Celebrity News - Anna Nicole Smith, A Passing

Anna Nicole Smith died yesterday. The news surrounding the passing of the phenom filled the airwaves and the newpapers. The internet was abuzz with one report after another.

This morning, on NPR's Morning Edition, one of the reporters explored the reasons why her life has captured our attention for as long as it has. The reporter observed that she could not act, nor sing, nor write. Mostly she was just blonde and reminded us a lot of Marilyn Monroe. She was beautiful and easy on the eye. High school drop-out, stripper, wife to a billionaire, would-be performer, star of a television reality show, the center of a seemingly unending legal melodrama... her antics provided us with an unending stream of entertainment and we kept coming back for more of the same.

Why was that so? I can't really say. Maybe, as the reporter obersved, just because she was famous. And in America, one can be famous for just being famous.

Sunrise and the Dawn of A New Day

For the first time in years, I feel some feelings rising in me that have been absent for far too long. I am experiencing impatience. I want things to get moving again. I want to start working again. I want to feel like I am living my life again... not just passing through the days and weeks and years, sedated and numb. I want to feel successful again and I feel the need to go after the real American dream once more... the Dream in which we can pursue the opportunity to find out what kind of stuff we are really made of.

Now I am not in a quest for the better car or the bigger house. I am not trying to build my kingdom in whatever industry I happen to land with my next job. What I do want is a decent level of income and a sense that I am finally successful in terms of my own definition of what I believe personal success to be.

I want to feel like I make a difference in the world and I want to like what I am doing, at work and at play. No longer do I want to feel trapped in my own life, because I have created my own cage as a consequence of the mistakes I made. I don't want much... except that elusive sense that I am living the life that I was meant to live, instead of one imposed on me by others or by the necessity to pay for all the unnecessary stuff I thought I needed. Everybody wants that. Few are smart enough or disciplined enough not to fall into the avoidable pitfalls that trip us up along the way.

So, I have reignited that fire in my belly. I have stoked it and soon it will be raging within me. I am definitely going in the right direction. It has taken time to do that and it has not been easy for me to get this far. But I still have a long way to go.

Now it is time for a remembrance of things past... things I knew once, but somehow forgot.

What things?

Rediscovering a passion for living. And a passion for what I am doing. And a passion for the people I care about.

Unwavering commitment to my goals, my dreams, my aspirations.

Developing an unshakable focus which will enable me to stay the course, no matter how difficult things may get for me.

Being true to myself. Being true to the values and the qualities which uniquely define me.

Being kind to myself. Being able to look in the mirror and actually like the person who I am seeing.

Remembering not to be too hard on myself. Accepting that I cannot achieve perfection in the things I do and that I can never achieve perfection in myself.

Realizing that sometimes I will have to forgive myself, if I stumble or if things sometimes do not work out as planned.

Remembering to make sufficient time in my busy schedule for my family and my true friends, because my relationships with them are the only real treasures in my life.

Always remembering and appreciating the people who have helped me along the way to achieve my successes, because none of us make it on our own.

And very importantly, at this very late date, to search out and find positive role-models from whom I can draw inspiration, as I set out to become the person I was meant to be... as I set out to build the life I was meant to live.

Remembering these feelings, these ideas is just not enough. I have to put them back into my life and into my thinking, replacing pieces which may have fallen out from that jigsaw puzzle which is my life.

Everything I will have done so far is just a prelude to the most important part of the process. After clearing my head and clearing my agenda of all unnecessary distractions, I would need to write a mission statement for the rest of my life. I would have to clearly lay out what is important to me and what things I want to accomplish in the years that I still have to live. Only after I have done that can I develop a working strategy to make all my dreams and my hopes and my goals happen, given that all things turn out to be equal.

The preparations made, I will have but one thing left to do. As Jean Luc-Picard, of the Starship Enterprise was heard to say so many times, "Make it so!." I would have to take my plans and carry them out, committed, focused and dedicated to the proposition that at the end of the day, the people I knew in this world will have cause to say that I made a difference in their lives... in the world.

