Why Every Christmas Brings Me to my Knees

Each Christmas season, we take our nativity scene out of storage, unwrap the packaging and put it on display.  I go outside to cut branches from evergreen trees to place around the scene, and I cover the greenery in amber colored pine cone lights to softly glow each winter evening. This year, we added in real pine cones with edges covered in gold glitter to go along with the lights. It is, in essence, a way of bringing together nature and theology, of bringing together heaven and earth.  

In this nativity scene, the mother of the Christ Child both holds and kneels before the baby. Some know her as Mary, some call her St. Mary. In Greek, she is called Theotokos - the God bearer.  

Each Christmas season, there are these lovely moments, these simple moments, when ornaments go neatly onto the branches of the tree, when we put all the pieces where they belong, when we step back to see the beauty, or even the perfection, of the decorations. In those moments, I feel so grateful for every good thing that has been given to me. 

Yet each Christmas, we are reminded of how so many pieces in our lives won't seem to go where they belong at all.  We are grieving some recent loss, or we are remembering those we once spent Christmas with who are no longer with us. Maybe we are looking back on a year when things did not fall into place in ways we wished they had.

Sometimes we bring our best and good comes of it. Sometimes we give our best, and it doesn't seem to be enough.

There are Christmases in my life that I would rather not remember. There were a lot of sorrowful holidays for me growing up, and many other Gen Xers would say the same. Of course, we find new ways to be happy, we make new traditions, we try not to let the past overshadow the present. In those evening moments when the sun sets and the Christmas lights start to come on in the neighborhood, if I need to, I let myself grieve for a few moments, and then and then I move on to something quotidian to bring me back to the present, like putting dishes into a sink of hot soapy water, or making hot apple cider so that the house is full of the smell of cinnamon and cloves.  It is amazing what spiritual beings we are, and at the same time, it is profound that we are so rooted to the earth, the way we are flesh and blood beings, connected to the physical things around us. Christ was born into the most humble beginnings imaginable, and when he did, God became less abstract to us, he became someone who breathes the same air that we do. He became incarnate. 

Why the world needs God is because it is a broken place, and because we live in a broken place, we also at times find ourselves broken. And when God made himself incarnate, he made himself vulnerable to every wound, heartbreak, and betrayal that a person can experience in this life. This is what brings me to my knees every Christmas - that God made himself a defenseless infant to the coldness of night, so that he would fully know what we feel like when we are cold. When Christ was born, the love of God became so profoundly palpable.  When Christ was born, he proved that love means suffering with those who suffer. When Christ was born, everything changed.  

God is with us.

The white-golden glow of Christmas lights from our tree shine on these small nativity images of the most extraordinary story I have yet to hear.  And to know that Christ was laid in a wooden manger so that he would some day show sacrificial love by hanging on a wooden cross - - I just cannot get over this story, I cannot help but be moved, even changed, by it every Christmas. I have devoured as much literature as I can get my hands on from the centuries of the human experience, and no story has ever brought me to my knees like this one. 

And when looking back on a another year of life on this earth where darkness has tried to make us all live in fear, this is the story that instead gives us hope. When dusk comes and goes, and the Christmas lights on the houses shine in front of a backdrop of a cold winter night, when the soft glow of candles flicker on the table that you eat from this holiday season, remember this:

A light has shone in the darkness, 

and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Generations of the View-Master

There's something about this time of year...when the morning chill makes its way through the turning colors of the leaves, and as we turn to our Charlie Brown and Rankin Bass holiday specials, a certain nostalgia rises up within us. This is the time of the year where find ourselves making holiday shopping lists for remakes of retro toys we once had as Gen X kids or pulling down our own retro toys from our shelves for the kids in our lives who come to visit us.




In 1976, it was the Bicentennial of America, and everything around us from the pot holders in our harvest gold kitchens to the fire hydrants on the streets became red, white, and blue. The View Master model that year was also one of those things....

This was the most beloved toy of my early childhood.  When I would lift the lenses to my eyes, it created a certain magic. The sun would send its slanted rays onto the shag carpet of my bedroom and I could lose myself in another world as I pulled the reels out of its round canister. I would lose all sense of time and a whole afternoon would disappear into moments.







This is the time of the year when the most epic stories usually make their way to the movie screens in theaters and in our homes - when we are more likely to be indoors, when we are more likely to look inward, or to take a moment to look back. The beauty of storytelling always seems to come alive around the holidays.

When the 1970s rolled into the 1980s, the kids of Generation X kept on using our Bicentennial View Masters to view the new pop culture that came at us in a new decade.

        

The stories to go along with the images were neatly folded inside the View-Master envelopes and there was nothing more fun than pulling these out for the first time when you got a new View-Master. It was a lot like getting a new record, a new cassette tape, or a new CD, and pulling the sleeve out to read the lyrics.

The stories that we remember from our View Masters include characters from every TV show, movie, or cartoon we knew. This included Snoopy, Herbie, Holly Hobbie, E.T., Star Wars, Adventures of G.I. Joe, Looney Toons and Disney characters, Captain Kangaroo, and more obscure stories like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

Of course, Benji made his way into our View Master reels - especially since he had already made his way into our hearts.









I have 3D images forever imprinted in my mind of so many different stories - Winnie the Pooh eating honey, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys trying to escape Captain Hook, the reels that came with the Bicentennial View Master that showed images from 1776, and others. 



Just about any character we remember from the stories or pop culture of our youth probably found their way to these reels.





Even our superheroes would come alive for us in all their dimensional glory....

Some of the images of View Master reels over the decades of the 20th Century were photos, some were in cartoon form, and some in claymation form.  Some were of historical events like the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth.



There was nothing I loved more as a small child than seeing the world in 3D - how I first experienced the sites of America was through my View Master reels. I could feast my eyes on the Golden Gate Bridge hanging gracefully over the San Francisco Bay, the surreal vastness of the Grand Canyon, the stalactites hanging from the ceilings of Carlsbad Caverns, and the palm trees leaning over the Atlantic lapping up onto the Florida Coast.






The larger world became real to me through images, like the tulips of Holland or the pyramids of Egypt.   It was national parks and travel destinations that were the original images on View Master reels from the 1940s....



