The DMV, Long Waits, and Way Stations

Entrepreneurs, Self-Love & Self-Trust, Work5 Comments

 

The line wrapping around the DMV at 8:40 on a Tuesday morning encompasses three sides of the building.

They won’t let us inside anymore because the building just won’t hold us all. We begin to creep forward. It’s hot in the sun. No one dares leave his or her spot for a bathroom break. We’re all pretty quiet and uncomfortable.

Most people are staring down into phones. We have a 4-hour wait ahead to get my daughter’s drivers permit. No, we didn’t make an appointment – the wait for that was 13 weeks.

Life is about waiting sometimes. Waiting for the right job, waiting for the drivers learning permit, waiting for the right man or woman to come into your life, waiting for the right house or apartment. Waiting.

Think about all this interim time that goes by in the “in between” zones. As if life decided that for every one part of action, it requires 2 parts non-action, like a cosmic recipe.

My meltdown friends

Entrepreneurs, Jobs & Work, Work9 Comments

The first email I read today is a friend’s “so-called” business newsletter. She usually hardly ever talks about business in it.

Instead, she’s typically describing her latest break up drama, or how her company is reinventing itself in perfect syncopation with her own internal reinvention, which happens dramatically around every six months. Her newsletter stays juicy.

I love it.

I’ve realized that the three newsletters I read most often are all from women who tell me about their kids, husbands, and lives more than anything else.

There’s the corporate woman with the farmer husband. And the Australian woman who keeps moving houses every year, always searching for the better place to be, dragging her husband and kiddos with her. And the entrepreneurial lawyer who’s a Burning Man devotee.

I realize that even though I’m reading their emails just to find the juicy scoop on what’s going on in their world, they somehow slip in their business messages too.

In fact it deepens their validity that I can watch them build and run hugely successful businesses exactly while all their head and heart drama unfolds.

It’s not a slow train wreck”¦it’s a slow train assembly, and they’re simply handling all the routine fallout from life as they continuously assemble their dreams.