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The First Death is the Hardest

 

 

An edited extract of this was published in The Australian Women’s Weekly 2004

By Ruth Ostrow

It was a cold afternoon early in 2001. I made the pilgrimage to Sydney from Byron Bay to visit a terminally-ill girlfriend.

Not realising the weather would be so cool I set aside an hour before my appointment to go shopping for a coat. As I walked down Oxford street I was trembling - from cold, from fear. I was bracing myself for what I would see. Deb Bailey was one of the most beautiful women I knew. High cheekbones, a fresh open face, a seductive smile and large empathetic eyes that really saw you.

“Be aware that she has deteriorated very quickly,” her husband David Armstrong, my friend and then-boss as editor-in-chief of The Australian newspaper, told me over the phone. “She can’t speak, and she already has trouble holding a pen but she can communicate through notes.”

She had been communicating. Long emails, telling me her fears, her dreams, her nightmares. She had only a short time earlier found out that she had Motor Neurone Disease, of the most virulent kind. “Enjoy the weeks and months ahead,” the doctors had said, ominously.

She refused to give in, writing me the most amazing letters of courage as we searched for meaning, searched for hope, and for the sacredness of life, together late at night when she couldn’t sleep.

But one day the emails stopped. Already confined to a wheelchair, her muscles deteriorating rapidly, she was having trouble sitting at the keyboard. She was 47 years young, vital, inspirational, one of the top women’s magazine editors in the country, former Assistant Editor at The Australian Women’s Weekly, with two daughters who shared her beauty. I jumped on a plane.

Ah grief. It’s a vast country. A foreign land. This was the beginning of a long journey for me into that wilderness of pain and sorrow that would span three years and span four friendships, as woman after young woman in their 40s – all treasured friends - died from illness and disease. As a journalist and writer I would struggle to grasp through words what was not, and is still not, graspable.

I remember feeling bewildered and frightened as I scoured Paddington for a coat shop, wondering how Deb was going to look. Steeling myself for the shock, I wandered past a shop full of sexy lingerie and see-through silly things. What was I thinking?

To this day I am still miffed by my behaviour. I had never bought sexy lingerie before and not since. But suddenly, as if it were the most important thing in the world, I ran into the shop and started spending my coat money. Compulsively.

A staggering $1000 poorer, I stumbled into the street carrying bags and bags of knickers, bras, leopard-skin leotards, shiny PVC pants, a red silk Suzy-Wong bodice, fishnet stockings, a fishnet top, and a pair of pink, velvet cat-ears that to this day have me shaking my head in shock as they sit in my wardrobe gathering dust.

I was shivering from the cold, trying to hail a cab, holding ridiculous things I’d never wear. It would have been comical had I not felt sick with guilt.

Some time later, prominent grief counsellors Mal and Dianne McKissock - founders of the internationally-acclaimed Bereavement C.A.R.E Centre in Sydney - would tell me that the way people grieve is extraordinarily different. Some will cry, other people will go on party or sex binges or do escapist things, some will go on shopping frenzies, others will be in bliss and find God, others will be furious, others will just go cold and stony silent. “None are better than others,” said Dianne.

“Whatever your defence mechanism is from childhood, to run away, or scream, or hide, this is what you will most likely do in times of extreme stress of which grief is one. Don’t feel badly Ruth. Don’t feel badly for panicking at mortality. Your purchases were an expression of love-of-life.”

That day however, not yet having the benefit of those kind words, I sat the whole way to Deb’s in the taxi berating myself for being “shallow”, “an awful friend”, “a bad, bad person”. “How could you do this as your friend lays dying?” I yelled at myself inside my head as my mind filled with images of sexy lingerie and my sweaty palms made anxiety marks on the elegant paper bags.

I arrived with no time to put the bags down. Instead I followed David straight into the kitchen where Deb was sitting limply in a wheelchair.

Standing in front of her was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Here was my friend, so beautiful, and alert, flopped in a wheel chair, gaunt, pale, face frozen from the disease, dribbling slightly, watching me for signs of shock.