Since moving to my new Northern California neighborhood a year and a half ago where the tree lines on the horizon don't become red or gold until late fall, I have become friends with a sweet neighbor who is from the Silent Generation, and she has been here since the neighborhood was built in the mid 1970s. This is where she raised her Generation X children, stayed home with them when most moms didn't do this, and even kept her family together in a time when families often didn't stay together. She knows the value of story, and of history, and has kept many of the retro things of multiple generations safely tucked away in her home.  She has kindly shared many of these things with me - to keep in my Gen X retro writing nook, or to take pictures of, or to hold in my hands for a moment and remember. One of these things is her collection of View Masters and reels.

The first View Masters were sold at the 1939-1940 World's Fair in New York soon after Kodachrome color film was invented.  Some of the pieces of my friend's collection date back to the era of her early childhood - the 1940s. I remember looking at some of these as a child, when friends of mine had gotten these as hand-me-downs from grandparents.




The plastic View Masters I had once held in my hand as a child had been grandfathered by the original metal ones.


During WWII,  the US government commissioned millions of View Master reels from the Sawyer's Co. in Portland to train serviceman how to recognize planes and ships from a distance and for range estimation.









Stories from the View Masters of the 1940s included classic fairy tales, national parks, and celebrity cowboys of the time like Gene Autry.







C.S. Lewis said that some day we become old enough to read fairy tales again.  He also said that we should read books from different eras than the one in which we find ourselves - this is because each era (and generation) is good at seeing certain truths, and liable to make certain mistakes. What I did not know as a child is that when I was learning many of these stories, I was looking back to the 3D images of a decade that was far before my time, and in the case of fairy tales, these images were bringing alive stories that were written in the centuries before my time.

Over time, there have been almost 30 viewer models in every color you can think of, each representing the era it came from. There have been hundreds of different themes for the reels, though the View Master itself has remained basically the same so that any reel made from any decade can be used in any View Master.

When we are long gone, if our civilization is buried in rubble, what will they unearth of our old belongings? How will the history books sum up the 20th and 21st centuries in which we straddled with the timeline of our lives? They will see that we took the stories of the centuries before us and turned them into 3D images, that we took black and white and turned it into color, and that we escorted an analog world into a digital one.

What I know is that the Silent Generation and Generation X had something in common - our stories often faded under the sound of the louder voices of other generations of our time, and that is why, while there is still time, we should tell those stories. What I know is that every generation has a story to pass on to the next one.  When we look at time and generations and the stories that formed us, we begin to see how much the narrative of all of our lives intrinsically connects us.  

When I would look at my View Master as a child, I would look at the enormity of the trees of the Redwood Forest reaching toward the blue California sky or the depths of how far the waterfalls of Niagara Falls were plunging into the water below. I was looking at these images with all those who had the same reels, and even with those who had actually once stood in those places. We are truly are connected, and for all the differences that exist among generations and cultures, we have more in common than we usually realize. From the tulips of Holland to the pyramids of Egypt, nothing we do connects us more than storytelling, nothing connects us more to others than telling our own story, and to listening to the stories of others.

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Thank you, Louise, for letting me borrow these symbols of time, to photograph them, and to see 3D images again that I had not seen in decades.  Sending you love for the history you have been a part of, and for the story you have lived.  

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(c) 2015 writing and photography by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved 

When the Message Reaches You

"Do or do Not...there is no try."

When Luke Skywalker is having trouble using the force to get his X-Wing out of a swamp he has crashed it into, these are words of wisdom from Yoda. In other words, don't just sort of put some effort into something, really try, make it happen.

That's about as philosophical as it gets, especially when it comes to the movies/pop culture of the formative years of Generation X.

Earlier this year, I was walking past Union Square in San Francisco and this giant heart statue caught my eye...

Artist: Lawrence Noble

So I took a photo, walked around to the back of it, and took another photo....

And as I lowered my camera back down, I saw my own reflection in the words, and I have to say it felt like that specific message had somehow been delivered to me the way a letter is delivered in an envelope.  Maybe that's why it was designed this way, so that if you look close enough, you notice your own reflection and take the words more seriously. I sat down for a while to watch other people look at this giant fiberglass piece, and while some were just taking selfies next to it, I could see other people having the same reaction that I did...feeling as they walked up to it that the message was for them.

As I saw this message I resolved to not just try, but to fully embrace the opportunities that presented themselves to me in the days that followed. Soon after, it was as if the universe began unfolding around me in a way it had never quite done before, and it felt as if I took a huge turn around some corner in the timeline of my life. As fall begins, and as I begin to plan out the rest of this year, I realize that this has been one of the most amazing years of my life - not easy, but amazing.

Sometimes, a moment presents itself for us to change our thinking, for us to resolve to do something, or even to do something differently. Sometimes it is a moment that is profoundly beautiful, sometimes it is a moment that hurts.  Sometimes we stumble upon these moments so that we can turn a corner, or change direction, and it is these small moments than can change the trajectory of our lives.

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This sculpture was painted by Lawrence Noble who has made numerous Star Wars sculptures, some for Lucasfilm.  This piece has been part of a charity drive to benefit San Francisco hospitals.


Photos and writing by Chloe - 2015

Meeting Jennifer

This summer, I took a trip to Oklahoma to see someone I needed to reunite with even though we had not yet ever met: Jennifer. I had been connected to her online for years, and had been reading her blog for even longer. I left my 20th high school reunion in the New Mexico desert for the singing of cicadas and the sound of the wailing trains passing through Oklahoma City - for the feel of the summer humidity and heat on my skin in a way that I had not felt in a very long time.

Jennifer and I both spent a good portion of our nomadic childhoods on Route 66 and in the cities and towns that are dotted along that highway. I have always felt such a connection to her through her stories, partly because we grew up in the same generation, and part of that is because we were in the same places growing up - New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, many of the Midwest and Southwest states.

 I took a snapshot of this wall that is in the Albuquerque airport on my way to Oklahoma City see her....



