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I met Lisa in late 1994 while participating in a Landmark course.  We flirted through most of the course and then finally, she asked me out.  If you want to know, really know, generosity, you must meet my wife.  Here’s a woman who while in relationship with me, helped me deal with the loss of my relationship with Colette.  It was like life brought me an angel – someone who’d be there for me, someone who’d bear witness to my life.  In many ways, Lisa has been like a cocoon that has held me tight and allowed me to grow.  She watched my struggle over the last decade to understand, to learn and through it all she loved me.  Not sure yet if I’m a butterfly, but it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that I’ve had a true partner to walk with me.  Lisa and I were married in 1998.  It was the most magical day.

During this time from 1995 through 1998, I graduated law school, got my first legal job, lost my first legal job, started my own consulting business, closed my own consulting business, and went back into law as an attorney for the New York State Insurance Fund.  During this whole time, I was training with LEC, and finding every opportunity I could to transition into the field of transformation.  In fact, in my mind, that’s what makes my break with LEC so totally outrageous and yet courageous in some way.  Logic said that participating with LEC and eventually working for them was my best bet into the field of transformation.  I was an engineer turned lawyer who at the age of 25, now wanted to be a coach/consultant in the field of transformation.  It’s like I laid all of the track for a train heading in one direction, the only alternative route really to where I wanted to go was the LEC train and I did the most illogical thing – I got off the train!

One thing I began to be aware of were two distinct experiences I was having in my life.  I noticed that there were times that I was totally alive, full of possibility for my life, and in action.  And not just in action, but in action naturally, without force or manipulation.  I wish I could say that was the dominant experience but it wasn’t.  The dominant experience of my life was frustrated, not in action, stopped and depressed.  This one simple awareness began to more sophisticatedly frame the question of my life as I moved forward.  The question simply stated was, “What is the source of natural action in life?”  So I wasn’t really saying “no” to Landmark as much as I was saying “yes” to this new question, and I simply no longer believed that Landmark was equipped to help me answer this question.

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Colette dumped me.  I was heartbroken and this heartbreak even more intensified my questions about life.  Sometime during 1994, a friend of mine, Mark Meritt, recommended that I take something called The Landmark Forum.  The Forum is a weekend course put on by Landmark Education.  It’s designed to impact the quality of life.  Mark thought it might offer me some insight into what I was dealing with in my life, so at the beginning of my last year of law school, on Mark’s advice, I took the Forum and my education finally began.  To be honest, I wasn’t instantly taken with the Forum.  In fact, I didn’t get much out of that first weekend course.  It was in other course – the Advanced Course – that I really began to see the possibility of transformation.

Here’s the thing about Landmark (LEC), if you search the Internet, you’ll find a lot of information on LEC – both good and bad.  In my experience, it didn’t answer all my questions and at times, I found participating with LEC to be extremely frustrating, but the education itself is extraordinary.  I loved that it focused on real life and how to live.  The “distinctions” of the Forum were designed to give you access to living, not understanding how to live.  It wasn’t just the content, but it was the way in which it was delivered that captured me.  It connected theory to real life in a way that no other education had ever done for me.  In fact, the measure of the work was not how well it made you understand, but how well it had you living your life.  It also got people talking about the real stuff of life authentically without a need for experts or textbooks.  You could put your life at stake in a course and have it be transformed.  

So here was my predicament: four years of college at Cornell, one year to go of law school and there it was in front of me – what I wanted to do with my life (if you listen really closely you can still hear my father, “What? Are you kidding me?  This would have been useful information about … say … SEVEN YEARS AGO”).  I had certainly been exposed to self-help, but nothing ever like this, delivered in this way, with this impact.  It had me firing on all cylinders.  It focused on the questions I was most interested in, and it was all about making a difference in the quality of life.  I’m not suggesting that other fields of study like psychology don’t have that same end in mind.  Of course they do, but the field of transformation, in my experience, makes a difference like no other.

