You Boys Like Mexico!

Name the movie and I’ll give you props. (Have a feeling most won’t be able to nail it.) But the line stands true this week as I prepare to head down to Guadalajara, Mexico for the Society of American Travel Writers annual conference. I’ll be speaking again this year on multimedia and will also be launching my new company Plus Ten Media. It’s going to prove to be quite the trip I’m sure, but like all things, I’ve come to realize I won’t now it’s full power for many years to come.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

One Book, 200,000 blinks of an eye and two minutes a word.

It was Junior year of college during an anthropology course on the narrative structure of disease that I first read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. By the end of that semester my book was marked up with notes, thoughts, observations, literary critiques and the occasional stain from a falling tear. My teacher, a whisper of a women struggling with her own deadly disease, took no pity on our emotional struggles. She pushed and pried our emotions apart until we stripped back the literal meaning and wove into the complex narrative of a man’s free mind trapped in a worthless shell of a body.

Over the years I have picked up the book and leafed through looking at my notes, remembering the intense gut-wrenching class discussions and paralleling the metaphors with my own personal pain. I’ve even sent the book to several people who I thought would benefit from the story. Now as I pick up the book with the fear of learning my teacher may have passed away I can’t help but reflect on the intense message at hand: Just because you lose your perceived freedom doesn’t mean you have to stop living. It just means you have to change your perspective and throw everything else to hell.

When Life and Friends Collide: A Wedding Speech

Took a few minutes to speak at my good friend’s wedding this weekend. Though the speech was off the cuff, I’ve decided to write a bit of it out by memory. Obviously it’s not verbatim, but you get the idea.

Some quick context: I met Joe in college and lived with him for two years. His grandmother, Evelyn, was an awesomely senile and loving Jewish woman who loved to speak on the phone with us during our college years. She passed away last year and sadly never got to see Joe and Erin get married. We relived her life and some of our favorite stories the night before the rehearsal dinner.

The Speech
Joe and Erin, with the exception of the wonderful speeches before me, I find that wedding speeches usually fall into the same boring narrative. First there is a story: One day Joe left on the stove and almost burnt the house down. Then there is a bigger theme: It was obvious Joe couldn’t cook and he would have to find someone to marry that could. Then the lesson: Joe thank God you found Erin, now don’t forget to always do the dishes, she will love you for it.

And as much as I wanted to pull myself out of that narrative structure I just couldn’t. But what I could do was talk to you and Erin as a friend. You see guys, I’m talking to you and 75 of your closest friends and I want you to think about something. Last night while we all sat in the living room something amazing and wonderful happened. For about 35 to 45 minutes, we remembered, laughed, bonded and told the stories of your loving grandmother Evelyn. We sat there, laughing about the WalMart employee and that damn bird that almost got killed, and it was as if life stopped. It was one of those moments when a life gets boiled down to a few stories, intense laughter, and an overwhelming amount of love.

Joe and Erin I want you to do something. In this world of hyper-connectedness, Facebook, Twitter, email, and cell phones, I want you to take a moment every day and stop. Stop everything and look around. We too many times miss the small things that make our lives amazing. I know this because I do it all the time. Just look at where we are now. Sitting here next to beautiful Lake Tahoe next to a sunset most people only experience through a promotional photograph. We should take a second and soak this in. It’s a moment that will define your lives.

So as you go forward building your life, I want you to remember to improve the lives of others and strive for what Evelyn gave us: Roughly 45 minutes of joy and laughter that took a special night to tears, overwhelming happiness and a life remembered.

May God Grant You Many Years

(Pics of the groomsmen and Joe on the lake during the rehearsal dinner)

Throwing Caution to the Wind

If I asked what one thing you would do if failure were not an option what would you say?

• Run a marathon?
• Quit your job and follow your true passion?
• Tell your kid to take a flying leap and grow up?

Too many times we put up roadblocks in our lives and come up with sophisticated grounded reasons why not to follow our hearts and take the risk required to find the beauty in life. The sad thing is we can spend an entire life wondering what if. So challenge yourself today and write down what you would do. It’s okay to not necessarily act on it, but identifying the dream is always a solid place to start…

For me it’s acting on intuition, listening to others, and realizing I may live in this world, but I don’t live of it.

Three Keys to Happiness

For the last year I have been working hard on identifying what makes me satisfied in regards to work. I have always marched to the beat of a different drum so it was no surprise this exercise took months. Now after hundreds of hours brainstorming, journaling, diagramming, and running I’ve come up with the list. I consider them my three keys to happiness and the three reasons I am walking away from being a freelance writer and starting a multimedia company.

* Have a creative outlet where I can push boundaries others thought impossible or a waste of resources.

* Satisfy my entrepreneurial drive to build a company/product

* Develop and work with a creative driven team who understands collaboration, taking on new ideas, supporting one another, and pushing boundaries without the fear of failure, but figuring out what doesn’t work.

When Life Comes Crashing Down

Last night on the eve of one of the most aggressive deadlines I’ve ever had to meet, a close friend sent me three photographs from back home. The man in the photo is a close friend, mentor, and spiritual father. Last night my life came crashing down. Not because of death, but because I was 1,500 miles away and wasn’t able to help my friend with an extra arm as he walked across the empty church. Instead he had to use a cane.

Lord have mercy.