Some nights, while Generation X sleeps, Jennifer is up, collecting and archiving the photos of our generation before they disappear forever, putting together the story of our generation, so that it won't be forgotten. In looking through these photos online, she has found at least one picture of herself from her childhood that she had never before seen. Someday, I hope she finds some retro photo of both her and I standing right near to each other in line at some roadside Tastee Freeze or Dairy Queen when we were very young.  I am convinced that she and I passed each other at least once on Route 66 or some similar highway as kids. Whether we glanced at each other through the back window of a car on the road, or whether we were shopping at the same souvenir shop, I have always had this feeling I had seen her somewhere before - decades ago - and most likely for only a fleeting second. Maybe the yellow NM license plate on the wall of the airport is sending some cryptic message that means the two of us saw each other in 1980 on the road somewhere in New Mexico?

When I visited Jennifer, I stayed in her guest house which was originally built as the maid's quarters about a century ago.  The kitchen inside had a coffee pot on the counter that I put to good use each day I was there and I drank my coffee out of a Fiestaware cup.

One evening at her house, we sat down to a sturdy wooden dining table heavy laden with all the colors of Fiestaware, and with skewers of grilled vegetables and burgers fresh from the grill that her husband Robert had barbecued for us. It reminded me of summer meals I ate as a child with family in Texas - it was profoundly meaningful to share a meal with her family, to see everyone in real life that I had only seen in digital pictures for years. The cool of the air conditioner fought back against the humid summer heat outside. The sun came in to puddle up onto the wood floors of her lovely house. I did not photograph the table or the house because it was too beautiful - it was more important for me to just be in the moment. I told myself I would photograph my own Fiestaware when I got home to tell the story.



I first ate on Fiestaware when I was a kid - it was at the home of my after-school babysitter, a lady who was from the last Lost Generation, who had lived through the Great Depression, The Dust Bowl. Fiestaware came about during the Great Depression - all the bright colors were meant to cheer people up.  While families often try to pass on the same china patterns through the generations, the reason I put these on my wedding registry years ago was so that I could share the same pattern of dishes with women from many generations even beyond my own family - it is a symbol of all the people who I would feed from my table who I had not yet met, of the connection we have to people who have had the same life experiences to us, whether we ever meet them or not. Both Jennifer and I are quintessential Generation Xers - we know what it's like to live through a dust bowl of our own - to come of age and continue to live on the timeline of history during an extended Crisis - when everything is turned upside down and the wells are found empty.

I was anticipating my visit to see Jennifer as the worst drought in California history kept hanging on, just as it still does.  One evening after packing my bags, it was hot and my back was aching fiercely, so I slept on the floor. In the middle of the night, I felt an earthquake quite unlike anything I'd ever felt. I could feel the house go over a wave of sorts as the plates of the earth shifted. My arm was up against the wall and my back was on the wood floor so my bones could feel the movement of the structure of the 1970s house that we live in. I could feel the framing of the house move like the skeletal structure of a whale move as it slowly goes over a large wave in the ocean. The movement was subtle enough that I knew everyone around was okay, but I wondered for a moment if any of my Fiestaware was going to slide off the kitchen shelf before I fell back asleep. One afternoon a few days later in Oklahoma City while laying on the bed to rest my tired back I felt a sharp jolt as if someone had rammed a car into Jennifer's guesthouse. I jumped up and ran in a sort of panic as the ground was moving.  It was another earthquake.  The shamrock green Fiestaware cup and saucer Jennifer had left for me on the counter sat calmly in its place. Jennifer is someone who kept herself stable for others even when some of those around her did not stay stable for her. 

Sometimes it is as if the very plates of the earth below us have to shift so that we can get to the next place in life that we are supposed to be.  And we see there is good in that.  Some days though, we feel fear as we brace ourselves against the next natural disaster, and it seems that the droughts will go on forever, and we wonder why it has to be that way.

Jennifer was given her name for some reason much larger than she may have ever knew - maybe because it is the most popular name for the women of our generation, maybe because she knows the suffering of all the Jennifers. She has been through a lot in this life - so much I know that she could empathize with any person of our generation.  She has gained a lot of wisdom through the hardships of life, and through her story she looks for redemption, and creates beauty of it all.  She reaches many other Jennifers through her story - many other Gen Xers.  She is a natural born storyteller, and when she speaks, light fills the room. She knows what it is like to have the foundations of life moved below her, yet she uses her difficulties to pass on hope. Sometimes when I look at people's lives who have had a large amount of suffering, it makes me think of the suffering of saints.  

Both Jennifer and I write about, and are fascinated with history, and generations, and generational theory - the generational turnings of history. Every four generations, at least in the Western World, there is what is called a Lost Generation - the last one were those who came of age during World War I. The current one is Generation X.  We grew up in a time when children were valued the least in modern history, yet we are now known as the best parents in modern history. At Jennifer's house, I watched as she took care of each little detail of her kids' lives, how she entered each present moment with them. Maybe each Lost Generation is the ultimate salt of the earth....

There are these extraordinary moments I have shared with Jennifer over the years, these things that have happened that are far too coincidental to be a coincidence, that have been seemingly cosmic, divine.  There are too many moments to name, and many of these moments would be almost impossible to describe, though there are a few that I can share with you....







One of those moments was in 2012, when right around the same time, both of us found an almost identical, newly hatched, little blue egg shell laying in the grass - for me it was in Oregon, for her it was in Oklahoma, and we both saw a delicate beauty in it and photographed it.

There was another time when we both had similar experiences of experiencing God's presence on baseball fields...and we both stopped to take pictures of the moment - the list goes on and on and goes back further and further in time....

There were moments when, around the same time of our lives - for her it was in the summer of 1978, and for me it was in the summer of 1979 - when we each stopped and watched fireflies glowing on a warm evening, ascending and descending, and each of us experienced a juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy going on in our lives as young Gen Xers as we stared at the fireflies.

The last night I was with Jennifer in Oklahoma City, we went out, and when we got back to her house we were standing in the driveway. I could not believe my eyes when I noticed that there were fireflies lit up, encircling us, with their peaceful glow. The beginning of our journeys as Gen Xers began with memories of fireflies, and our visit ended with fireflies as well. The fireflies left us as quickly as they came - they were on their way somewhere, they stopped and encircled us briefly and then left.  It was just like how Jennifer and I probably crossed each other's paths on Route 66 as kids - only briefly, and on the way to somewhere else.

