Get lucky!
Three years ago on a sunny, brisk October day my best pal and I drove to the Shenandoah and spent the day hiking Old Rag Mountain. We didn’t encounter many other hikers that weekday on the trail, which can get clogged on the weekends with Boy Scout troops and packs of JMU sorority girls building sisterhood.
If you’ve hiked Old Rag, you know it’s not an easy trek. There are sections where you must hoist yourself up from one large boulder to the next sometimes with the aid of a rope that’s already been helpfully placed there by the Park Service when there are no easy handholds for your raw fingers to grab, or leap over what seem like bottomless chasms, or needle your body sideways through a slim space that makes you wonder how that portly Boy Scout troop leader ahead of you found his way through. The difficulty of the hike pays off at the top with a spectacularly stunning view of the Shenandoah Valley that instantly restores a sense of your right place in the world.
Exhilarated, elated, and hungry when we got off the mountain, we started driving back to DC and as we neared civilization (a.k.a. cell phone reception), my cell phone started blowing up with text and voice messages, mostly along the lines of, “Are you ok?” “I’m really sorry this happened, but I’m here for you.” “Don’t worry, we still love you anyway.” I was perplexed at first until I found the source for all the concern: an article that had been published in the Washington City Paper about me that morning. I read the article out loud to my friend as he drove and added some dramatic flair during the snarky, mean parts and we laughed our asses off. Soon the mean internet comments started appearing and those weren’t quite as easy to take. But I’d just had an extreme dose of true beauty in the world and I didn’t care much at all what irrelevant internet trolls and snooty ladies-who-lunch had to say about me.
However, what really helped me get over the hater commentary was the fact that a phone call from a writer at the Fashion Washington quarterly of The Washington Post interrupted my dramatic reading of the City Paper article to tell me that I had “won” a free trip to Paris and that I could invite four friends to accompany me. We’d fly on OpenAir, a first and business class only airline, and we’d stay three nights in the 5-star Prince de Galles Hotel.
Why had I “won” this trip? FW had decided that I was that year’s “Most Fashionable Washingtonian” and that they would document me and four fashionable friends enjoying the City of Light for a long, luxurious, beautifully snowy winter weekend for a marketing spread in the next issue of the magazine. I wasn’t actually the most fashionable Washingtonian that year. I simply was available on short notice for the dates they needed to do the photo shoot. My first boondoggle!
The most difficult task was deciding which four friends would join me. People started lobbying me hard once they learned about the trip. One slot was already taken by my boyfriend at the time. To fill the other three spots, I came up with a brilliant solution: I would invite starving artists. Who would argue against that? I persuaded three artists whose work I admired and with whom I shared a friendship to join me: Holly Bass, Victoria Gaitan, and Ryan Holladay. I won’t go into all the gory details of how much fun we had. You can get the idea here.
I was remembering that trip when Karen suggested we write about winning stuff/prizes for today’s blog duel and it made me think about how lucky I felt to have been given that amazing Paris trip right in the middle of an emotional firestorm caused by a few cancerous comments about me. I’ve been thinking much more lately about what it means to be lucky. I am lucky that my actual cancer was detected so early under incredibly lucky circumstances (it’s juicy stuff but you may have to buy my future book to find out how) and that I won’t need any additional treatment after the double mastectomy, like chemotherapy, radiation, and icky drugs that force you into early menopause. Eeewww. And that in the middle of the cancer catastrophe, I found out that I was lucky enough to have the kind of friends who would basically drop everything to take care of me when I needed them most. I feel lucky that cancer forced me to downsize my life so that I could live my true passion: to write every single day.
I’m lucky that I recently won a lottery to stay one night in the amazing Room for London next month and the boyfriend of a new friend I met because of cancer (very lucky!) will give me one of his free first-class airline vouchers to get there (even luckier!). I’m lucky that my original plastic surgeon took an emergency leave two days before my double mastectomy and I ended up getting a new surgeon who would restore my classic bosom to resemble the original equipment as much as possible. And the list goes on and on about how lucky I have been. Even the seemingly unlucky stuff (cancer and such) has yielded such lucky outcomes that I am not even sure anymore how to define luck.
None of these so-called lucky things that have happened to me, even the earlier trip to Paris, came to me for no reason at all though. I believe that these things were given to me because I have tried to live my life according to these principles:
Inspiration. Surround yourself with extraordinary and creative people.
Passion. Suck the marrow out of life and wake up every morning screaming at the top of your lungs.
Generosity. Give unconditionally and without any expectation of return.
Curiosity. Combat intellectual stagnation with curiosity about everything and exploring everywhere.
Courage. Act according to what is true and authentic for yourself rather than what anyone expects of you.