My face was fighting itself. The false smile was so false as to make my lips tremble. I was finding it hard to breathe. “Show her what you bought,” said David, peeking into the bags. I went bright red. “But it’s lingerie,” I whispered. He took me aside. “She wants to feel alive, not be pitied, not talk continually about death and illness. Show her the stuff, she’ll love it. Treat her like a girlfriend,” he said discreetly disappearing into the next room.

My heart was breaking for him in that moment - her beloved husband who attended her every need till her moment she died, trying to second-guess her every desire. His courage and devotion became legendary, as have his efforts with Deb’s friend Robyn Paine in setting up the Deb Bailey Foundation for MND research.

One by one I dragged out the stocking’s, the frilly and fluffy things, as she nodded and wrote on pieces of paper how beautiful each piece was. It was like a scene from an absurdist play or a strange arthouse film. Me prancing around the kitchen with cat ears, and a pink, furry bodice, she with her extraordinary sense of humour enjoying the pantomime, scrawling merrily, her “oooo’s” and “ahhh’s” on bits of paper and holding them up. I played too for a few moments, lost in escapism, lost in her joy and amusement.

But then her teenage daughter walked in the room and the spell was broken. Something inside me snapped. In those first minutes I had been in too much shock to take it all in. But as her child entered it all suddenly registered. “Oh my god,” my mind screamed. Deb saw the truth cross my face.

“It’s okay Ruth. I know how you must be feeling seeing me like this,” she wrote and handed me the paper. As I read her note my face - so tired from grinning - just cracked. Not out of pity but at her extraordinary compassion for me. Her kind, kind soul. There I stood clutching cat ears in my clenched fist, as the tears began spilling out, everywhere, all over everything.

In this society we are not allowed to show grief in front of people who are dying, but what else on this earth is a greater tribute of love than our expression of emotion and pain? It is okay to laugh and it’s okay to cry or play with sexy lingerie or just be. There are no ‘shoulds’ in this mysterious, scary world of grieving.

Within a few months of this special day Deb had died. She had only lasted five months after diagnosis. I had always believed that the first death is the worst. Like the first time someone breaks your heart, or the first time you fall. There’s a shock to it, a quality of indefinable confusion that somehow intensifies the pain, a loss of innocence that we grieve the first death.

I now know this not to be true. For grief isn’t one thing. It is a whole world with its own languages and cultures. Order has nothing to do with it. Some deaths leave us with a sense of abandonment, a loss of intimacy and closeness, others with guilt. Others are almost joyous - the releasing of an ‘old soul’ back to God.

The death of a baby which I went through with one of my girlfriend’s during this fitful time has its own particular quality of emptiness and meaninglessness, the loss of an older child holds a sense of terror and existential anxt. My own dad died young, whilst his hair was still black and shiny, and I have never gotten over my rage and despair at his leaving so soon.

Losing Deb was the first of a new and terrible kind of grief we all have to face. One which has changed me forever - losing a peer, a mate, a buddy. As my Fate would have it, I was to lose three more women of my peerage in the months ahead. Two were cousins. All had children. Peers are like mirrors of our own body. We mourn our own ultimate passing as we mourn theirs, we mourn for their children as we mourn and fear for our own.

One by one each died, and it never got easier.

Whilst I was on planes to Sydney visiting Deb, I was also on planes back and forward to Melbourne where I grew up, dealing with my sick cousin.

She was 44 years of age at the time – four years older than me. She was like a sister, we had daughters of the same age. She trusted me, and I knew I had a privileged place in her heart. She was a fragile woman. Externally robust, always laughing, curvaceous, full of life and love, but like so many of us, a girl underneath.

Just before the news came through about Deb, my cousin rang to tell me she’d been feeling unwell. Her blood tests weren’t looking good, she was turning yellow. She was waiting for the results of a liver biopsy. I waited too, high on a hill-top, in rural Byron Bay, where I had moved from Sydney for my sea change.

“Don’t keep calling,” my mum had chastised me. “We’ll call you when there’s news.” The days were long, without any call. Finally I picked up the phone. It was dead. Somewhere out in a field miles away, a backhoe was preparing the ground for a new property. In his ignorance the driver had cut the cable linking my line to the network. I hadn’t realised. My mobile was out of range.

