Perspective

One of the very many reasons I love my friends and love meeting new people is because they bring perspective to my life.

I'm the sort of person who is never happy with where I'm at in life, I'm always wanting to strive for the next new thing, create the next goal, the next project; change this, move that. This doesn't mean I am "never happy" just that I am always trying to get to "anywhere but here", both geographically and in terms of this moment in time.

My "anywhere but here" issue of late is my day job. You know, the one that pays all those pesky bills. I don't hate it but I don't love it. It's certainly not my passion. However, it has a lot of perks: I work from home, I don't have anyone breathing down my neck (most days), I control my own schedule, and I get a lot of input into how the company is run. Am I sick-and-tired to the hilt of being "coached", "assessed", and "moulded"? Absofrickinlutely! But would I want to work anywhere else? You know, in one of those cubicle farms with a supervisor and all that? Ughh... no. (I firmly believe myself to be unsupervisable.)

Today I met with another local photographer and now, I hope, friend, and we chatted about business stuff. She does this full time, lucky gal, and she is looking at making some changes in her business. As a result, she's going through a lot of the same stuff I am right now: pricing, web content, branding, direction...

What I realized in that chat is that, as much as the golden-handcuffs are 8 hours of my day where I am not pursuing my passion, they provide me with some financial freedom to take chances and fail; risks that are much more nail-biting when photography is your main income, your livelihood. The stakes are higher, the ramifications greater if you don't make the right decision.

So, while I still dream of a life where I have a regular stream of business and income from photography, and where I can cut those chains to my corporate life, right now I am given the luxury of experimenting with my business on my own time, in my own way, and without the fear of failure.

Like I said, perspective.

The dew did it

This morning, as I was working out on the eliptical machine, a local morning news program was covering the early morning set-up of a charity race. (I'm not sure exactly where it was or what the race was in aid of because I was, after all, working out.) Watching the set-up folks stride purposefully around in the dusk with a cell phone parked on one hip and a two-way radio parked on the other, really took me back to the days when I used to work in special events. And then there was the dew - the morning dew on the grass, that hinted at a chilly morning before a warm, sunny day. For some reason the dew just transported me back ten, twelve years.

I remember so many early Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings in a Southern California summer, bleary-eyed and chilly, working off of barely any sleep (because I'd been partying the night before), coming off the back of a month of 7-day weeks and 16-hour days, adrenaline pumping through my veins and a constant feeling of being behind, late, in a rush. People pulling at me from different directions, event staff who needed guidance, vendors who showed up nonchalantly late, and a sense of camaraderie with fellow event organizers who were equally as tired and yet amped-up at the same time.

Driving hours in the dark to parks and shopping centers and arenas without the aid of Google Maps and getting lost, walking miles back and forth from parking lots to booths, jumping in and out of 26 foot refrigerated trucks, loading and unloading with the guys, gossiping with the girls, drinking too much coffee and eating way too many donuts. Those were the days when duct tape and zip ties were my friends, when I attempted to dodge calls from my boss at all hours of the day or night - weekdays and weekends - and when I managed things (and people) I really had no idea about and yet jumped in the deep end and did it without a second thought anyway. Those were the mornings where I'd already done a full day by 10am and would find myself sitting in the cab of a truck with yet another cup of that coffee, desperately trying to muster the energy to make it through to the end of the day when we would repeat the whole shebang in reverse.

I miss it. In case you can't tell.

I miss the people I met (one of which was/is my husband), I miss the sense of accomplishment when it all came together, I miss the camaraderie of a team pulling together and working really hard under your leadership, and I miss the events themselves. True, they all started to look the same after a while, but it was cool to be "behind the scenes" and to see an event site come together bit-by-bit before a single attendee was even awake.



It feels like such another time, another place, and another me at this point.

Overcommitted and overscheduled?

Those of you who know me pretty well know that I make an effort to see my friends, in person, as regularly as possible. Lately, however, it has really struck me just how hard it is to get together with people.

I shared a string of several emails today with a friend who really did want to see me (ie: wasn't just blowing me off) but where her schedule and mine just failed to coordinate for multiple reasons. By the time we were done, we were booking ourselves 3-4 weeks out! The same thing happened just last week with some friends that usually get together as a group - we threw some dates out there for the month of November (remembering this is still only October) and could only come up with one day that worked for everyone. One day... out of 30!?

When I was at home in England, I just don't remember people's lives being this way. But then, maybe I was just a teenager with no responsibilities, who was friends with a bunch of other teenagers with no responsibilities. I don't know, but my recollection was that friends dropped-by on one another unannounced or called each other at 6 o'clock to decide to get together for a drink in an hour. What I remember is that people decided to go to the pub after work and just invited people on the spur of the moment - and people were available, and came!

Yet, since I've lived in the U.S., that kind of social life just doesn't seem to exist, or at least, rarely. People are scheduled to the hilt three, four weeks in advance (sometimes more) and if you don't make the effort and plan ahead it's easy to just lose touch as the weeks and months slip by.

Now, I'm not saying that my schedule is always open either - in fact it's a tad packed for the next week or so - but it just brings up the question: why is this? Why is it that people in the UK have much more spontaneous social lives and people in the U.S. (at least the way I've experienced it) end up running their calendars like a military operation?