I never really thought that I would call someone in this life a soul mate, as I had never really found anyone who can operate on the same wavelength as I do, who can see the human experience the way I do. Until I found Jennifer, I had never found anyone who can hold humor, and tragedy, the presence of God, and the weight of the pain of a generation all in one moment, yet she can, she is Jennifer.   

Thank you, Jennifer, for letting me come see you, for letting me be in your presence. After all these years of reading your writing, it was so good to hear your storytelling in person, and to hear your infectious laugh. After all these years of exchanging digital words, it was so good to give you a hug, and to break bread with you, and to sip coffee from your shamrock-green Fiestaware cup. You are kind, generous, and full of profound beauty. You are Jen X. You are encircled with Light.

Photo Credit: Jennifer McCollum

If you follow this blog because you love reading about Generation X, you will love Jennifer's blog even more: Are you there, God? It's me Generation X

(c) 2015 - Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved 

The New Mexico Sky and Why You Can't Go Home Again

All the thunderstorms of summer stood back and paused as I went back to New Mexico for the first time in many years - the land where I was born and came of age. On my way to my 20th high school reunion, I was thinking about the people I needed so much to see and the way they had become a part of me, and I was thinking about the land - the way it had always left its mark on my soul - the mountains, the bright blue skies, the way the clouds would lay down their heavy shadows on the ground. 

These images that I captured on my camera from the window of the plane as we flew toward Albuquerque were so familiar. As a child, I would fly across the Southwest by myself - the shadows would cover the ground, and patches of light would come through, and I would feel these sparks from within even the deepest of my sorrow - these shards of infinite peace in the most center part of myself - in spite of all the problems that I had left on the ground - even if just for a couple of hours. 

Looking down on the ground was where I was nearer to the clouds, in between time zones, even outside of time, was where I could merge with God.  

I had a lot of unfinished business to take care of on this recent trip, messages that  I needed to convey, reconnecting that need to happen, places I needed to visit, things that needed closure.... 

There were people I needed to embrace, people I needed to say thank you to, things that had been left unsaid that needed to be said. 

The shadow of our plane moved across the desert ground on this land where I was born as our plane descended. I thought about how our souls come into our bodies when we first come into this world - if we come from some outer stretch of the universe and descend, then our soul merges with our cells, our bones, and our DNA in the way a plane merges with the earth when it touches down on a runway. I wondered if maybe this is how my soul first descended toward earth - over this desert landscape, with the dark blue of mountains on the horizon, and the light blue of the sky.   

This was that quintessential epic journey for me - the one where you go out in the world and become who you were meant to be in spite of your upbringing, or maybe because of it, and then you go and stand where you once stood and choose to make peace with everything you were ever at war with when you were young. 

   

This land is rich with Native American culture, it permeated our lives in a way that we didn't always realize - in a way that was often implicit.  It was in the rhythms that we could feel below our feet when we walked barefoot on the desert sand.  It was in the movement of the brown swelling water of the Rio Grande. In the early mornings and late afternoons of my youth, the all covering Father Sky would stretch over me every day I was alive like it was the only thing always willing to embrace me.  

In the distance is the mountain line that will always be a part of my memories of my youth.  That distinct line has become part of the landscape of my own soul.  

There is a life that some people create for themselves in this city - a life of sipping wine and spending hours on the golf course, and living in the right neighborhood.  Meanwhile, there are parts of this city where poverty means dirt floors and not enough to eat, and moments or even lifetimes of hopelessness. 

In making some kind of peace with this place, there were a few roads I needed to travel on, a few places I needed to stop by.  Heading up this road makes me think of a birthday party I had in elementary school at a house I lived in that was up this road - and how I keep a photo of that party tucked away, out of the light, in a photo box in the room in which I now sit and write, and how half the girls at that party are no longer alive on this earth. To the right of this road is a sidewalk though it's hidden almost entirely by the green plants that sprung up from the rains of July monsoon season - this is where I at one time walked with each of those girls who I have since lost, to go to the nearby park, or to go buy magazines with our allowance money at a nearby store... This road holds so much sorrow for me.  Clouds began to build in the distance with the promise of more rain, just like they always did. Just like I remember. 

It's a city where too many people die too young, a city full of secrets kept for far too long, and a city with far too many addictions. There is a darkness that falls on the ground each night in a way that is relentless, in a way that makes you wonder if the light will even come again in the morning. Darkness fell on the city just like I remember. 

Albuquerque. Pink and lavender light bounce off the clouds in the foreground, while yellow and orange light covers the sky in the distance. Captured in this shot in the light of dusk, are hospitals, and churches, and a vintage motels, and it's hard to say which of these buildings have held the most weight from the stories of the human situation.    

I don't know what it is about this city, but its edges spill over with dichotomy, with juxtaposition.  It holds within it a light-drenched hope on the horizon and an enormous overbearing sorrow in it's dark alleys. Maybe that can be said of any city.

I took these sunset photos from a posh roof-top hotel bar as I sat next to a table of movie stars and crew working on a local film. Even in the cool breezes of the evening and the flicker of city lights slowly emerging, it was hard to stop thinking about how this renovated building was originally a mental hospital and how I remember going in it to visit a distant relative when I was a child.  

Even if you spend the whole second half of your life trying to take care of unfinished business, it seems there will always be something left undone, something that cannot be repaired in this lifetime, and for those situations that I may never be able to fix, I can only hope for grace.  

More fluorescent pink bounces off the lavender clouds and a pale blue sky. If you look close enough, you can see the shape of a flying dove in the middle of the sky in pink. Maybe it was a fleeting image of the grace that hangs over this city.  When I was a child I would pretend that the ground was the ocean and the lights, as they began to come on, were the boats floating on the water. In spite of wishing I was someplace far from the desert as I grew up, I also knew that a profound beauty existed all around me, and that this was only the beginning - that there were many more places I belonged, and that I would soon enough no longer belong here.

"Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been...furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we...You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now...you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us..."

