Back to the Future

Earlier this week, had a 'Back to the Future' moment with my friend Rebecca who just relocated to the East Coast, and starts a brand spankin' new job on Monday morning as general editor of national magazine with an extremely well known brand name. Hurrah!

(And if I can wrangle a tour for my 11 year old Godson Connor perhaps I can get another hug or two outside of the every-6-month ones he dolls out!)

The picture above was taken in late March of 2006, at the outside patio of "Beach Fire" in San Clemente, at the launch of the new community paper, The San Clemente Times. Reggae music is undoubtedly playing and inside the restaurant, highlights from surf contests at Mavericks, J-Bay and Teahupoo are shown TV monitors. I had just relocated to the small California beach town known for Richard Nixon and great waves, had started working at a very fast moving start-up, survived my first Natural Products Expo West Trade show, and met my first friend (Rebecca) when she featured the founders of Sambazon in the San Clemente Times inaugural issue.

In the last couple of years, Rebecca relocated to Austin and bought a condo after her San Clemente job folded, began a new job at a community paper in Austin, which also folded earlier this year, and lost her mother very unexpectedly.

When I spoke to her earlier this year (after she lost her job in Austin and of course was worrying about things like paying her mortgage) she did have a sense of inner calm within chaos. I think this calm sometimes happens when you run out your own ideas and schemes and plans not working out, and have to Let Go, and Trust.

So you already know the end of this tale - doors shut, but big windows opened, and life in its circular way, brought my friend from my small California beach town to the East Coast.

I enjoyed the wisdom in a blog I follow, written by the daughter of a friend of a very good friend of mine, who besides being only 18 years old, has also never verbally spoken a day in her life. This is what Gaby recently wrote about change.

"..To transform my self-image, I had to learn – and am still learning – how to organize myself so I can sift through the chaos. This has been a slow process, and each day is a metamorphosis within itself; some days I wake up feeling like a cockroach scurrying around throughout the chaos, and sometimes I am the caterpillar serenely dormant in my cocoon, awaiting the moment of my emergence as a butterfly....Whatever stage of metamorphosis you are in, I urge you to embrace it. You might be entering a new and different stage of life and feel a change within yourself. It might be a joyful or incredibly trying journey. The important thing is to remember that to metamorphosize is to live; transformation is life. Feel the process, appreciate the progress...."