I have learned that my life is not about me and my accomplishments. I am not concerned about my place in history. I just want the rest of my journey count for something more than the amount of money I will have been able to accumulate in the bank before I die.

Please understand that I won't complain if I actually can make a lot money in the years to come. However, I now know clearly that possessing wealth is just a means to an end. There was a great line about that in the musical, Hello Dolly. "Money is like manure. It isn't much good unless you spread it around." And in the end, what I believe should be most important about my life is that I leave behind me a legacy of love for the people who were important to me and that I will have hopefully made a difference in the lives of the people with whom I spent some time during the journey.

So there you have it. I know what I want to accomplish. I have remembered what I need to be thinking about. I have clear sense of what I have to do. Now, all that's left for me to do is just to do what I will have to do, whatever that turns out to be. Sounds simple. It's not.

But then, nobody ever told me that getting through my life was ever going to be a simple or easy matter. Think about it. If it were, in that context, the very notion of success would have little or no meaning. If it were, where would we find any sort of challenge in trying to live each day as caring, decent and successful people?

For me, tomorrow morning will be the dawn of a bright, new day. The sun will rise into the sky. I can sense that this new day is going to be full of hope and promise of good things to come. Very soon, I will finally be moving on, once again. But for now, I have many things I will need to do in preparation, before I can book my passage into the future.

Making Sense of It All

I haven't been able to make a whole lot of sense out of all the things that have happened to me in the recent past. Maybe, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if I were able to do that, given that I am still so close to these recent events. Maybe the only way that we can completely make any sense about something that we have experienced is to put some time between ourselves and the event. Only after we have done that can we begin to find the greater meaning to the sum of a cluster of seemingly disconnected events.

Also, there may be another angle to this matter. I was watching Boston Legal on television tonight. In one of the cases considered, a girl was profoundly affected psychologically when she was sexually assaulted. The crux of the case was whether or not she should be allowed to take medication which would essentially enable her to "forget" the pain and mental anguish she continued to experience after the assault. An attorney opposing giving her that right argued that who we are, in a very large measure, is determined by the sum of our experiences. Without all our memories, what are we? What becomes of us when memories, good or bad, are washed away?

Our experiences shape us and form us. A pivotal experience can cause us to radically revise the way we see ourselves and the world or which of two roads to take. Critical experiences alter the way we understand how the world actually works. The good experiences as well as the bad and painful ones.

I have come to believe that a lot of the painful, difficult things which have happened to me over the last couple of months are part of something larger which is happening in my life. I see myself changing significantly in fundamental ways. I don't fully understand the nature of these changes just yet, but in time, I will. But that understanding will come only after this particular scene from my life has played itself out to the end and the next scene begins. Losing a job or totaling my car were just two events which in themselves had no particular significance. Only when considered in retrospect and in context will their meaning eventually become clear to me.

I have been somewhat distressed lately and maybe a little frustrated. I wanted to immediately be able to understand why these things were happening to me, one catastrophe after another, in rapid succession. Why was G'd doing this to me? I was demanding immediate gratification in this matter, and I wasn't getting the "answers" I wanted. Now I am beginning to understand that sometimes we have to be patient and bide our time, until things that happen to us can begin to make any sort of sense.

Thankfully I don't see any new disasters en route to befall me on the current horizon, at least for the moment. But then one never knows how long this peaceful lull will last, so I will keep a sharp eye out so that I can gird myself for the next bumpy stretch before it gets here. In the meantime, I will just have to do what I have to do to keep things on as even a keel as I can.

When I do reach that moment of understanding, everything that I have been trying to figure out will become very clear. And just in time, too. Because right after that happens, I will be starting the next scene of my life. I don't have a clue as to what will happen to me in the next chapter of the story. But I am sure of one thing. It ain't going to be dull. It never is.

Disappointment and Forgiveness

I wrote earlier today that I believed that the people who loved me the most would always be just a little disappointed in the person that I am. After I wrote that, I realized that even if that is so, under any circumstances that would have been the case.