-Thomas Wolfe You Can't Go Home Again

(c) 2015 Writing and photography by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved 

A Letter to My Teenage Self From 20 Years in the Future

Dear Teenage Self,

This letter is to be read by you the day after you graduate from high school. It is being sent to you from your older self in the future after you have just gone to your 20th reunion. Today (in 1995) your friends will take you to the airport and you will leave the place where you were born and grew up. You will look down on the desert ground as your plane ascends and your life will change forever.

You didn't get into some prestigious university, but that would have actually stood in the way of your calling - so it all works out for the absolute best. You will end up transferring around to different schools until you are done with college, and you will do exactly what you need to do, so don't worry. You don't have to do what everyone else is doing.

You came of age in a city that was stunningly beautiful with July monsoon thunderstorms and fluorescent pink sunsets, yet it is full of a dark and haunting and relentless undertow. You got pulled into that undertow, but you made your way back to the surface. This will be part of the reason you will be able to overcome enormous adversity in your life. All the things that happened led you to something better, they were for a reason, they were to help you become the next thing you needed to become each time you needed to become something else. Even the darkest things of your life eventually find their way to a place of redemption.

Get used to the feeling that there are more questions than answers. Get used to the feeling that you aren't completely at home in this world. In all your years on this planet, something deep within will continue an echo that you were meant for a world beyond much better than this one. In the meantime, through the decades, you'll have to make the most of your surroundings. Through every Death Valley that you travel, always remember the way the New Mexico summer rain dotted the desert sand and each small cactus would drink up the water.  In your life there will be many droughts.

You were blessed with good friends in your growing up years who will find again even when you have lost touch for a while. They will be there when they can to help you when you de-rail, to bring you back to the real you when you get swayed by something out in the world that doesn't have your best interests in mind.

Work hard and try not to leave things unfinished with people - while growing up seemed to take an eternity, the years of adulthood, and of life, somehow are very short.


You will find that you are much braver than you thought you were. You will find a way to use your voice.  You will rise beyond your circumstances. You always did. You will find a way to cut ties with people who do not respect you, and once you work through your anger, believe it or not, you will find ways to move on from all the disappointment you experienced in your youth.

Here is the most important thing: listening to your heart instead of your head. The heart, the core of the heart, is where God speaks, the head is where ego speaks, and within your mind, your deepest anxieties are the echos of people telling you how to live your life even though they don't know how to live their own.

Eventually, people will stop telling you how to live your life.

You will find an extraordinary connection to your generation that you will not have enough context to see until you are much older. You will realize that a lot of the suffering you endured in your younger years was not all that uncommon - all the things you went through were the things that many people went through - this will help you to no longer feel sorry for yourself, all of that energy will eventually go toward using your own story to help others.

It never gets easy, but it does get easier. In every dusk that seems darker than it should, in every night that seems longer than it should, the sun will rise - it always did, it always does.
 

You will have a daughter who is just as strong-willed as you are and that is what will give you the confidence to know that she will also make it in this world.

Through long term relationships, and parenting, and by years of quiet observation, you will begin to see people differently. You will start to see that people that you viewed as gods while you were young, were really just fragile and even broken, and that is why you will start out in life angry, and stay deeply angry for a long time, but eventually you will end up forgiving. You will realize that even though there were people in your life that were monsters became that way because of the monsters in their own lives.

You are about to put your cap and gown into its storage box. You are tired because you just walked out of your graduation party at 2am and felt like you are in free fall because everything that was ever familiar to you is now going away. But it is those moments of feeling completely lost, that if you reach to the depths, you will know what to do, and you will end up exactly where you are supposed to be. So don't worry so much, and hold your ground, and tune in to the deepest parts of your heart.

U2 will still be your favorite band all these years later, and to quote lyrics from a song that you will not hear for twenty years,

"Every breaking wave on the shore tells the next one there'll be one more."

Leave your mark on the shore, with both hands.

 -From your Thirty-Something Self

(c) 2015 Writing and photography by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

An Epic Conversation with Judy Blume and Molly Ringwald

It's hard to think of two people more influential to the formative years of Generation X than Judy Blume and Molly Ringwald, which is why seeing them in person at the same time seemed almost surreal to many of us who got to be there for the event.

On Sunday, June 7th, at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, over a thousand of us came to see Molly ask questions of Judy in a sort of interview-style format, as well as tell her own stories. The theater was full of mostly Gen X women and the event was hosted by Inforum (part of the Commonwealth Club) - an organization that works to connect the Bay Area's most interesting people to thought leaders in tech, pop culture, politics, food, and business. Inforum is about creating meaningful conversations and inspiring action, and their mission is similar to that of TEDx.

This was one leg of Judy's book tour for her newest book, In the Unlikely Event. She did months of research to create a historical fiction novel based on three plane crashes that occurred almost back-to-back in the early 1950s, and how the lives of three generations of families, friends, and strangers were profoundly changed by these events. Judy started her writing career in 1969 and she has written for every age. While the evening was in part about her new book, it was about all the writing she has done over the years and how it has affected people. Molly had some beautiful words to share about being affected by Judy's writing, especially when she gave an introduction about Judy, and I'm pretty sure just about all 1300 of us were shedding a tear as she said those sweet words.

Both Judy and Molly have affected a lot of people through film and writing as they showed us we were not alone through the transitions of life - especially the transition of adolescence. Molly said that she was one of the only teenagers of the 80s who didn't have The Breakfast Club to guide her since the experience of being in the movie was different than watching it. On that same note, she was curious about who Judy had to guide her.  Judy said that she quickly made her way through childhood books and was soon reading all the books on her parents' bookshelves.

The first Judy Blume book that Molly ever read is, Are You There God?  It's Me, Margaret.

credit: Inforum at the Commonwealth Club

Molly spoke on behalf of all the girls over the decades who have been comforted by how Judy was able to write with honesty and candor about adolescence with a remarkable lack of shame. She spoke about how Judy wrote about all these issues with humor and grace - things that we are "not supposed to talk about" and that she has been a guide to many who would have otherwise been taught to approach these issues with embarrassment.

They also talked about censorship issues - it was interesting to find out that Judy never experienced her books getting banned (or challenged as she prefers to call it!) until 1980. The 70s were a much different decade than the 80s and Judy's books were treated differently as the ideals of one decade made way for the ideals of the next one.

