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My friend, Jacelyn is sitting at my kitchen table looking wistfully at her boyfriend who is staring at a presentation he is putting together for his new web start up. 

“I wish Roger knew me when I was totally hot,” she whispered to me with a smile. 

Just for the record, Jacelyn is totally hot, even at 52 years old. Her long chestnut brown hair and athlete’s body make her look 20 years younger. I know Jacelyn is not talking about her looks or her age.  She is adding up the years in a different way. 

In her 52 years, Jacelyn has learned to enjoy her life and today, she’s feeling a little guilty about it.  Her boyfriend, Roger, who is living in start-up company hell needs her, needs her red-hot contacts from when she was a top sales executive at one of Atlanta’s top 40 radio stations.  He wants her to pitch to potential clients and develop new client lists in the way that her one of the top marketing and production people in the Southern U.S.  Jocelyn is working with Roger, doing what she can.  

She knows she can do much more than what she’s doing and is baffled why she doesn’t. Or won’t.

“ I don’t know why, Carol. I just don’t feel like my old-self anymore.”  

On most days, Jacelyn runs, bikes and swims in the ocean before most of us pour the milk on our Wheaties.  And here she was sitting at my kitchen table wondering if she’d lost a different kind of Mojo: her drive to “Sell, baby sell.” 

“Jacelyn, remember when you and I first started out in our careers?”  I was thinking about my senior year of college when I was interning at CNN, working nights and weekends for no pay, answering phones, picking up dry cleaning for correspondents who were jumping on yet another airplane. I would move every two years to the next television news station or network, fly 300,000 miles in a single year covering breaking news, missing just about every wedding, birthday, and anniversary between 1990 and 2003 when having a baby and losing my first husband to cancer forced me to slow down and reconsider my life.  How did I do it, I wondered?  I recounted those years to Jacelyn over a hot mug of coffee. It still feels like a sinful luxury to sit still, sip instead of gulp and linger instead of dash.  

“Fear.  I was afraid to fail,” I said.  “Jacelyn, that was the ‘push’ that moved me through my life.  I think it’s why I loved to go to dangerous places.” 

Years of travel showed me how fear has built civilizations as well as the armies that conquered them. My first bureau chief for CNN’s Los Angeles office once told me, fear is a great motivator.  He, unfortunately, was the type of manager who ruled by fear, screaming at the staff from his office until anxiety reverberated down the hallway. I was 20 years old and willing to put up with just about anything to keep my first news job. But then the years pass, things happen. Great joys followed by valleys of sorrows. The river comes, sweeps us away, and yet we find ourselves in midlife bobbing to the top for air.  We breathe.  We live. People we love die and we wonder how we can go on living without them

Jacelyn recently lost her mother after a long battle with Alzheimers. Then, mysteriously her brother died in his sleep.  I have never seen anyone face such tragedy with so much grace.

“Jacelyn, we pushed ourselves to get this far. Maybe it’s not about the ‘push’ anymore. Maybe it’s about the ‘pull’, what pulls at your heart? Where can we be of service?”

Roger, Jacelyn’s boyfriend was still laser focused on his Mac computer screen and missed one of the great wonders in life: Jacelyn’s smile.  Her face lit up, her eyes danced. I could see why salesmen used to fall at her feet and bought whatever she was selling.

“I like that!  Is it selfish to wait for that pull?” 

No, Jacelyn it’s not.   And sometimes that next great opportunity in life, one motivated by love, not fear, starts between two friends chatting at the kitchen table.

Former CNN anchor, Carol Lin is the mother of one daughter and the co-founder of TulaHealth.  She is a regular ShareWIK.com contributor.  Visit her on the web at CarolLinReporting.com.

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