Finally down the hill, I managed to reach someone in my family on the crackling mobile. While the phone had been dead my cousin had been rushed into hospital. She’d been diagnosed with cancer. It was in her lungs and they suspected it was elsewhere given the signs.

Sitting in my car, cut off, alone, by the side of a dusty road, no one there to comfort me in their warm arms, I remember gazing out over the grass and feeling helpless, terrified and alarmed as the adrenalin was making my tummy do back-flips.

“It’s so unfair. She’s so young and vital and passionate…she has a young daughter!” I railed at the windscreen that reflected back my distorted face.

I remember the sky so pure and open above me. The sky that has watched terrorist attacks and murders and wars and personal tragedies. I watched the indifferent animals wandering about, the birds still chirping. That’s the funny thing about grief. You can’t understand why the world doesn’t just stop.

Optimism, denial, optimism, denial. Where does one stop and the other begin? My first trips to my dying friends I brought books, stories of courage, positive statistics, Buddhist philosophies, and my belief in yoga and reiki energy as self-healing tools.

Talk to the doctors and there’s always the cold, hard facts. Talk to natural therapists and miracles abounding everywhere, if not in curing cancer or disease then certainly in creating longevity and a richer quality of life.

Deb was open to everything and had a very peaceful death, despite her pain, as a result of the spiritual world she embraced before she died. My cousin met me with a curious stare. She was in denial which made it difficult for me. It’s hard to say goodbye to someone who isn’t going anywhere.

“How would I be if it were me?” I’d ask myself when I became frustrated. I know now that she did bravely confronted her own death with dignity and courage. But she couldn’t come to terms with having to say goodbye to her treasured daughter - only a little girl of eight. Which mother ever, ever could?

I’m crying as I write this. Crying for all of them. Still. There’s no time limit on grief. It is an endless well of acceptance of the losses, inevitable and tragic, that we have to go through over a lifetime: person by person, love by love, the old houses we cherish, our nanas and papas and parents, and friends, precious things, sometimes our children, eventually our own selves taken piece by piece by aging, illness or accident. And each loss takes us back to the great well, where we stand looking down at all the losses looking back at us.

We grieve not only for the people who have gone but for how it could have been with them, what should have been, the child she/he would have grown into. How much our dad would have loved to meet his grandchildren. Each Christmas, each birthday, each anniversary we grieve, endlessly.

“What is the meaning of life?” I’d ask my God in those trips back and forth. Before Helen and Deb would die, I was to get a phone call from another beloved friend in Sydney, another Helen - mother of two girls, who had been fighting stomach cancer. The prognosis was grim.

I was planning to go visit her, when Deb Bailey died. One week I stood in the pouring rain at the cemetery in Sydney burying Deb, the next I stood in the pouring rain at the cemetery in Melbourne burying my beloved cousin. Between all this I went to visit my friend Helen to say goodbye. Helen was an extraordinary and compassionate human being. This anecdote best sums her up. When I told her of Deb Bailey’s death she said: “Poor thing, how tragic for her and the children.”

Helen like Deb had accepted her death. In doing so they left valuable things for their daughters, diaries, notes to read as they grow. They said things that needed to be said.

A few months ago, with a sense of death behind me, another cousin, a beautiful mother and friend, had a massive coronary. Apparently she just looked up over morning coffee and said to her companion: “I feel I’m about to go on a journey somewhere,” and then slumped over and died. She left three children.

I have cried so many tears my face is older from fluid loss. But I have laughed also.

For what I’ve learned is this. To say all the things we need to say now. Not to put it off, not to hold back on words or feelings nor money. To dance as if no one is watching and live life to the fullest, seizing every moment. To not put off spending time with our children, parents, partners, or telling them a million times we love them.

The Buddhists have saying: “Keep Death as a friend, always on your shoulder”. Each moment we and our loved ones are alive is a gift not a given. Only a few of the millions of fish born to one mother make it out to sea. It’s the law of Nature. I have learned that accepting death helps us celebrate life.

