jalléCafe

Meltdown Moment

You know I'm busy when I blog less than once a week.  I love writing and blogging. Since returning from Hungary, I'm deeply, happily busy.  I walk out of many conversations thinking how fortunate I am to create a business. Take time still with friends. It's worth all fatigue. The energy replaces most stress.

Then, of course, there are the meltdown moments. Somehow always unexpected.  Like just after 6 p.m. tonight.  I suddenly looked at my project list and said: this is not possible!  "I did nothing today!" (Not true, BTW, just not those projects first.)  "I have meetings, deadlines, impossible!" And I felt for about 60 seconds like falling in a heap on the floor out of despair. All logical, positive thought hit a standstill.

But then I said, "What are you going to do? Your clients talk about this stuff.  How do you get out of it??"  That straightened me up a little. Can't be a good role model from a heap on the floor.

Time to be soothing.  "OK it cannot be that bad. You are probably hungry." True.  Then I set a time limit - one hour, "What can you best in one hour?" Managed the first project in 25 minutes.  The second in 30.  Walked out as I promised myself.

All seems better now. Meltdown reaction stopped. Tomorrow is a new day that I can face.

I cook my best pasta sauces after meltdowns.  This one smells of peppers, onions, oregano.  The reward for recovery!

My father would have loved being Hungarian, except...

 I just spent five days fully immersed in Hungarian culture as seen through the eyes of friends who had gathered with family to celebrate the 80th birthdays of their mother and father in the same year.  Fabulous!

I will have much more to say about their warmth and generosity and a trip that will forever change my travel perspective.  We stood in large gardens, drank homemade raspberry juice, grilled over an open wood fire, listened to men sing together as they had for decades, and ate too much (totally high fat, carbo-loaded) food that 80-year-old Grandma kept cooking and forcing on us.

In the men, I saw a similarity to my father (who died much younger): a mix of warmth, humor and the scars of a life hard fought with unexpected twists and disappointments along the way.  Yet they were standing together still fighting the fight.  Watched tolerantly by wives (and children) with whom I'm sure they had also argued and laughed in turns for decades.  This unexpected feeling of connection in a totally different culture with a fully different history surprised and moved me.  Dad would have appreciated that.

But then again, Dad probably wouldn't have as much appreciated the homemade schnapps as the rest of us, which was totally as hot as it looks here (not that they warned us before the first shot!).

Always a storm before the calm

I really meant to write the headline that way.  Today, I'm trying to work as men drill and pound and create a general dust storm in the main part of my new studio.  On Monday, a cute little custom-designed tea-kitchen is supposed to arrive.  We must be prepared. 

It was so clean yesterday. And organized.  And quiet! Now the coffee machine table sits askew in front of me. Books and glasses are piled again in the corners. I feel the drill vibrations creeping up from foot to neck.

You know, this is sometimes how I feel just before I make a clear new decision.  Emotions spin.  My head feels cloudy.  Then suddenly one morning: pouf!  Something triggers a clearing.  I know what to do. It becomes easy to put the next steps in order and move forward with enthusiasm or at least determination.  In fact I have learned to have faith that a storm signals a clearing on the way.

I hope this "pouf!" also happens in my studio by our seminar next week.  Though sadly it will likely require me storming around first with a good old dust rag.

Life's bookends

 I started this week celebrating a birthday. Mine.  Not like me to announce it in public or at all, but with so many social media websites updating people automatically, what's the point of hiding?

Then at the end of the week, I joined a "celebration" of the life of the man who owned the apartment I have rented for the last six years.  He originally built it for his own father.   The father died two years ago. Roman Fritsche died two weeks ago suddenly. A heart attack.  He was 60.

In the photo above some of his employees gather outside a cafe near the church before the service.  One of these women told me she had worked twenty seven years for Fritsche Reisen. Mr. Fritsche founded his travel agency 31 years ago.  A small, successful company with a few dozen employees.  The priest characterized Mr. Fritsche as a man with energy, humor, a love of life and travel, and a gourmet cook.  He'd made 100s of trips in his life.  I can attest to that as even my first inquiry call was returned from Spain. Later email replies from Asia, Egypt, the States.

My sunny apartment feels a little more forlorn for the loss, but I am stronger for the reminder that I'm writing my own story, also an entrepreneurial one.  I hope in 30 years, someone might say with some happiness they started working with me in my business two decades ago. I would be way past normal retirement age for that to happen.

Then again, when you do something you enjoy and bring others into it, I call that living a happy, fulfilling life.  Give me three decades, please...