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1024 512 MAHA KIMBERLY AKHTAR

To Err Is Human: But Can We Bounce Back? Absolutely!

Mistakes…I’ve made plenty.

But even after making so many, it annoys me to no end when I do.

Annoyance forces me into rumination which in turn leads to anger and anger turns into self-flagellation.

Now, it is a given that not everyone reacts as vehemently as I probably do, but by and large, people really hate making mistakes.

“You learn from your mistakes,” they say.

But who are ‘they?’ The ubiquitous ‘they’ to whom we tend to assign these beatific, angelic phrases that frankly make no sense to me.

No one ever told me that when I was growing up.

But then, I come from a background in which mistakes were not permitted. Every time I made one, it was cause for severe and instant harsh admonishment, reprimands that went on, and a running history of my mistakes that was brought up the next time something happened.

In my innocence, I dealt with mistakes with elaborate coverups: lies that I told, excuses I invented, pointing that awful rigid finger at anyone else, just away from me.

But then when I was found out, and the coverup exposed, the punishment was worse.

Sadly, it was all I knew. And so I stuck to it and lies became part of my self-defense and self-protection mechanism. And it became so ingrained that I didn’t think twice about lying. It became ‘normal.’

Of course, what that did was allow me to shed the responsibility of mistakes and stunt my growth, something I didn’t realize until I was handed an opportunity that I got because I talked a good game, not because I was necessarily the most qualified.

I was in my very early twenties and I became the Director of Publicity for EMI Records in New York after having spent a few years after college in Los Angeles.

There were five people on my team and I really had no idea how to run the department. I wanted perfection and I was demanding and brash. I did not lead…I trod on people. Everyone else was wrong and I was the only one who was right. I was perfect. Why couldn’t people see that? And because I was arrogant and foolish enough not to admit it and ask for help, I got fired.

I was devastated.

That was my wakeup call. That mistake was humiliating enough to begin to force me into rethinking how I dealt with mistakes, with people and with life.

But it did not happen overnight. It took a while. And by a while, I mean a couple of decades.

As my career took me from the music business to food and wine, journalism, entrepreneurship and flamenco dancing, of course I made mistakes, and with each mistake, I believe I subconsciously knew that my default mechanism was wrong…but I had a tendency to ignore that little voice that kept showing up.

And then one day, I could no longer ignore it.

Shortly after I decided to be a full time writer, I also realized I could not afford to live in New York City, so I came up with a plan that would help me pay my bills and keep writing.

My strategy was to get a job that didn’t make me think too much, one that was more mechanical, something that was 9 – 5 with weekends off, benefits, and the requisite 2 weeks holiday a year.

A PA, a personal assistant, ticked all those boxes. In my heart of hearts, I knew it wasn’t the right position/job for me, I didn’t relish the idea of being a PA, but…I did have bills to pay and I convinced myself that it would be fine.

I went out and interviewed and got a job immediately. And was fired 6 weeks later.

But I stuck at it…And over the course of the next seven years, I kept getting jobs and getting fired. I worked for real estate magnates, billionaires, sporting team owners, bored Park Avenue matrons, even a film director…but I kept hitting that brick wall. Nothing seemed to stick and the stress of not being able to hold one of these jobs was starting to get to me. I was unhappy, my confidence plummeted and I put on weight.

I actually calculated that over the course of 5 years, I’d had 10 different jobs. What the hell?

That’s when it came me: I’d made a mistake and I’d been lying…to myself. I couldn’t be a PA. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of service. But I couldn’t admit to myself that I was wrong.

The only person I was really hurting here was myself.

And the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the last person I worked for called me on a Sunday night at 11pm,

“Can you come in tomorrow and iron my yellow Prada first thing,” she said. “I want to wear it at lunch.”

The next day, I went in and quit. It was the first time I’d actually quit. And when I walked away, I was beaming with happiness. I’d finally admitted I wasn’t perfect. It had taken me some time, but I’d done it. But the main thing is I was happy.

Of course, I still had bills to pay…so I pivoted and went back into the world of wine: I worked my way up into becoming the wine director for a top New York City restaurant, which of course, closed in March.

But I’m no longer worried. I’m going to be fine.

I know now that I no longer have to hide behind stories and excuses. I am who I am, flaws and all and people can either like me or not. And the most important lesson is that I have to be truthful…to myself in order to move on.

Through all this, happiness with oneself is the best form of resilience.

My story is not uncommon. If you feel like you’re hitting a brick wall, take a step back. Don’t beat yourself up. Appreciate what and who you are. And that, my friends, is the first step towards acceptance of oneself and happiness. It’ll make living with yourself a delight.

And the added bonus is people will see it.

Follow your heart or your gut: it will never lead you astray.

150 150 MAHA KIMBERLY AKHTAR

Is 2020 the new Unlucky 13? Or, the uncanny value of improvisation and the ability to adapt

Does luck really exist?