- Photo ©Wendy Russell 2009

Just Do It

I went running yesterday with an amazing woman. Not only did she bring her four-legged friend who might as well have run the doors off me, but she also pushed me in more ways than one. Our conversation was deep—life, goals, passions, why our calves hurt—but never became too heavy. As we ran next to Boulder Creek, twilight seeping into the canyon and pink clouds wafting overhead, she said some that shook me: “So why don’t you just do it?” It was the same thing I ask people every day. And then I did exactly what I say NOT to do and stumbled out excuses justifying my slothfulness. “I guess I don’t get it,” she said back. And then it hit me. She’s right. I should just do it.

Candid Thoughts Regarding Freelancing

It has been just shy of eight months since I started freelancing after my internship with Backpacker Magazine and I’d like to think I’ve come to learn a few things. They are as follows:

• There are no paid holidays when you freelance: just days when you work, days when you travel and are working, and days when you think about the fact that you really should be working.
• The check is always “in the mail.”
• Life comes down to one word: hustle
•  Freedom is an amazing thing, but self disciple is a must.
• The grass is always greener on the other side. (This one obviously refers to all jobs)
• Make sure you have at least a few months savings built up to live off of during the transition time. Sadly I went from an internship to freelancing in one swoop which meant I never ate out.
• Nobody is going to make it happen but you. No boss, no editor, no coworkers. Sure they might be there to help, and they will end up giving you the green light, but if you don’t make it happen it just won’t.
• Friends will be insanely jealous and think you do nothing all day.
• Finally, it totally fits my personality, but it’s too stressful at times. 

The Joy of Conversation

It’s midnight and I’m standing in the only open line at Safeway. I’m holding two bananas, a carton of juice and some gummy bears. The checker, born sometime during the last major recession, is moving slower than molasses reminiscing about the last time she tried to give up cigarettes. 

“I gave them up once, but you know had this health problem,” she told the elderly man buying ten packs. (I think they were on sale.) “But you know, once you start you just can’t stop.”

It seemed like my bananas were getting heavy. 

“Gotta love Safeway at midnight,” I muttered to the women standing in line in front of me. She was buying a twelve pack of Sprite and reading US Weekly.

“Tell me about it,” she muttered back. And then a strange thing happened. The kind of strange thing that comes out of two people standing in line sometime around midnight waiting for the checker to shut up and just ring up the sale: we started talking.

“Sonoma State hugh?” She asked. It took me a second to realize I was wearing my college sweatshirt.

“Oh yes went for college. Native Californian — you know this whole 0 degree thing not too sure about.”

“I understand,” she laughed. “Where are you from?”

“Santa Cruz.”

“No way. I used to live in Los Gatos.” (This happens to be twenty minutes from where I grew up. “I love it there.”

And then we hit a stride. For the next five minutes we reminisced about the beaches, beer and food. We talked about the sun, the calm winters and overwhelming amount of SUVs. And then, just as fast as it started it was done.

She paid for her Sprite, said goodbye and went on her way.

Safeway at midnight, who would have known.

Everyone’s Still Breathing…

We used to have a little saying on the river when I was a guide: “What’s the worst that could happen?” (we would then look at each other and put our hands up) “we could die!” And then we would be off over some waterfall or into a swirling mess of pulsating hydraulics. The first time we said it, it was more of a joke than anything else, but as the years passed and we witnessed death first hand the saying began to morph.

First it happened while eating pizza one night after an especially long Middle Fork trip. The day before my fellow guides and I had nearly lost a guest. Standing along the bank I helplessly watched a helicopter lift off a mile upstream racing her lifeless body to the hospital. Standing there too, starring me down were sixty pairs of eyes anxiously awaiting me to tell them the trip was over. That we could all pack up and go home for the day. But instead I had to inform them we were only half way through. Leveraging a select number of guests and my fellow guides, I was ultimately able to coax everyone back in the raft and continue downstream. Later that afternoon I threw up everything I had while hunched over a pit toilet. Even though the guest didn’t die and turned out to be fine, I had nearly lost someone who trusted their life with me. The worst part was I was in the water at the time swimming frantically for my own raft which had flipped just seconds before. 

The conversation that night during pizza was grim. We were all still shell-shocked. Even the four pitchers of beer weren’t helping. 

“You okay?” My best friend at the time asked.

“I think so,” I remember mumbling back. “It’s all my fault.” In reality it wasn’t, but I felt responsible as the senior guide on the trip. Ultimately there were six guides and everything had to go humanly possible for this to happen. I couldn’t blame myself but I wanted to.

“You know our saying,” he said a few minutes later. “It really hit home yesterday.” And that was the end of it. We never really spoke about the incident again.

Two years later while holding the head of a rafter who had bashed his skull into a rock, the sinking feeling of watching another human die came over me again. This time though it wasn’t my guest and wasn’t even from the company I was working with, but a private rafter who had fallen out and misjudged the strong current as he swam for safety. There were seven of us holding things down and pandemonium was unfolding all around. I could hear the helicopter in the distance and prayed for it all to be over. Then I noticed a tear in my gloves. God please don’t let this man have AIDS I can remember thinking.

Just yesterday while in the middle of editing a large video project for Bicycling Magazine, my computer died. The screen suddenly went blank and my heart momentarily stopped beating. Then a question mark appeared and began to flash. I put my head in my hands and tried to keep from losing it. I knew I had just about everything backed up, but the last two weeks of editing and last two years of Final Cut Pro presets were not. I spent the remainder of the day putting my computer back together using money slated for a ski trip to Vail, and trying to stay calm. Then just before 4:30 p.m. while sitting in the parking lot after just dropping off my laptop I remembered the saying: What’s the worst that could happen? I thought. I could die. Or worse, someone I care about could pass. And then it hit me, this was just a glitch, a small inconvenience and luckily didn’t involve a helicopter.