I loved finding out during the talk that Judy had done one of the same things in  her childhood as I did in mine.  Because her teachers didn't respond favorably to reports on the sophisticated/advanced adult reading she was doing, when it was time to do book reports for school, she would make up books that didn't really exist along with authors that didn't really exist. I used to do this, too...only Judy used to get As on her fake book reports and I was more likely to get a C+!

I forget how loud my laugh is when I find something deeply funny. It sort of explodes from my vocal cords and the sound waves can fill up a very large space. Sometimes it causes people to look at me quizzically. This explosive laughter is what I spent a lot of time doing when I read the books Judy wrote for elementary school kids - Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Superfudge, and others. As Judy said many funny things through the evening, she looked over at me because of that loud laugh of mine and it seemed fitting, since it was her humor that caused me to laugh explosively in my childhood, it seemed fitting that she could hear it in real life.

A Mini Etch-A-Sketch, a mini hand-held
water game, and a mini Rubik's Cube for Molly

I somehow made my way up to the stage right after the show ended and called Molly's name a couple of times, but she didn't hear me. It was her adorable daughter Mathilda who noticed me and got her mom's attention to point her in my direction. I had the chance to give Molly the gift I brought for her - three miniatures of toys from our Gen X childhoods along with a card. The stage lights were flooding down so brightly that I could really only just see her eyes and her signature smile as we very briefly spoke. She gives off the vibe of a truly kindhearted person.



















The hashtag of the evening was #judyandmollytaughtme

What I learned from Judy and Molly is that we should always be kind to one another, and more specifically, that we can better do that when we first have the confidence to love ourselves for who we are.  Both Judy and Molly are examples of kindness, and that is clear by the way they treat the people around them.

Rachel Maddow, when speaking at an Inforum conference described San Francisco as the only city that is truly magical. That evening I got to experience some of that. It was in the room that night as we all listened to Molly and Judy, it was on the streets as we all came pouring out of the theater.

The palm trees leaned quietly over us as fog and a chilly dusk began to take over the blue sky.  We walked back into the world, away from the profound experience of being in the same room as these two women, who are truly legends of their own time.

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Judy's first adult novel in 16 years, In the Unlikely Event is based on real life events and history that Judy researched through old newspapers and even the memories of old friends.  It is a story of tragedy, loss, and hope, and how one generation reminds another that life goes on.

Molly's first acting opportunity was in San Francisco when she was 10 when she was in the play Annie.  She then went on to TV, to John Hughes films, then to foreign films.  She isn't just an actor, she is also a published writer, and not everyone knows that she is even a talented jazz singer.

The YouTube link to a video of the evening:  A Sunday with Judy Blume and Molly Ringwald

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(c) 2015 - by Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

How to Find and Live Out Your Calling: An Interview with Jeff Goins

A large part of the audience that follows best-selling author Jeff Goins through his blog, books and courses are people that are Generation X. Over the past few years, I have learned a lot from him about finding clarity in my own calling. It was really exciting to get a chance to do this interview, and I am very grateful that Jeff generously gave me some of his time one morning recently to interview him. While he talks a lot about finding your calling as an individual, I talk a lot about finding it both individually and collectively as a generation.  His newest book is The Art of Work. Here is the conversation we had:

Chloe: How do you define calling and how would you like to modify the way people view the idea of a "calling"?

Jeff: I love that word - some people refer to it as your life's purpose or your life's work. I like the idea of a calling because there is a sense of otherness to it, some people would attach spiritual connotation to it, I would do that - I don't know that you have to do that - but a calling really is as simple as the reason that you were born, the thing that you can't not do, and that could be the things that you can't not do, but it really is the work that you're propelled to do, the life that you're meant to live beyond just a job or a hobby. This is the thing that, at the end of your life, you're going to feel like you missed it. I do think that you can miss it and I wrote The Art of Work to broaden our understanding of calling not as something that really special people or really lucky people get to do, but something that we all need to do and it is not a process of setting out a perfect plan and going and achieving it, its really about taking the life the life you've been given - which I think if we're honest, most of us feel like it's not enough, that we weren't lucky, we have certain disadvantages that other successful people don't have - and that's probably true, but that doesn't really matter. What matters, I think, is you have been given something - this thing called your life - how are you going to make the most of it?  It doesn't mean that you have to replicate somebody else's success, it does mean that you can't sit around your whole life wondering, "What if?" or "What could've been?". In the book, I mention this quote: "What makes a life extraordinary aren't the chances we get, but what we do with them." And that, I think is calling.

photo by Chloe Koffas

Chloe: Tell us why you wrote The Art of Work.

Jeff: I wrote the book because I felt like it needed to be written. I felt like there were a lot of people talking about how to be successful, like "do these seven things and it will work." Then I felt like there was another school of thought that said you don't have to have a purpose to your life, you don't have to have a calling and both of those things depress me...I cannot swallow the idea that life does not have meaning - it does not sit with me. I felt like there were folks who were talking about the practical process of chasing a dream - and I think there's a lot of merit to that - and I read books that were more about the esoteric, spiritual side of figuring what you're going to do with your life - and again I don't have any problem with that, but I didn't see a lot of people talking about both - talking about the intentional stuff that you have to do - the work that you have to do - and then also the mysterious stuff that happens along the way. The truth is if you chase your dream - if you pursue your calling - you will get lucky. There will be things that will happen and you'll say, "Wow, how did that happen?". And there will be times when nothing seems to be happening - and you will have to work really hard - and I think it's both...you've got to work hard but then there are these things that happen that just kind of blow your mind. I didn't see a lot of people talking about it like that and I wrote The Art of Work to at least present another way of finding your purpose.

Chloe: How does failure lead us to success?