And if it does, is it necessarily good or bad?

Isn’t life more about what you make of it? Improvising, adapting to circumstances, knowing how to dance around misfortune, rising to the occasion or sitting still? After all, isn’t good or bad luck something viewed through a personal prism?

The number 13 has always been considered an unlucky number: some people say it began with the Code of Hammurabi, the world’s oldest legal document that omitted a 13th rule; others say the Sumerians believed that 12 was such a perfect number that 13 could be nothing other than completely imperfect.

In western lore, superstition around the number started in biblical times with Judas who was the 13th apostle to sit down at the Last Supper.

And then of course, there’s Friday, which, for hundreds of years has been considered an unlucky day, at least according to Chaucer, who, in his ‘Canterbury Tales,’ says “and on a Friday fell all this mischance.”

So, when you put Friday and the 13th together…well that’s a serious bout of bad luck, such as befell the Knights Templar who were burned at the stake on Friday the 13th in the year 1307.

Needless to say, even today, 13 is looked upon with narrowed eye. Some buildings don’t have a 13th floor; airlines don’t have a 13th row…etc etc.

Then of course, there’s 666…the number associated with the Beast of Revelation in Chapter 13, Verse 18 of the Book of Revelation, commonly known as the number of the Devil.

This whole preamble brings us to another number.

2020.

Frankly, I would like to propose that 2020 will always be remembered as one of the strangest years in living memory. But is it unlucky? It depends on how you view it.

The optimist in me says it marks the beginning of a new decade that will make ultimately prove to be the greatest in the 21st century and that what we are going through are teething pains before the emergence of a brand new world and a brand new order.

But after the recent, massive explosions in Beirut, I cannot help but think that it really is just an unlucky year…for everyone, all 6 billion of us.

The year began with the onset of a pandemic that no one could figure out, despite all the scientific advances and technologies we have at our fingertips; and whilst for us here in New York, the pandemic seems to have receded, it rages madly, roaring through other parts of the United States and the world.

But the pandemic is more than just a health crisis: the fallout from it in political, social and economic terms is incomprehensible.

It has brought America, the most powerful country in the world, to its knees in more ways than one: at the beginning of this crisis, we all watched as the Italians started burying people in unfathomable numbers…that would never happen in the US, we all said, very cockily. And then it came to New York and people dropped like flies. And all the world watched our response, hoping for some sense of leadership that never came.

Now…months later, America lies stripped of its prominence, harshly criticized worldwide for its’ laughable response, and Americans have been banned…yes, banned from Europe.

So, what does this all teach us?

Everyone will of course have their own take away…but here is mine:

As a wine director / sommelier in a prominent New York City restaurant, I suddenly found myself out of work from one day to the next when the city shut down on March 15th. Actually, the decision to do so was made on Friday the 13th. Hmmm.

Well, that was just great. Now what? I had no savings to speak of. Whilst on paper, I have a list of impressive accomplishments: Journalist, flamenco dancer, entrepreneur, a writer with six books under my belt, and an intimate knowledge of Burgundy, it doesn’t necessarily translate into dollars in the bank.

First things first, was to get myself on the unemployment line so as to at least pay some bills, and at least put food on the table. Well, that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Overnight, as millions lost their jobs, the system crashed.

It was weeks of investigating how to get on, calling incessantly…until finally one day, I got up at the crack of down and was at my laptop at 7:30, when the site opened and I slipped into the system.

Next, of course, what to do? I’ve always been a worker, a doer, not a sit-arounder waiting for things to happen.

What could I possibly do with my writing and / or my wine knowledge?

The best I could have done was to literally “go with the flow.”

And when I stopped trying to control the uncontrollable, things started to change.

A book of mine, a caper/whodunnit that I had let lie because I’d been too busy to pay it much thought, was published. And my wine knowledge could be put to use at a wine shop,  considered an essential business and therefore allowed to stay open.

My life is no longer what it was, but there is a new one . Who knows where the new one will take me, but I can use the tools I have to try and make it work.

All this to say that life ebbs and flows and takes us down all kinds of meandering paths. Often, if you’re stuck, you’ve got to improvise instead of just standing there looking around you. But always keep going, moving, forward, sometimes backward to go forward again.

It really is like the waves on a beach. The water rolls in and rolls back and comes back renewed, refreshed.

Improvisation and the ability to adapt are probably the two best qualities one can have to navigate life’s crises, no matter how big or small.

As a final example: I was in Madrid, promoting a book and a friend of mine really wanted to eat Lebanese food, myLebanese food! It was a Sunday and most gourmet shops were closed and none of the ingredients were available. Well, never mind, I thought…I’ll replace this with this and that with that and we ended up with one of the most memorable meals we have ever had together…and that is what it’s all about.