Sometimes I can’t sleep, and something within keeps my heart pounding, my mind awake, my body too tense to settle into my night, until I’ve exhausted myself by staying up late, or by discovering and doing what I’m supposed to do…
At the end of February of this year, I left Boston for Boulder to join many of my colleagues at the Gaiam offices in Colorado. But when I left Boston behind, I also left a relationship – the first time I ever left someone – and set out into a strange and scary new world of being single. I didn’t leave because I’d stopped loving or caring for this person; I left because repeated experiences and lessons over the past year showed me that the way she and I related was in fact holding us both back. My actions of care, rather than encouraging independence and growth, had begun to encourage dependence and stagnation.
To move to a strange new place – as wonderful as Boulder is – frightened me, but not half so much as voluntarily saying goodbye to someone who loved me, of choosing to be on my own again, without knowing how my decisions would play out in the future. I remember telling my ex, “I’m sure you’ll be the first to find someone new, I think it’ll be a while before I meet someone who’d be interested.”
When I boarded the train to Boulder, beginning a two and a half day trek across the country, I said goodbye to a city I knew well, to friends who lived down the street, to an apartment I called home, to a cat I’d grown to love, and to a person I also loved, but with whom I couldn’t be together. Just as I set off for Maui four years ago, I consciously chose the more difficult path when I left Boston for Boulder.
It turns out, oddly enough, that life moves with amazing velocity and ferocity when you choose your destiny rather than wait for signs, rather than hem and haw. Only a few hours after leaving Boston, I received a beautiful and touching email from someone on this very site, out of the blue, expressing wonder and appreciation for my words here.
Over the course of the next month and a half, that email turned into a flurry of emails, and then phone calls, and eventually into a budding romance – two spirits separated by many miles, each appreciating and loving the other’s mind. It ended on my birthday weekend when we met in Boulder, though it took a few more weeks of false starts and attempts for us to recognize these facts. But this too, difficult as it felt at the time, opened the space for me to become much more comfortable being on my own.
At the same time I was preparing to leave Boston, someone else from my past found me: my first semester of college, I met a girl whom I liked very quickly, and who liked me back with the same intensity. But circumstances surrounding our crush and the way we handled it led to us losing touch very quickly. By the end of freshman year, we saw very little of each other, and barely talked when we did. The next time I saw her after that was her graduation in 1998, a few months after I’d gotten married. And then we were gone from each other’s lives.
10 years passed: I moved back to Boston from Atlanta, got divorced, moved to Maui, spent months homeless and penniless and 3 days in a psych ward and came out in a tiny little way enlightened (not the big E, but the little e, the kind where suddenly all the crap you accumulate that obstructs your vision and muddies your happiness falls away and you blink at the utter beauty that is realizing you are you, regardless of where you are, what you own, what you have, who you’re with, and that you are here). I joined the Zaadz team, moved back to Boston, and she found me just as I prepared to make my next leap to Boulder.
When we started emailing again, I didn’t think of romantic possibilities. I was still in a relationship, even though by that time my ex was quite aware I was leaving. And soon after arriving in Boulder, my romantic attention focused on the other person. In my mind, I’d messed up my opportunity fourteen years ago. So I did what comes naturally to me with my friends (and less naturally with love interests!): I acted like myself around her.
Kyrie and I met again for the first time in 10 years in June, in Chicago, before traveling to our college reunion. By the time we reached New York, our old classmates asked us how long we’d been together, shocked when we answered ‘since Wednesday.’
One week after my wedding, in April of 1998, upon returning from my honeymoon, I walked in to my office of the job I held then to find an envelope with a pink slip. For ten years (just realizing it a few months ago), I avoided taking any significant vacation time from my jobs, for fear of being let go as a result, until meeting Kyrie in June. I finally relaxed about my fear of vacation time – still being judicious about how I used it – and allowed myself to take more time off. I was glad to discover that nobody cared that I took a couple days off a month.
On August 26, 2008, a day before I was due to begin a vacation to attend my best (from way back to high school!) friend’s wedding in northern California’s wine country, I sat down in my cubicle for only a moment before being asked by my manager to come talk with him for a minute. That was the last time I sat down in my cubicle, the last moment I led the team that has been building Zaadz and Gaia for you since 2006.
What are the chances of getting let go twice around the times of the only two wedding-related vacations I’ve ever taken?
As I left the building, I felt sad, a bit shocked. Remarkably absent from my reaction – different from every other time I’ve parted ways with a company – was anger and fear. I have Zaadz, I have Brian, and I have the incredible experience of working with this team, and I have you to thank for where I am now, for the opportunities that lie open to me, and for the equanimity to experience impermanence so clearly and without fear or anxiety.
I left with Kyrie for my California vacation happier and freer than I’ve ever felt before, with the future’s wide open spaces stretched out before me. I drank in the rich wines, the rich sunsets, the rich landscapes of California, the rich joys of seeing my friend united in happiness with his love, and the rich love of sharing all this richness with my love.
An amazing coincidence, or synchronicity, or destiny, or just luck – to have traveled our separate paths fourteen years, through different places, different phases of life, and to reunite so comfortably, so easily, without a hint pretense or facade, to find in each other the amazing freedom to be each ourselves, without worry, without filter, without shame. How can I decry a life that bestows me such amazing gifts?
I believe if the universe has sentience, or direction, it challenges us and presents us only with jewels, opportunities that we many times do not understand or recognize as blessings, but that are not beyond our capabilities. No, they just ask us to stretch ourselves out, to reach, to test our limits.
And so this, my separation from Gaia, this is too a gift. With it comes some pain, some sadness, because I love what I did at Gaia, I love building the place where we all come to share our visions for a growing, evolving world. I love seeing that what I have always believed is true: that we all want to do good, that we all choose what is right and good and just in our hearts, even if we each believe differently about the details of good and bad, of right and wrong.
But I hadn’t yet said goodbye. Siona and the team asked me to write my goodbye on the day I was leaving for California, and I intended to write it then. Sometimes ideas take time to reach maturity, and this was the case with my goodbye. I’m not leaving this community, but I am leaving a role I played in this community. I will no longer coordinate how things fit together under the hood, and sometimes on the surface. I can no longer steer Gaia’s development in the directions I have championed since taking on a leadership role in Zaadz early in 2007. I’m saying goodbye to being one of your ‘leaders’ and saying hello to being one of you.
So… goodbye.
And… hello.
I choose to embrace all the beauty and the wonder and the richness of my life, because suffering is a product of resistance.
And that is all, perhaps, that I have tried to say in so many words in my writings here.
Thank you, and goodnight.