Jeff: In The Art of Work, I interviewed a bunch of people who are living their calling, doing really interesting, meaningful work, and one of the common themes that kept emerging was failure in all these lives - including my own. Then when I was reading all of these biographies of famous/successful people - people like Walt Disney, Mother Teresa, and Steve Jobs, to name a few - not perfect people, but people who made a mark on the world - who figured it out and went after it - they all had failure, like seasons of failure, years of failure. I thought that was interesting because most of us fear failure. The interesting thing about failure I learned is that failure isn't the thing that prevents you from success, it leads you to success.  When we look at people who have succeeded who have also failed, people like Michael Jordan for example, who didn't make the varsity basketball team in high school, usually the story we say is that he succeeded in spite of failure. That is not true. Michael Jordan succeeded because of his failure. It was his failure that forced him to work harder than he was working. When he didn't make varsity, his mom told him to work harder, practice harder, grow. In the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, she says what separates successful people from unsuccessful people is mindset. She distinguishes the difference between a 'growth mindset' and a 'fixed mindset'.  So Michael Jordan did what a lot of us do and thought "I'm just not that good". That's a fixed mindset - this idea that your abilities/potential is more or less fixed. A growth mindset would say "I can get better" and that's what Michael Jordan's mom taught him. In a more recent example, Groupon did not start out as this group coupon company, they started out as this philanthropic endeavor, using social media to help individuals to find local meets. It didn't work, it failed. They lost a million dollars appealing to people's more noble, virtuous side - asking people to vote on service projects - so if the most votes came in for working at a soup kitchen, that's what they'd do. It didn't work, so then they thought about how they could use the technology to sell something. All the sudden they have a new business model. Years later, when they did their IPO, it was valued at $13 billion. That is what I call a pivot and that is why it is essential that when you fail, you learn something from the failure, and then you make an adjustment and you keep going. That's how failure can turn into success.

Chloe: In The Art of Work, you write that when you find yourself at the pinnacle of personal greatness, you may just be getting started.  What do you mean by this?

Jeff: There's a theme in the book that I have been learning over the past few years, I'm 32 years old, I'm a newer dad, our son is 3, and all of this stuff kind of happened at the same time - I became a parent, I became self-employed, I figured out what my life was about all around 30. That's kind of a more ambitious stage of life - people are thinking about how to make money, how to be known for something.  At the same time, my life was becoming less about me - I'm married, I'm a parent.  I learned that it's possible to achieve your dream and not have anybody to celebrate it with because you've burned a bunch of bridges; or assumed that, as Stephen King wrote about in his book on writing, that your life was a support system for the work that you do, when, in reality, the work you do is a support system for the life that you live. Personal greatness is fine, but what it takes to be truly great, as Jackie Robinson once said, "A life is not significant except for its impact on other people". Viktor Frankl wrote that to live a meaningful life, one of the crucial ingredients is you have to have somebody to share that life with, you have to have somebody to live for. When he was in the Nazi concentration camps, one of the things that kept him alive was that he was going to see his wife and family. The belief that they were still alive kept him going. Somebody that pulls you out of your current context and the focus on self, which is so easy to do in this age - focusing my ambition, things that I can accomplish, etc.  When you are at the pinnacle of your personal greatness, hopefully you are just getting started, because I think your calling, ultimately, is not about the work that you do, but about the people whose lives you impact and the legacy you leave behind in terms of those that you invested in.

Chloe: Because I write about Generation X and the pop culture of our formative years, I have to say that I loved your Luke Skywalker references in the book. When it comes to finding your calling, and even pushing through when it gets hard with that calling, how would you say that Luke is a good metaphor or symbol?

Jeff: It's a great metaphor because Luke Skywalker follows the hero's journey process that so many great stories are based on. Luke starts out with this longing, he realizes that his life is not enough. He's living the life of a farmer and it's boring to him, and he wants to go live an adventure. Luke just knows that he is missing out on something. I think we all begin there - we all begin with feeling like there's more to life and I'm missing it...that there's more. Every great story has that - The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars - they all have these characters that start out feeling dissatisfied.  I think that's really telling. If you're feeling dissatisfied, that's an indicator that there's a deeper story you need to tap into. In the second movie, Luke is ambitious, he bites off more than he can chew, he tries to face Darth Vader, he gets his hand cut off...and what's interesting about that is that failure humbles him, it makes him train harder. He's not full of himself anymore, he has to rely on the community of other people... he goes back, finishes his training, faces Darth Vader again, and is now a Jedi Master, and, more importantly, he has learned that what's greater than strength is compassion and love and he spares his dad's life.  That's the the maturity of a calling - you start out thinking that your life isn't enough, then you get your hand cut off - you have some kind of terrible failure that humbles you - and then like Luke, who [after the journey] celebrates with everyone - friends, Ewoks, everyone partying together - because that's what a life lived well looks like. At the end of the journey/road/marathon, there are people to celebrate with because you were wise enough to bring others along for the journey.

Chloe: In the book, you write that when our interests connect with the needs of the world, we begin to live for a larger purpose. What's that larger purpose and how has this proven to be true in your own life?

Jeff: I think that there are layers to this. I thought that it was enough to just be a writer, and write great stuff.   also thought this would be enough to just support my family and this would be a job, and it wasn't.  I remember having a conversation with my friend Stu when I was making more money than I had ever made before and I thought, "Why am I less happy, why am I bored, why am I a little bit depressed right now?". My friend Stu said that he remembered when that had happened to him - and buying a new house or car didn't excite him. Around that time, Stu took a trip to Africa with his wife, a school teacher, and visited all these rural communities in Kenya and realized there wasn't a school for miles - that these kids were missing out on an opportunity that had given him a lot of luxuries and opportunities to do so many of the things that he did. So he and his wife started this non-profit, building schools in Kenya. What Stu told me was that after he left Africa and came home, he no longer felt guilty about making more than enough money because now he had something to work for that was not himself. I think that's a very simple definition of purpose.   have a friend who teaches memoir writing, and she says a great memoir is always about something, and that something is not me. So if you want to tell a story, it needs to be about a theme that other people can connect with. More importantly, if you want to live a great story, it needs to not be about you. Simply, when I am living a purposeful life, my life is not just about me, when I go to work, or write a book, or teach an online course for writers, it's not just about me having enough money. I think work is not just a means of living, its about making a meaningful life, and what that really comes down to is having something bigger to work towards. For me what that's looked like is that when we have more money than we need, we give it away - to charity projects, non-profits, causes we believe in that are making the world a better place. I've done the thing where I've made a bunch of money for myself and I achieved that goal and I felt great for about twelve seconds. If I'm trying to do something big like build an orphanage in the developing world, or help ten thousand people share their messages with the world, that is so much more exciting than an extra zero on the end of my bank account.

photo by Chloe Koffas

Chloe: Your book tells us a little bit about the mystery of motivation. Tell us why it's so unscientific and so important to pay attention to.