I’ve learned to allow ourselves to grieve as long and hard as we like, as madly and badly as we like. It is our duty to honour those we love by silencing the silencers who would gag our souls.

But mostly I’ve learned this: there is always, always room for hope.

Do not stand at my grave and weep 
I am not there. I do not sleep. 
I am a thousand winds that blow 
I am the diamond glints on snow. 
I am the sunlight on ripened grain 
I am the gentle autumn rain. 
When you awaken in the morning's hush, 
I am the swift uplifting rush 
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night. 
Do not stand at my grave and cry. 
I am not there: I did not die

Mary Elizabeth Frye (1904-)

 

 

Nervous Breakthrough

As appeared in the Weekend Australian 10th April 2004

By Ruth Ostrow

There is a moment when you realise you’ve got it wrong: An epiphany, a breakthrough, a breakdown, a midlife crisis, call it what you will. It’s the moment when the wave hits. The moment you realise that everything you’ve ever aspired to is illusion and you have to change to save your life.

These epiphanies are pretty dramatic things. You would ideally be behind a closed door or under a couch when the tears start and the mascara runs and the panic rises and your skin turns red and itchy. Mine came at the most inconvenient moment possible, with cameras rolling and a film-crew monitoring my every word.

It was late 1998 and the ABC-TV series Australian Story was preparing a documentary on me which would subsequently air across the country to an audience of more than a million. The prospect had initially filled me with pride. It was validation that I was now a prominent Australian, recognition that I’d finally arrived where I’d dreamed of being since I was a little girl growing up in the then-outer Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh, the oldest of four daughters from a working-class, immigrant family.

I wanted the filming to be perfect. I had blow-dried my hair. My make-up was immaculate. In fact, everything was perfect in order to create the perfect media image. Sitting there in a spectacular long, red dress - my trademark - which I’d humorously dubbed “Aphrodite”, I had answered all the perfect questions perfectly. Until I was asked one probing question too many.

Suddenly I was in tears. Not a trickle, but a torrent. The filming had to stop as the camera crew and sound engineer prowled angrily around my apartment waiting for me to get a grip. Every time they started filming, the tears would start again.

This was the day, the moment, I credit with my nervous ‘breakthrough’ – and the realisation that everything I’d aspired to had left me empty. Within months I would be living on a farm, having traded stilettos for Blunderstone boots, a spectacular waterfront penthouse for a modest weatherboard, and money, status and professional respect for peace-of-mind.

I didn’t know it the time but I was about to become part of a quiet revolution called ‘downshifting’. Realising that happiness and success cannot be bought, many around the western world are sick of feeling like rats on a treadmill. Using “Voluntary Simplicity” as their mantra they are divesting themselves of possessions, pruning back work hours, or going bush, pulling kids out of private schools, growing their own food, in order to have a richer inner-life. Basically making more time for joy.

All across Australia this Easter weekend, people will live the life they should always be living – enjoying the company of kids, lovers, partners, family and friends, laughing and finding time for each other and the things that truly sustain us. The things that matter. But come Monday or Tuesday morning they’ll be back at their workplaces wondering why these are just moments in time. They will be asking each other as they lie on beaches and look out over rainforests: “Why can’t life always be like this?”

If I could speak to each of them I’d tell them this: “It can be like this. But it comes at a price. The price is realising that less is more. Less money, less creature comforts, less security, equals more time to live and love.”

It’s already happening in large numbers overseas. According to The Trends Research Institute, 15 per cent of America’s 77 million baby boomers will have joined the movement by the end of the decade. Here a staggering 25 percent of the adult population according to the Australia Institutehave begun the process of scaling down.

This is my personal story of the day I slid off the greasy pole or fell off it. Made a decision that precipitated my own sea change.

At the time you are meeting me, in late 1998, I was the woman who had it all. At 38 I was on top of the world. Splashed across magazines, on the cover of Who Magazine, I had made front page of The Age not as a journalist, my vocation, but as a news story. If you were young and ambitious you may have modelled yourself on me.

