Perspective of a year

What a difference in perspective a year and a half can make. A year and a half ago I broke off my four year relationship with J. I felt frustrated and disappointed, and after I left I felt grief and a sense of loss.

Only half a year before the break up we had travelled together to Vancouver and Seattle to attend the Twenty First Century Leadership workshop. We had both taken lots of pictures and shot lots of video and done lots of journaling during that trip, and I had a vision of bringing all that content together to make a travel videologue. I hadn't got a good start at that project when I broke up with her, and a year and a half ago if I looked at any of the images from that trip I felt depressed. They reminded me of failure.

Today I look at those videos and I remember with pleasure and fondness that trip. I am looking at those videos now because I have decided I will make that documentary after all, as a portfolio project for my business if nothing else.

J and I have become friends again. One of the tenets of leadership that 21CL teaches is that as a leader I tell myself the truth. I frequently ask myself, "What am I pretending not to know?" I know what were our relational dynamics that often led to the fights we had. I know that she behaves in certain ways and I know that I have a choice in how I respond. I know that if I respond in the way I would naturally respond, then that leads to the same kind of friction that neither one of us enjoyed in the past. For me to continue to respond in the same way that I used to is to pretend that I don't know what I really do know, about her and about how we relate.