Arrival in Paris
The following article continues the saga of my Leap of Faith, which turned out to be myjourney from lawyer to coach. This article was originally published in the Orlando Sentinel in 1999.
Arrival in Paris
A year in France sounded like a reasonable antidote for the forty-something mid-life crises of a couple from Houston. Because Jim and I had minimal travel experience in France and minimal French language skills, we made a trial move to Paris for one month. It started out well. When we landed at the airport, we breezed through customs and immigration so easily that we did not recognize the process had occurred until we found ourselves at the street exit. Then, unlike in New York, our cab driver spoke a little English. He took us straight to the furnished apartment we had rented for about $1800 a month, despite the fact that we could hardly pronounce the name of the small street, and could only tell him that it was in the 17th Arrondissement. Already life was so different from home.
We found our small one-bedroom apartment nicely decorated, and it even resembled its picture on the Internet. The kitchen and the bathroom were so tiny that they were cute. (We knew from talking to seasoned travelers and researching floor plans on the Internet, that apartments in Paris were small.) In France most major kitchen appliances are in miniature. Our dishwasher barely accommodated breakfast and lunch dishes. We had to stoop to peer into the refrigerator. We had an understanding that he who cooks doesn’t clean up, because there really wasn’t room for two people in the kitchen at the same time. We just bumped into each other a lot.
The bathroom had barely enough room for both me and my reflection in the mirror. When Jim shaved, he said he invaded his own personal space. I bumped my head and my backside the first time I brushed my teeth and bent over to spit. The toilet was installed at an angle, because otherwise one could not get past the toilet to the shower. The shower was so small that the curtain rubbed against my backside while I showered. Soap-on-a-Rope was a necessity, because a dropped bar was nearly irretrievable.
The apartment gave us something new to laugh about every day. We loved it. Living there for a year would probably be a challenge, but for a month it was great.
Eager to experience Paris, we quickly scouted out our neighborhood. Living in the 17th Arrondissment, we experienced a real Parisian residential neighborhood - not the hyped-up version filled with post cards, camera-toting tourists and waiters who know how to sneer in English. My French was not good that first jet-lagged day. Our apartment manager had what seems to be the universal response to my language difficulties: She spoke faster and louder and flapped her arms. My French didn’t recover from jet-lag, however, so now when asked if I speak French, I respond, “I thought I did until I moved to France.”
The triple whammy of an unfamiliar language, unfamiliar customs and unfamiliar products kept us in continual bewilderment. Fortunately those who stereotype the French as rude are wrong. Or maybe the French took pity on us. They tried hard to help us, and some actually apologized to us for not being able to speak better English. I struggled to communicate in the local tongue, often speaking “Spanglais.” Coming from Texas, where Spanish-speakers are abundant and French-speakers are almost non-existent, I found that unbidden Spanish interjected itself into my conversations when the stubborn French words would not rise to the surface. Sometimes it worked anyway. Mostly it resulted in a very puzzled look on the face of my listener.
Adventure and comedy spiced ordinary daily events like grocery shopping and dining out. If we didn’t look at our life in France that way, we would have been ever-agitated. Our first grocery shopping trip took an hour to buy the few things that we could easily carry home walking. We never did find any decaffeinated or herbal tea that day, but we did find some “light” tea and something mysterious called “infusion.” We didn’t find any skim milk, but we found “half-skim.” We found hundreds of cheeses, and things called bacon that weren’t bacon as we knew it.
We didn’t find facial tissue, but we found folded sheets of papier toilette. You have to go to the French version of Walgreens to buy facial tissues in Paris. There you will also find shampoo, lotion, and even clothes. But not sun screen. You get sun screen at the pharmacy, where you will also find the anti-cellulite cream and posters of thong-clad women advertising it.
At the grocery checkout stand we bit our nails as we tried to decipher the ominous warnings hung over some lanes. Timidly we ventured forth, hoping we didn’t have the wrong number of items, the wrong form of payment, or worse, the wrong passport, for that lane. Halfway through the checkout process, we were discovered: We hadn’t followed the proper procedure. After much pointing and arm-flapping, I understood that we were supposed to weigh our vegetables in the produce department. There I found the scale that spit out a label with the ultimate price on it after I pushed buttons to tell it what it was weighing.
I thought I had actually passed the vocabulary test on the scale (with the help of pictures), but it still tripped me up. I was not fooled by the fact that the French call grapes raisins and plums prunes. I found raisin noir for the luscious black grapes and raisin blanc for the juicy green grapes (which the French call white), but no raisin rouge or even raisin rose for my red grapes. Finally the exceedingly patient customer behind me just reached through and pushed the button for black grapes.
Meanwhile, Jim was still tying up the checkout line, apologizing in English and arm flapping to people in line behind him. Contrary to the French reputation, the waiting customers were very gracious, telling him “Pas de problème” (”No problemo” in Spanglais).
Post Date: November 25, 2006
Leap of Faith
A forty-something mid-life crisis tightened its long fingers around my neck, slowly suffocating me. I had practiced law for 18 years in big firms, small firms, on my own, changing the configuration every few years. My life had the outer hallmarks of success. I liked my clients personally, and they gave me good work and paid their bills promptly. I was my own boss in a reasonably secure position. I cherished my beautiful new home designed to my specifications. My teenage son, Brandon, was smart, handsome and happy. I had a relationship with Jim, a loving and considerate partner who would talk through conflicts with me.