My sex & relationships column was being syndicated through the News Limited Sunday group with a readership of several million. The Triple M Sex Show I started on late-night radio across the country was rating brilliantly thanks to continued efforts by Senators Harradine and Alston to get me thrown off air due to the graphic honesty I was eliciting from my listeners.

I had the lavish apartment on Coogee Beach in Sydney, the adorable child and supportive husband, the respect of my colleagues for the decade I’d spent at The Australian Financial Review as a finance journalist and author of a best-seller on the secrets of success.

I had attracted the attention of Australian Story for my stand against censorship and my controversial views on love, marriage and sexuality. I’d been in the news for having taken on the Howard Government which had accused me in Parliament of “ushering in Sodom and Gomorrah”. I was defending the right of average people to speak their truth about what really goes on in their marriages, hearts, beds, and souls.

The producer, one of Australia’s very best, Vanessa Gorman who went on to make the extraordinary documentary Losing Layla about the death her daughter, and was later to become one of my dearest friends herself having just made a sea change to Byron Bay, was not a woman to suffer hype. She wanted me to speak my truth. Demanded my truth. “Why do you do this?” “But what drives you to work up to 16 hours a day?” She probed as I fielded each question expertly.

Sensing a sadness I’d never admitted to, she kept probing me off-camera. “But what would you be doing if you could?” Before I could stop it, it was coming out of my mouth. “I would be sitting on a mountain top, away from all this bullshit and real estate madness. I would have a quiet life, simple and full of love and joy. I’d be dancing and hanging with friends. What’s the good of having all of this if you haven’t got the time to enjoy it?

“We don’t own anything anyway, it’s all an illusion,” I blurted out. “I’m trapped by my huge mortgage. And people die. Even Princess Diana died. Why do people wait until they’re old and retired before enjoying life?”

As the grief rose up in me I realised the tidal wave I had run from all my life was inexplicably crashing down. I was a sex writer who never saw her own bed so gruelling were my work hours, a pleasure activist who forgot her body. “Where is the meaning of it all?” I cried, as she stroked me gently, keeping one eye on her watch.

One spiritual guru would later coin the phrase “nervous breakthroughs” to describe what I’d been through. It is the point where we know we’ve reached the end of deluding ourselves. In mythology it’s the Hero’s Journey into the deepest parts of ourselves. We go down into the darkness, to find the light. For being lost is the beginning of being found.

When I’d regained my composure and the cameras started rolling again, I wanted to tell the truth. But shame and guilt got in the way. I was ashamed that with all my blessings, all the opportunities my parents had worked so hard to give me, I wasn’t happy. It has taken me four years of solitude to shake the cloying feeling that somehow I’d failed by walking away from the ‘Happy Ever After’ myth. In fact, I now realise it was the most courageous thing I’ve ever done. And I’m ready to tell the truth.

But where to start telling the truth that no one dares speak of? The disappointment that life went too fast, the lack of understanding at how marriages fray at the seams, the boredom, the greed, the jealousy we feel towards others, the sense of missing out, the sense of being pulled in too many directions, the exhaustion, our sexual confusion, potency problems, hatred of our bodies. The sense that someone is always coming up from behind - a younger woman, a younger business rival. We cling with sweaty fingers to an illusion of permanence, yet we can’t keep anything - not our looks, not our youth, not those we love.

At the height of my success, thousands of Australians were either writing to me each week or calling me on radio. When I asked for people to talk about their hidden world of fantasies I got 10,000 letters in two weeks which became the book now retitled ‘Burning Up’. Yes, there were letters that were titillating and sexy but so many people used me as a Mother Confessor for things I could hardly read for the pain and confusion buried there.

To know how unhappy people are in their bodies, in their souls, in their marriages is a huge burden to carry. Many feel silenced, forbidden from grieving too hard or long, punished for aging, lonely behind the picket fences of suburbia. There’s the resentment at always having to prove themselves, feelings of not being valued and appreciated. The sense of being trapped on the mortgage treadmill – the capitulations we make to others because if we don’t we’ll lose the house, the status, money for school fees.

There’s also the guilt at the neglect of our children, particularly from working women like me. Where do we begin to unravel the knots we tie ourselves in our attempt to have it all?

