Roses in Toronto
I just got back from a conference in Toronto. That sentence is so funny to me because how on earth did I end up at a conference in Toronto? Me, the perpetually lost and wondering. Well, turns out having a zigzag career path makes for a good story. And turns out belonging to a professional organization has paid great dividends. Mostly, it turns out success is not strictly a pull yourself up by your bootstraps proposition. Other people can help; amazing things happen when you let them.
This might be a product of my midlife crisis, but I’ve been desperate to feel I am working to my full potential, and I’m starting to fear I might not get there, that somehow I am doing it wrong. I was scheduled to be part of a panel of women speaking about their career paths, and this made me feel I must be doing something right, an external validation. But we all know — that’s not the good soil where real confidence grows, the quiet and solid kind that is independent from the opinions and flattery of other people.
For anyone who is a regular attendee of work conferences, you know they are a whole exhausting thing. Planes and trains and automobiles followed by people, people and more people. The writer in me just wanted to take notes about what it felt like to be in what is to me a foreign city, amidst the forest of impossibly tall and artfully arranged office towers and condominiums and the rush of all manner of people and languages passing in the streets. But the truth is I could have been located anywhere, since the majority of time was spent indoors in a conference facility with droves of eager to network people. In other words, these things make me uncomfortable. Not much time to sightsee or to ponder.
Amidst all the scheduled events, something unplanned happened. I met a woman who lives in Toronto, someone who works in Transportation like me, but she was an engineer, a manager of technical processes (whereas I am a person of soft skills people at conferences like to tell you are not at all soft). She was short, with cropped black hair, and could have been a maybe passed middle aged woman from anywhere in the world, not dressed in the smart and splashy way of a woman looking to be noticed for her togetherness (of which there were many at this conference, I myself was trying for the look). She had a thick Chinese accent that made me have to lean in to really hear what she was saying. I was terrified of having to make her repeat herself so that I could strain to understand again, which happened often. But she never seemed annoyed, only eager for a simple conversation.
We met sitting at one of the anonymous white clothed tables set out at breakfast. In these overwhelming events, I always go for a table where no one else is sitting with the hope that someone, a stranger, will come introduce themselves; I’m a little lazy in the networking department. And so she sat and we smiled and chatted. I ran into her again in one of the panel sessions, and from there it was lunchtime, and she asked if I had lunch plans. I did not.
We walked next door to a hole-in-the-wall Greek place I had discovered the day before that serves the most unpretentious, delicious and messy chicken gyro pita. We brought our lunch back and ate at a small café table in the bustling hotel lobby. In the habit of a good mother, she provided hand sanitizer and tissues and spoke of her career, that she was now at the point where she realized she had climbed as far up the professional ladder as she wanted to go, further effort would not yield more happiness. In fact, she would give no more energy to a career if it were to take away from her enjoyment of life, from her hobbies, which turns out she had many — cooking, purse making and… planting roses.
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Out came her phone, and a picture of an impossibly beautiful arrangement of roses, like something from a bridal magazine. Brilliant pinks and peaches and purples. You grew these? I asked, in disbelief. She smiled and nodded. This is my hobby, she said. Roses.
The degree of her delight in roses was something to behold. Photo after photo of different breeds of roses, a type of rose named Ethan (at least that is what I think she said), yellow roses, roses with delicate pink rims, roses in impossibly full bloom, all grown in her backyard, some climbing the walls of her home. I have a lot of roses, really, a lot, she said, showing more and more pictures, and avalanche of the most beautiful roses I had ever seen. I could nearly smell them. Oh, to enjoy something that much, to tend to a garden with such a single mindedness!
I have been doing life wrong and this might be the real reason for my underlying discontent. What I should be focused on is cultivating joy; the rest will come, the highs, the lows, the achievements.
I showed her some recent photos of desert blooms here in Mesa, Arizona, where her rose garden would not flourish. She looked impressed and asked me about my hobbies. I had nothing to compare to her roses, but I said I like to write in my spare time. And with not much spare time, it doesn’t happen often. No time to tend the garden, and so when I write, I write about the weeds.
Me too, she said, I like to write. She had come to Canada twenty or so years ago with her husband, and she did not speak English, which was a problem at first because she did not live in a community with other Chinese people. She committed to learn, getting into the practice of journaling regularly in English to reinforce her learning. She enjoyed the dedicated practice, the sense of calm and control it gave her, and so she still writes her observations regularly to this day, but now in Chinese, and like me she simply likes to share her thoughts.
This ordinary chance encounter seems so extraordinary to me, and I keep returning to it in my mind. The simple notion of saving your best energy for the things you love, and how that creates a kind of magic, a peace, a joy, that is contagious, and especially in tumultuous times, is life’s saving grace.
I showed her pictures of my other pastime in recent weeks, attending pro-democracy protests here and there. She lit up again. I support you, she declared. The Canadians I met were all a little shaken up by Trump’s antics. We are a peaceable people, more than one person told me. Why does he want to fight? I hate that as an American I have an association with that man. Here my new friend sat, question after question, looking to me to explain the fact of him. I had no answers, but I was proud to represent an American who could let this Canadian know we are in fact on the same team.
I should have gotten an email address, something so that we could continue sharing the things we enjoy, our thoughts. But off she went to a panel on asset management while I attended a session on lessons from women running mega construction projects, returning to a sea of anonymous conference goers, all seeking to advance a profession.