After that honeymoon period in any relationship is over, each person in a relationship begins to discover the flaws and imperfections in the other person, that they hadn't seen originally. I am not perfect. My wife and my kids and my friends, none of them are perfect either. And neither are any of you who read this post.

Once I was able to get past the irritation I experienced because of the little quirks and flaws that my wife possessed, I was simply able to accept my wife for who she was. And after a time, I began to realize that some of her qualities that initially drove me nuts, were actually very strong and positive attributes. For those qualities which still came across as flaws, I simply allowed that that was who she was and I still loved her for who she was, flaws and all. My wife was having to deal with the same feelings about me. And each of us was even able to forgive ourself for not being perfect. Loving someone and being loved in return makes life a lot easier to get through.

With us, it is not always sweetness and light. Things can get downright testy sometimes. But that just goes with the territory of being married. Because we do love each other and do care about each other, when our emotions settle down, we can forgive and forget and make up. The part about making up is not all that bad and can be downright good, in fact.

Because I am coming out of what has been a really difficult two months, I have had to deal with a lot of uncertainties and concerns. I have not always been able to get immediately past the emotional lows that I sometimes experience, during such times. But no matter what might happen to us, because we know and love each other... because I trust her to be there for me and I for her when that is where we are, then we know that together we are going to get through this rough patch just as we have gotten through bad times in the past. We now know that things are never as bad as we think they are going to be, nor are they as good as we wish they were.

As I have been something of a drama king lately, I can ease off of presenting that persona to the world. I don't have a lot of patience with drama kings and queens. I really don't see why anyone should put up with me when I am behaving like that. Even my best friend must have finally found that to be just a little to much to deal with, even coming from me. He is having to deal with his own problems at this moment. People can and should be expected to be forgiving of what we dish out, only up to a reasonable point.

I guess I am well along the way to recovering from what has been bedeviling me lately. I have used my own particular strategy to work through this period. I am very pleased that whatever it was I did worked. Pretty soon my family and my friends will be able to breathe a genuine sigh of relief, because I suspect that my/our situation will be a lot less stressful and that I will be a lot more pleasant to be around. As to how I feel about things right now, Shakespeare said it better than I ever could: "All's well that ends well."

"...Looking for my way back home again..."

I just sent off an email to a good friend of mine.

I talked to him about how our past precedes us as we begin each new day. And our past, the recollection of our successes and/or failures, stick in the minds of the people who have known us along the way. I suspect that in their minds my life has come off as a bit underwhelming. I suspect that I will be spending the rest of my life trying to come from behind to overcome in their minds their perception of who I am and what I have accomplished in my life.

I always keep in mind, that no matter how successful a person has been, no one ever cuts that person any slack. We are as good as what we are doing today. Period.

I have struggled for as long as I can remember to figure out where I want to take my life. Just this moment, I believe that I know a part of the answer to that question. I want to take myself to a place and time where I can feel that my life is stable and solid and that there is a positive consistency to it... where the people who know me will have an expectation that the things I set out to do seem to have merit and that I will succeed, because of who I have become. I want to reach a time and place where the people I truly care about will have higher expectations for me than they do now. Certainly, that will be something I will have to earn. But that is the place and and time to which I want to go... a place and time I want to call home.

I was listening to a Debbie Friedman album, the Carnegie Concert album. One track, titled "Save a life and you will save the world" has just finished playing.

I caught the phrase, "... looking for my way back home again..."

I think that is what I am doing now. But I wish the hell I knew where "home" is. I know it isn't a destination marked on any on any map I know of. It is a spot on the road somewhere ahead of me in the future. It would be nice to say to myself, with certainty, "I will know the place when I get there."

If I get there... This is one of those moments I have to stop myself and say to myself, "All things being equal, you will get there. Just take things one day at a time, and then one day, you will reach that place. One of these days. Just don't give up hope."

If only I knew with a profound certainty that, for me, there is such a place as "my home," then maybe I wouldn't have the uneasy feeling that I am still just drifting from one day to the next, without any sure sense of even my next destination.