But most of all the desperation we feel when we realise this material life, this youth-obsessed, beauty-driven culture, isn’t making us content. Renowned academic Joseph Campbell in his masterpiece Myths to Live By talks of a sense of meaninglessness that pervades our competitive western life. We don’t know why we are here.

And here was I, forged in a working-class home, following like a sheep my parents’ capitalist dream. I was a consumer-society pin-up girl. A walking close-peg for designer life and designer body, as my personal trainer took me out for a trot three times a week so I could look good on daytime Tele giving three-minute grabs on “How to keep your marriage hot and spicy.” And I woke up every morning with nausea because of some undefined fear.

Were it just me who felt lost, I’d probably be too embarrassed to speak up. But it isn’t. Looking back over my career I see it was everywhere, this sense of emptiness. I dated some of the wealthiest men in the world. I rode the crest of the ‘Greed is Good’ 80s. I wrote my book on secrets of success from jacuzzis and private jets.

But what did it all amount to, all the money, all that so-called power? Back then, George Herscu had just taken over Hooker Corporation and couldn’t stop: "I love it. I am an entrepreneur, a workaholic…" he told me from his lavish home in Toorak which he modelled on Tara from Gone With The Wind. His words were echoed by another colorful identity of the 80s, head of FAI Insurance, Larry Adler, father of businessman Rodney. “I work golf, I work tennis, but I play work. I absolutely love it and if another heart attack is the price I have to pay to keep going at this pace, then I'll pay it gladly."

Floyd Podgornik was a racing identity and the man behind Melbourne's famous Florentino's restaurant. One of the leading property developers in Australia he shared his secrets of success with me. "I never sleep. I work all night...I hate wasting time. I look at my watch and I get frightened that another day is passing me by."

The three men, who became the subject of fascination during the turbulent 80s for their rags-to-riches achievements, echoed an obsessive work ethic and desperate need for financial success that belied all physical evidence of fatigue, exhaustion and burnout of either themselves or their families.

Within a few years of my book The NewBoy Network being published Larry Adler had suffered a massive coronary and died, his son Rodney is now facing criminal charges, George Herscu was in jail, and Podgornik, a man unable to sleep for fear of wasting a moment of work time had allegedly taken his own life in the bathroom of his elegant St Kilda road apartment. Their demise reflected the fate of many our monied elite: Alan Bond, Robert Holmes a Court, Coles-Myer's Brian Quinn, Christopher Skase.

American psychologist, Judith Viorst, writes in her best-seller Necessary Losses that there needs to be a spiritual context in order for us to live happily ‘For no matter how triumphant we are, no matter how high we may climb, the course of a normal life will lead us to losses. To illness, to age… to separation and loneliness and death… Without some larger meaning beyond the “m”-“e”, the passage of time can only bring horror on horror.’

When Vanessa Gorman finished filming, I curled in a corner of my bedroom staring at photos of my late father who died too young. He was an absent parent trying to make good. I looked at the child I was, and knew I would have given up all the material comforts he provided to have had more time with him. Which child wouldn’t?

When I finally came out of my room, I stood bravely in front of my own little girl and asked: “Are you happy?” “I don’t see you much, Mummy. It makes me feel sad,” she said. I turned to my husband. “It has to stop!”

“I got it wrong, so wrong. I want peace. We can rent a shack somewhere and grow our own vegies. I don’t need this apartment. We spend so many hours working to pay it off we never get to see the view - or each other. I don’t need all the applause if I can’t be proud of my own self.”

Ah…the ramblings of a crazy visionary. Breakdowns should be revered as times of profound insight and wisdom. My husband, a finance journalist, tried to talk me out of the madness: “If we get out of the Sydney real estate market we’ll never get back in!” he warned ominously. I let him have his say. But within a few months my career had unravelled. Accidentally-on-purpose things came crashing down around, whether sabotage or fortune, deals fell through. I couldn’t sustain the mortgage and without my financial input nor could he.

I loved watching it all fall apart, loved seeing the responsibility fall from my shoulders. The day we finally sold the fabulous apartment, I wept in relief.

