Ya gotta love it...

Ya gotta love the social media revolution.  I've been debating the merits of this new medium with friends a lot lately.  I've decided that, when you are a smart and responsible person that watches the potential disadvantages, there really aren't many downfalls to it....especially when you are job hunting.

I've been featured on a acquaintance's blog this past week.  Catherine Ducharme leads Outsidein Communications--a strategic brand and communications company.  Thanks to Peter Reek, I met Catherine for about 10 seconds once and saved her business card.  I've always admired her from afar and watched what projects she led.  She then got my networking, do-you-know-of-any-job-opportunities e-mail, and suddenly she's helping me out and I'm helping her out.  Her "employer branding" blog now uses me as an example of today's job seeker.  While I am that 20-something person for only 37 more days, I hope that I'll always be a smart and savvy professional, and I'm eternally thankful for the nod and the help.  

Ya also gotta love the "shout out" encouraging strangers that pop up every so often.  I've just returned from my late afternoon run.  About 20 feet from leaving my apartment to start, a woman passed me on the sidewalk.  She saw my running attire and shouted, "Good! Yes!"  I laughed out loud because I am usually that "weird" person.  I often don't usually have the guts to shout it out.  I liked it so much that maybe I'll just have the guts next time.

When there is so much not to love right now--the economy, the street violence and those tax forms on your desk--it's sweet to love the simple things. Not as a pep talk in the hopes of drumming up warm fuzzies.  But rather to love and express the little things you really feel lift your spirits.  Ya gotta love it.

The Extremes

I've always been an extreme person.  I'm either blissfully happy or completely depressed.  I either clean my whole apartment or I don't clean it at all.  I love a job or I hate it.  I either love you or would rather not know you at all.  I either relish the fact that I'm an extreme person or deny it completely.  

The funny thing is that I've also always been fascinated by dichotomy's, and often find peace in believing they are true.  If one were to look at this blog or my journals over the years they would see that I use the word dichotomy a lot--usually when I've had a revelation of some kind.  Which makes life damn confusing.  I'm an extremist in a grey world.  

An extremist in the non-fundamental, anti-unibomber, ticked-off-at-Pat Robertson kind of way that is. 

One of my favorite quotes:

"And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.  Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter." (John Milton's "Areopagitica", 1644)

Truth and lies are extremes, but they have to both exist in their extremes in order to have any value, or, ironically, truth to their existence.

My write-up in my university yearbook summed up the dichotomy's of lessons learned:

Wait on God, go with your gut

Be independent, permit vulnerability

Say yes, set boundaries

Take risks, we are all just people

Choose joy, live honestly

Confidence determines opportunity, humility breathes freedom

Rest.

I have come to a few conclusions that will spur on to more conclusions, as conclusions always do.

I've been studying the topic of pain lately.  It's biology, how it interplay's with pleasure and how God interacts with it.  I've concluded that pain is necessary for pleasure, that we can't avoid pain and that I spend most of my time trying to avoid it or fearing I won't be able to.  I'm still 0.1% into this study, but so far I really do believe that pain has to be reality in order for pleasure to be reality.  I can't live in either extreme.  I actually am forced to live with both.  A dichotomy I'm not thankful for yet, but know is true.  

After all:

"What is it, therefore, that goes on within the would, since it takes greater delight in things that it loves are found are found or restored to it than if it had always possessed them?"  (Augustine's Confessions)

Forced Free Will

There have been a few times in my life when I've felt like God was making it impossible for me to be able to do anything, except what he wants me to do.  This is one of those times.

I've been really sick for the past week or so while I've been hunting for jobs, networking and planning and researching what I will do next in my professional career.  First a cold, which was bad, but manageable.  Then came pink eye, or eyes, which was far less manageable.  Then came a solid 12 hours of construction in my building which might as well have been in my own living room.  It was so loud I couldn't hear anything but the drilling.  

These external arguably minor challenges mirrored the frustrations I have been feeling and thinking for far longer than this week--about the world, God and myself.  

I've discovered over the past two years who I really am, not who I think I am or want to be.  But who I really am.  A lot of that has to do with really honest people around me telling me what is--people I respect and can't ignore.  

This process has been hard.  So hard that it has made me question what I thought I believed. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this has resulted in a great deal of anger towards God.  

"Why the heck did he create the world like this?

I'd arrive at unsatisfying answers every time. I'd try to talk to God about these questions, but found myself getting more and more angry, and farther away from him.  Until this week.  

This week I've found that my feelings of need are stronger than my questions.  That my anger, while still there, is more quiet than the loud and unavoidable evidence of anger that is all around me.  

And so I am forced to freely choose to believe.  To believe that God is the answer to my need and to believe that He welcomes my questions.  Sure, I've always known this.  But today I feel it.

Back on the external front, I've also surrendered.  Fine, I'm sick.  So I'll stop and rest.  I am forced to lay down and sleep, read or just stare.    I am forced to stop the hunt and rest, knowing that God has a surprise for me in my next steps, a surprise that will still come whether I send out my resume this week or not.  

Why forced?  While I can choose whatever "solution" I want, I still know that Jesus is the answer - no matter how angry at him I might be.  So, I am forced to freely rest and heal.  I am forced to freely go to God with my angry questions.  

Here is a great quote I just found...

"The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing.  The illness exists long before the symptoms.  Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cures.  The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace--a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair." - M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Resigned to Naivete

I've never been a mid-way kind of girl.  I dive deep.  I don't know how to do anything any other way.  I buy into the story, drink the kool-aid and then sell it.  Every - single - time.  

And every time I believe that it won't change, that the loyalty, that the commitment and the investment won't ever be lost.  And then it happens, again.

I was recently laid off from my job.  For almost two years I believed in the company's vision, gave almost all my time, and definitely all my passion to that team.  And moments after finding out, suddenly all that blood and sweat is all put into a box that goes into storage, seemingly forgotten.

I remember someone sending me this quote by John Wooden a very long time ago:  "It is better to trust and be disappointed occasionally than to distrust and be miserable all the time." 

So I'll dive deep again.  I'm probably lucky that I don't know how to do it any other way.  I'll believe that something won't ever die.  Just so I can live all of life, trust people and trust that my work always is for something, not nothing.   Sometimes naivete is best.