Yet, discontent haunted me and sucked the energy out of me. Sometimes I felt guilty for not appreciating my good fortune. Often I felt crazy, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do instead. What was I even qualified for? Would I have to go back to school again? I had tried to find a new career for years. I was afraid to let go of what I had in order to start something new. What if I couldn’t make a good living at it? Or worse, what if my new career also turned into “Just a Job”.
I eagerly read self-help books. Although titles like “I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was” struck a bulls-eye, the advice didn’t stick with me. Well, ok, maybe I didn’t do the exercises whole-heartedly. Some of them I didn’t do at all. I just continued trudging to work, forcing myself to read boring documents and draft agreements I wasn’t interested in. Only my concern for my clients and the need to pay the bills kept me going.
Then Mary Manin Morrissey came to town to promote her new book, “Building Your Field of Dreams”. Her words, both spoken and written, reverberated inside my cranium. I still didn’t know what my dream was, but Morrissey’s counsel; “Go to the edge of the light you see,” bubbled up from time to time like the answer in one of those old eight-ball fortune telling toys from the 50’s.
After a relatively stress-free day of practicing law, I nevertheless returned home depressed. I moaned to Jim, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” Jim asked me the powerful question, “If money were not an issue and you weren’t trying to determine a career, what would you do for the next year?”
I blurted out, “I’d move to Paris!” Stunned, I asked myself where did THAT come from. It WAS an appealing image, and I HAD desired to spend time in France since my teen years. It occurred to me that I had a sad fondness for the idea, almost a buried longing. I recognized the dream I had shoved back into the dark corners of my sock drawer at least 20 years ago. Through the power of a single question, my life turned from drudgery to adventure.
Initially I dismissed that idea as outrageous and impossible, but once released from Pandora’s Box, the dream would not endure being stuffed away again. The idea haunted me for three days, popping into consciousness in unguarded moments. Finally I stopped saying “Impossible,” and began asking “Why not?”
Many “Why Not’s” shouted back at me. I had a big mortgage on my treasured custom-built dream home that I had completed only two years before. As a divorced mother, I shared joint custody of my then 13-year-old son, and his father would not want him wrenched away and spirited off to a foreign country. I had a law practice stocked with clients I liked and cared about, and structured so as to give me personal autonomy, yet the support of lawyers with other areas of expertise. Moving across the Atlantic for a year would deal a deathblow to the business I had struggled to build up. I had a cat and two big dogs, one of whom was renowned in his youth for his Marmaduke-like misdeeds, but who now was aging and sometimes incontinent. Although I had studied French in high school and college, I had rarely encountered the occasion to speak French in Texas over the past 20 years. My efforts at French while in France in the past year had produced comic, and sometimes very inconvenient results. I didn’t speak French well enough to properly reserve a hotel room, much less negotiate a place to live for a year. I had no prospects for employment in France, a country with a 13% unemployment rate, except for in the one area I wanted to avoid — practicing law. The exchange rate between francs and dollars disfavored Americans, in a country where the cost of goods and housing already soared. The list went on and on and on.
In the following days I had two thoughts bubbling up at odd times: (1) “Live in Paris for a year,” and (2) “Go to the edge of the light you see.” For the first time I didn’t dismiss the idea. I asked myself, “What is really stopping me?” I felt a strange exhilaration. Morrissey’s writings had encouraged me to dream bigger than myself. I began to examine my situation with the idea that maybe it WAS possible, at least with a little help from a higher power. Why say no without really exploring it? What did I have to lose? A career I couldn’t tolerate anymore? I went to the edge of the light I could see.
Post Date: January 1, 2002
Decision & Faith
How Vision, Decision, and Faith Orchestrated Events for “Leap of Faith“.
I enrolled in a French class. I examined my financial situation and determined that, if I leased my house for enough to cover the costs on it, I could manage for a year or so without working. I could just relax in France and see what answers would bubble up in that old eight-ball. I consulted Jim and Brandon. Brandon, who was just graduating middle school, salivated at the idea of living in France for a year. Jim was a at career crossroads himself, and declared his willingness to follow my lead. Now to my ex. After a few discussions, Bob generously put aside his desire to be with his son in order to give Brandon a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Nearly miraculous solutions materialized to solve the lingering problems. I leased my treasured house to people I knew and trusted. They just showed up at the door with a real estate agent, not previously knowing it was my house. Bob acquiesced to take possession of our elderly dog and the other dog made friends with strangers who wanted to keep her. Using the Internet, we finally found a suitable temporary apartment in Paris. As each hurdle fell away I felt reassured, and I faintly recognized the work of some other hand in this process.
Soon only my fear stood in the way. Fear of the unknown. Fears of unemployment, of not having a 99-year plan, of not knowing where this adventure would lead me. Fears about whether it would be a mistake, whether I was being crazy and irresponsible, whether I could manage without an income in a foreign world. I had done all the analysis and preparation I could. I went to the edge of the light I could see.
I came to understand the profundity of the clichà “Leap of Faith.” I stood at the edge of a cliff, trying to decide whether to step off, whether to trust that a net would appear (as I once heard faith defined). I projected far into the future, and realized that whatever happened, at age 90 I was unlikely to look back and say, “I wish I hadn’t gone to France for a year.” By contrast, I already had regrets for opportunities I had failed to pursue in my younger years.
I closed my eyes and jumped.
Post Date: June 1, 2001