Happy Birthday, Mothah!
It's my mom's birthday today. She is.....57. I always have to calculate that. To me she will always be 40-ish, which is what she was when I was 16, a sophomore in high school. It helps that she has an incredibly youthful spirit. Perhaps if she slumped around the house in a ratty housecoat with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other, griping constantly about her sciatica or her arthritis, it might be more difficult to retain the image of a sprite 40-year-old. But this is about as opposite a picture as is possible to create of Mom. In fact she sprints around the house in a cool, sleek, chic, hot pink jogging suit with, if any drink is in her hand at such breakneck speed, an espresso, pulled fresh from her ooh la la Italian espresso machine, as she speaks rapidfire through her Bluetooth Plantronics 645 earpiece to high-powered CIOs of companies like (hold on, I have to check her excel spreadsheet.....) Abbott Labs, Grainger, CNA.....See what I mean? 40-ish, all the way.
So, Happy Birthday Mom. This is an homage to the youngest 57-year old with the most spunk and energy of anyone I know. You are a total inspiration.
The Evanston Group, the company my parents run together, was her brainchild back in 1999. I just told the story yesterday, to two new clients of mine (I work for her). I love telling it. I love seeing my clients' heads nod as I tell the story of her brilliant idea, which launched a company that was profitable in the first year of business (does anyone know what a rarity that is? 99% of new companies fail, and precious few of the remaining 1% are profitable in the first year), and which continues to be a brilliant idea, copied by almost no one even several years later.
I was just thinking the other day how much I have learned from Mom about sales, negotiation, saying less rather than more, and always -- always -- finding a "work-around" to the client's protestations of "Can't be done!" "Impossible!" "Never happens that way!" Mom listens, nods obediently, and then slips in through a tiny, forgotten, and nearly invisible window that just happened to be left slightly open in a small back office corner room on the topmost floor.
Mom is a true entrepreneur. And she has a strong spirituality, which has also been incredibly important for my own growth and exploration. She has a natural, easy faith in the universe's support of her dreams and needs.
And she is a dreamer. Not one of those airy, soft, lazy dreamers who loll about under a willow tree, chewing on a strand of wheat and watching the clouds shift shape. Um, no. She is a demanding dreamer. Her dreams are expressed crisply in numbers on excel spreadsheets and large, sprawling questions on her white board (she like to express her dreams in the form of a question -- Ahhh! again with the theme of the question!) -- and an extravagant question, no less. One that seems even unreasonable, radical, rash, undoable. She really likes those kinds of dreamquestions. Because of course, for her, they always come true. And that's really fun, when extravagant questions get answered in the form of a beautiful, resort-like house in her favorite city on earth, or a beautiful granddaughter (she's been dreamquestioning that one for years), or the impending arrival of her son to live in Chicago (she really dreamquestioned that one).
I have watched her dream, and have watched them grow, and have watched her grow with them, and I'm just now realizing how important that watching has been for me. When we dream big, radical, crazy dreams, we are also dreamed. We enter a state of being whose boundaries lie far outside those in which we operate daily. We emerge into a reality that is more watery, where the lines between the possible and the impossible fade away. And we find, as I have found in my own life, that by having the courage to dreamquestion the way Mom does, we grow in proportion to our courage. Dreams are like questions that way. The minute we engage them, they turn and engage us just as deeply.
So, thanks, Mom. For sprawling those crazy dreamquestions on the whiteboard of your spirit for all these years and for sharing them with us. I raise a bone white ceramic demitasse of freshly pulled espresso to you.
So, Happy Birthday Mom. This is an homage to the youngest 57-year old with the most spunk and energy of anyone I know. You are a total inspiration.
The Evanston Group, the company my parents run together, was her brainchild back in 1999. I just told the story yesterday, to two new clients of mine (I work for her). I love telling it. I love seeing my clients' heads nod as I tell the story of her brilliant idea, which launched a company that was profitable in the first year of business (does anyone know what a rarity that is? 99% of new companies fail, and precious few of the remaining 1% are profitable in the first year), and which continues to be a brilliant idea, copied by almost no one even several years later.
I was just thinking the other day how much I have learned from Mom about sales, negotiation, saying less rather than more, and always -- always -- finding a "work-around" to the client's protestations of "Can't be done!" "Impossible!" "Never happens that way!" Mom listens, nods obediently, and then slips in through a tiny, forgotten, and nearly invisible window that just happened to be left slightly open in a small back office corner room on the topmost floor.
Mom is a true entrepreneur. And she has a strong spirituality, which has also been incredibly important for my own growth and exploration. She has a natural, easy faith in the universe's support of her dreams and needs.
And she is a dreamer. Not one of those airy, soft, lazy dreamers who loll about under a willow tree, chewing on a strand of wheat and watching the clouds shift shape. Um, no. She is a demanding dreamer. Her dreams are expressed crisply in numbers on excel spreadsheets and large, sprawling questions on her white board (she like to express her dreams in the form of a question -- Ahhh! again with the theme of the question!) -- and an extravagant question, no less. One that seems even unreasonable, radical, rash, undoable. She really likes those kinds of dreamquestions. Because of course, for her, they always come true. And that's really fun, when extravagant questions get answered in the form of a beautiful, resort-like house in her favorite city on earth, or a beautiful granddaughter (she's been dreamquestioning that one for years), or the impending arrival of her son to live in Chicago (she really dreamquestioned that one).
I have watched her dream, and have watched them grow, and have watched her grow with them, and I'm just now realizing how important that watching has been for me. When we dream big, radical, crazy dreams, we are also dreamed. We enter a state of being whose boundaries lie far outside those in which we operate daily. We emerge into a reality that is more watery, where the lines between the possible and the impossible fade away. And we find, as I have found in my own life, that by having the courage to dreamquestion the way Mom does, we grow in proportion to our courage. Dreams are like questions that way. The minute we engage them, they turn and engage us just as deeply.
So, thanks, Mom. For sprawling those crazy dreamquestions on the whiteboard of your spirit for all these years and for sharing them with us. I raise a bone white ceramic demitasse of freshly pulled espresso to you.
posted by Lorna Johnson at 2:49 AM
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