During that time I dropped from public view, took a modest job at The Australian and started writing my column on life-matters and spirituality whilst arranging the move, taking my daughter off waitlists for private schools. Her birthright would now be the love of life and books we’d instilled in her, not a fancy school name.

I’m writing this from my beach shack in Byron Bay. When we first arrived we spent three years on a farm. Now we’ve moved close to the sea. It’s a very basic house, but surrounded by rainforest. I can hear the ocean outside my door.

I’m surrounded by great friends, fresh food, good music and lots of love. And how much do we really need? A pair of jeans, a few pair of sandals, a sarong, a guitar, a drum to bang with friends. And at what cost to our souls do we take more?

My daughter’s school is a spiritual place. I don’t care a hoot about her grades – the arbitrary definition of success in a consumer world. When she rescues an ant and quotes the Buddha on compassion at nine years of age, I couldn’t be more proud.

My husband, who reluctantly came along on the sea change “just for one year” would never go back to the rat-race. “You should not have sold,” said one Sydney friend recently. “Your place would be worth millions by now! Millions!” he said looking exhausted, grey-skinned, geared to the hilt. His wife tells me that don’t make love often.

What have I learned from my tribulations? That we can change. I am different. Softer, gentler. Finding meaning makes you full and plump. No money, no possession, no fame can plump you up like self-satisfaction. I have watered my soul, taken up guitar, singing, and cooking. I work from the heart nowadays not to service a stupidly-high mortgage or out of poor self-esteem.

I’ve learned never be afraid to let go. In the world of mountain climbing, the creed is “cut loose or die”. You have to let go of where you are, before you can move to the next place. All relationships, all things have their time, and their use-by date. It isn’t a failure to let them go. We are trained to cling on, but when we unclench our hands, new energy floods in to fill the void in ways we can’t imagine possible. It’s the law of Nature.

And I’ve learned the most important lesson of my life, to be repeated every day like a mantra: “Often less is more.”

 

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World’s biggest jumps at Red Bull Big Air

World’s biggest jumps at Red Bull Big Air Posted Wednesday 17th March 2004, 9:30 am by Dunx A first-class line-up of stars are set to go big at the final of the Red Bull Big Air in Åre, Sweden from the 25-27 March. Simon Ax, the new snowboarding big air World Cup Champion, is among the riders trying to take the Red Bull Big Air title away from defending champion and fellow Swede, Hampus Mosesson. Among the skiers, the name to watch is undoubtedly the Swedish phenom and three-time defending champion, Jon Olsson. The competition this year will be intense, with US huckster Steele Spence, 2004 X-games medallists Simon Dumont and Peter Olineck, and a talented international field all gunning for the top spot. Red Bull Big Air in Åre is internationally known for its huge jumps which offer … BIG AIR! The first big jump has a plateau measuring 28 meters between the kicker and the landing. Riders will average around 70 km/h on the in-run. During the air they will reach a height of about 5 meters. The length of the air will measure over 35 meters - that’s approximately 3 city buses, or a 10 story house, if you like. The landing is extremely important as they’ll really need the speed in the second obstacle. The second big jump is a “box” with a 10-meter-high kicker. Riders will choose to either fly over the box or land on one of its sides. Last year, Henrik Windstedt won “Highest Air” when he flew 12 meters (!!!) off the kicker. During the air time, riders typically spin up to three times and add a nice grab or two. The judges rate and overall impression of the two big jumps, paying close attention to the landings, style and difficulty of the tricks. “Maybe it sounds dangerous, but we are full-time pros and know what we are doing”, says Henrik Windstedt, who finished 2nd at Red Bull Big Air 2003. “I train almost every day during the season which minimizes the risks. It is actually very rare to have serious injuries, but of course if you have bad luck things could go really bad.” The competition is divided in two classes: 17 snowboarders and 17 skiers. 12 of the 17 spots in each class are exclusively reserved for international pros who are invited to the event. The other 5 spots are for riders who have qualified for the final through 5 Nordic qualifiers held earlier this winter. [Press Release]

via snowboardclub.co.uk