Kids Say (and Write) the Darndest Things

My 10 year old wrote this poem for a school project. As I was reading, I was getting more and more alarmed. Had I misread her? Am I a bad parent? Read the poem, and then find out what it's really about at the end.

Over the Wall

The world was spinning
Around and around and around
It left me behind.

The tragedy crashed down on me
Like rocks falling in an ocean.
It broke the surface and stayed below.

Waves lapped against the shore
As people tried to mend my heart

While sadness twisted it
Into crazy shapes.
As pretzel. I'm still confused.
A worm. I don't understand.
A bird. I try to fly above my depression.

It's like a wall, a great looming wall.
It crushes my heart.
It crushes my dreams.

Over the wall I climb.
High, high, high, until the wall is nothing but a memory.
If I fall, I go right back up.
High, high, high.
Into the sky.

So I'm reading this (it was printed and mounted on a purple piece of construction paper) and thinking oh my god, my baby girl has some real issues. When I asked her what the poem was about, she told me it was about her grandfather, who recently died.

I just about fell apart myself and hugged her, thankful that she is in fact, a superb human being.

Failure

J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard really struck a nerve with me. In particular, her bits about failure and not pretending to be anything other than what she was.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

It's all here for you to read and/or watch.

Read the entire thing if you get a moment, this is one heck of a speech.

R.I.P. Pa

My grandfather died yesterday at 2 PM. He was a stunningly important figure in my life, even as we spent less and less time together. I've been in a fog since I heard yesterday and I wanted to write down some lessons I learned from him and post them here as a way to memorialize my relationship with him. As the now eldest male on my side of the family (both grandfathers and my dad have all passed), the world ahead looks strange. It's a perspective I think better left for later in life. But as with all things, I'll find a way through it all.

My grandfather, known as "Pa" (not pawwww, I'm from NY, not Tennessee) was a pretty amazing guy in many ways. Pa had a great sense of humor and loved to laugh. He had a slicing, mean streak in him too and his sense of humor could be biting for sure. I always appreciated it for what it was - a true ability to see something and then laugh at it. It is still something I want to be able to do more readily.

Pa was a salesman in both the "sell ice to an eskimo" Zig Ziglar way and in the sad Willy Loman way. Later in life, he sold trinkets and goods on the streets of NYC. It never seemed like he was telling the truth until one day we actually saw him in midtown Manhatten. He was holding court, sitting on a chair smiling and talking to everyone and anyone. When he noticed us, his face lit up and he immediately started to introduce us to everyone and tried to give us stuff off the tables. He practically forced the pretzel guy to hand over his goods. He was so generous with me. When I was a child, he would never come with 1 present - it had to be a dozen or it just didn't seem like enough to him. I wish I was more generous of spirit. It's a lesson I'm managing to miss more often than not.

He also taught me in an unintentional way to be very open and accepting of people. I always hated how he seemed to be a real life parody of Archie Bunker and even at a very young age, I can remember rejecting that perspective. It's funny (and a little sad) that this was so. But it was what it was - and in the end, I'm better off for it.

I am sure the fog will lift eventually and life will go back to the daily grind, the rush and blogging, twittering and work. For now though, I just feel like sitting quietly by myself.

I Had an "AH-HA" Moment

By now, you should have probably figured out that I'm reading Eckhart Tolle's "New Earth" and following the online class with Oprah. Yea, yea, I know.

I've posted a few times on Tolle - here and here.

In any case, I actually had an "ah-ha" moment that has been hard to explain, even to myself. While on vacation last week the galaxy seemed to click into place for me. We were all sitting around the dinner table talking, looking out over the ocean and suddenly I was awash in the most wonderful, amazing feeling. I felt like my entire body started to float up over the table and I was looking down on my family and myself. I felt totally connected to them at that moment and even managed to catch myself aware of the feelings as it was happening.

Can't explain it much further than that. It was a special feeling and totally unexpected. The world is a wonderous place and quite hard to explain at times.

How Much Is Too Much?

Twitter, Blogging, Facebook, Myspace and more. How much is too much? How far "out there" can you, no, should you be?" I started in with many of these social networking platforms out of curiosity about how to become a better marketer but find myself ensonced (is that a word?) and entrenched in them so deeply I wonder who I've become.

The "me" that is represented on these platforms is not a true representation - it's shaded in particular and confusing ways. I find it dangerous lately - I sort of feel like I'm losing the inner, private "me" to the public one that you get when you google (err... live search) "Marc Sirkin."

• I share things with strangers that I don't even tell my good friends about. That's odd isn't it?
• I connect with people who I'd otherwise never be "friends" with under any other circumstance (this is both good, and bad I think).
• I find myself getting wrapped up in following people who clearly have nothing going on, or so much that it's impossible to catch up with them. I think that's what I've become myself - hard to catch and impossible to know.

I continue to blog and tweet and post pictures everywhere - yet lately I am finding much of it empty and frankly, meaningless. There is so much noise out there - am I simply contributing to it (pollution?) or actually adding a valuable voice to some conversation somewhere?

I am even starting to believe that regular, normal people manage their lives MOSTLY in private! Could that be?

What Was I Thinking?

I think I've lost my mind, again.

Improv Class Tonight

Karen thinks I'm nutty (and she's right), but I'm doing it anyway... improv class tonight!

This really is.. mind numbing

And so damn cool.

The Last Lecture

I read about this in the WSJ yesterday and was thrilled to see that there is a youtube video up as well. Amazing.

"Brick walls are there for a reason: the let us prove how badly we want things."

Enjoy the video.