Jeff: I was talking to Daniel Coyle, who wrote The Talent Code, and in that book, he talks about what it takes to become great at something and he debunks the 10,000 hour rule about how to become great at something. He talks about how it's not just about the amount of practice that you do - it's also about how deep the practice is. He says you have to really love it and be really motivated to do it. He says that we don't know where that motivation comes from, what we do know is that it begins with a spark. When you're a parent of more than one kid, you realize how different each individual is. Even if kids are raised in the same environment - the same house with the same values, yet their interests can be very different.  One kid can love sports, the other loves chess, etc. It's interesting to watch kids gravitate toward one thing or another - and Daniel Coyle says that's a spark - some sort of initial motivation. That's interesting to me - as a person of faith, I think there is something spiritual there - something you were born to do, God-given sparks that explain why one person loves something and others could care less about it. I think that the mystery of motivation is that you need to be looking for sparks, and once you see them in your own life, or in the lives of the people that you're leading, or the kids that you're raising, you should be looking for those moments, and when you see them, go deeper with them. So when I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with my life - I'm looking for sparks - for things that I always loved doing...and then I have to practice those things really hard to be great at them. I think the mystery of motivation is that you can become great at something, but if you don't love doing it, it's going to be drudge work and you're never going to be able to master it if you don't have that inherent motivation that Daniel Coyle talks about.

Chloe:  You write that we don't understand our calling until we get to the end of our lives looking back. Could that apply to us both individually and collectively as a generation, and if that's true, how do we live with satisfaction today?

Jeff: Kierkegaard said "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward" and that's always true. Hindsight is 20/20. We have these cliches because there's truth to them. So what that means corporately or generationally - I think it means that we have to have the humility to realize that the things that we're supposed to do, we don't fully understand when we're doing them  The thing that you think your calling is, you're going to understand better when you're 50 than when you're 20, and what that means practically is that it will look like it changes, but I think it evolves. If I have the same perception of life that I do now when I'm on my deathbed, then I did not grow. When we look back at our lives, they should make more sense, and I think - as an idealist - there is an immature part of me that thinks that I should think the same way that I thought when I was 21 years old and an idiot and thought I knew everything, and if I lose that, then I lose something important about myself - that I'm losing innocence. I don't think you have to lose innocence, but I think you can grow up and understand that when it comes to your youthful ideals, there is a time for everything, "a time to sow and there is a time to reap." I think that when we look back on our life we're going to see two things: 1) we're going to see the people that we invested in and 2) we're going to see the people that we ignored because we were so caught up in our own melodrama.  I think that knowing that we're going to look back on that will hopefully make us more aware of the people around us right now that we can be investing in and bringing along for the journey.

Chloe: One of the things in the book you wrote about that I really liked is the concept of the portfolio life of our experience - that having a diverse set of skills is a way to ensure job security. This is interesting because both Generation X and Y came into the workforce during a tumultuous time in the economy, so a lot of us did temp work or tried this or that for a couple of years, and then did so many different things for work that we have looked at our resume and thought maybe it was kind of a hot mess. But from a "portfolio life" perspective, maybe within all those different experiences there was a common thread, or maybe those experiences collectively brought us to our ultimate calling.  I really liked the portfolio life concept you wrote about and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.  

Jeff:  I think that there is this old way of looking at work -  that you're going to do this one thing for forty years - that you're going to go to college, get a degree, you 're going to learn how to do this thing, and then you're just going to do it forever. That's not the way the world works anymore - organizations don't survive for forty years anymore, much less a job. So what I think that looks like for us - those of us in the workforce, or entering the workforce, or trying to figure out what's next - there's been some really interesting research about this idea of a "portfolio life". This is a term I borrow from Charles Handy, who in 1989 predicted that this was going to happen: that organizations were going to get smaller, and the freelance community of people who had lots of different gigs at different seasons of life was going to grow. Now there have been several interesting studies; there was a study a few years ago that Forbes released about the freelance community, and they predicted that if the trends continue, that by 2020, half of the American workforce is going to be freelance, and by 2030, about 60 percent.  So if you have a portfolio life, organizing the work that you do as a collective of all you've done, and not just one thing, it might feel weird now - it feels weird for me to say I did all these different things - and it looks kind of messy, but it will not be weird very soon, and in fact people who led portfolio lives for years, I think, are going to have a competitive advantage. We're seeing that more and more. What does it look like now, if you're a writer and you're just a writer and you don't care about technology? Or what does it look like if you're a really great administrative assistant, but you don't know how to use a computer? This is so much a part of our culture right now that we take for granted the fact that everybody has had to learn multiple skills to just keep a job. I know people who haven't, who did not do this, who focused on one thing, and the world changed, and that pension they were counting on didn't happen, social security wasn't as great as they thought it was going to be. They're having to re-enter, in the second phase of their career, what they thought would be close to the end, and it's kind of a new beginning, and they're scared. In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene says the future belongs to people who can take various skills and combine them in interesting ways. I think that's true - I think that's the future - I think that's the way human beings are actually wired - I think it's more natural for us than just doing one thing over and over again like a robot. I think the cool thing about having a portfolio life is when you're doing something that kind of feels relevant and then you look back and you realize that it taught you so much about the thing that you're doing now.  There was this anonymous quote that I read that I love and it was, "Every single thing that has happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come." How much more could you dig in and discipline yourself doing the work in front of you right now - doing what's in your hands to do right now - if you have that perspective. Understanding that it's "not exactly everything I want to do but I can add it to my portfolio and who knows how this is going to help me in the future?"

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The Art of Work can be found online and in book stores. I wanted to help get the word about it because I feel that when we give to the world through our calling, both individually and collectively, we can truly leave the world a better place for future generations. As Generation X takes on more and more of a leadership role in society, being clear on our calling becomes even more important.  

photographer: Ashley Goins

   For more on this, head on over to Jeff's website: goinswriter.com

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(c) 2015 Chloe Koffas