And so I studied with LEC for about five years.  In 1999, I became clear that it was time for me to move on.  I had learned a lot, but I was experiencing this tug of war in my participation at LEC.  I loved it, but also felt like I was being held back in some way.  In leaving, I left behind a community of supportive people.  I don’t mean that they abandoned me or I never saw them again, but you know when you participate in a certain group for a certain purpose, it’s just not the same when you leave.  No different than graduating college.  You still love and honor your college friends, but you’re not in “it” together anymore.  Plus there was one that stuck with me … my wife Lisa.

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I graduated Cornell in 1991 – in love – and looking at what was next.  Colette was in pharmacy school and I started the dreaded job search.  Then, in the summer of 1991, my life changed.  I went to see the movie Boyz in the Hood with a friend of mine.  This brilliant movie by John Singleton told the story of a group of friends growing up in the ghettos of Los Angeles.  I was deeply impacted by this movie, and by the events that followed.  As I walked out of the movie, I was disturbed to hear a white male telling his girlfriend how funny he thought it was when some of the black characters were murdered in the movie.  How could this be?  How could he think something like that, let alone say it out loud?

On the way home from the movie, I saw a black gentleman sitting on a park bench.  I told my friend that I had to go talk to him.  Tom was the gentleman’s name.  I asked Tom if he’d seen the movie and he hadn’t.  I described it to him a bit, told him what the young man had said on my way out of the movie and asked for his take on things.  Tom and I talked for a couple of hours.  Nothing got resolved, but a new force had been awakened inside of me.  The concept of “making a difference” was born in me.  I’m sure it’s not the first time I had thought about making a difference, but in my memory, there was no memory of wanting to make a difference prior to that night.  I had a new question to live my life inside of, “How could I make a difference with my life?”

The first answer to that question was law school.  In 1992, I began studying law at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, MA.  Law school was a breeze for me.  Don’t get me wrong I worked and despite the breakup with Colette coming smack dab in the middle of my three years, I managed to graduate in the top ten.  It just made sense to me.  It fit with how I tended to think.  As an advocate in the real world, lawyers are required to argue one side of the case zealously.  In law school, they’re just teaching you to see the arguments and to think like a lawyer.  I was a natural at arguing from both sides and going many layers deep.  Even though I didn’t enjoy the practice of law and am not practicing today, I have no regrets about going to law school.  

One other significant thing that happened to me in this time period between 1991 to 1994 was I read a book called Ishmael.  Daniel Quinn, the author, won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for Ishmael.  The award was given to a book offering creative solutions to global problems.  Ishmael begins with the narrator viewing an ad in the local newspaper, “TEACHER SEEKS PUPIL.  Must have an earnest desire to save the world.  Apply in person.”  As it turns out, the teacher is a gorilla and we are in for quite a ride.  I’ve read this book many times and have gotten many things out of it, but the most significant was the idea that what we are living today is just one way to live.  

Today, we have this cultural story that one day thousands of years ago, humans appeared on the planet, they lived and eventually evolved into who we are today.  At the heart of Quinn’s work is the notion that who we are today is not an extension of all humans.  Instead, who we are today is an extension of one particular group of humans that invented one particular way to live, and so, the way we live today is not the way to live.  It’s just one way.  I’ll leave the rest of the details of his work to your own reading, but suffice it to say, I was deeply influenced by Ishmael and all of Quinn’s work.  Reading his work made what I write about in A Life Worth Living possible – the possibility of inventing a new way to live.

With the gaps filled in, we can now move on with the story.

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In the summer of 1989, I met Colette.  I still remember the first time I saw her and what she was wearing.  There was a saying I heard once; goes something like, “It only takes a moment to fall in love and a lifetime to say goodbye.”  I don’t know if the moment was that first time I met her, but at some time in the next four years, there was a moment.  A lifetime to say goodbye?  Well, for now, the saying holds true.  Don’t misunderstand, I have a full life today married to a woman I love (who you’ll meet later), but there’s still a part of me that has yet to say goodbye to Colette.

She took a part-time job at my father’s pharmacy that summer.  She was younger – still in high school.  When I left to go back to school, after a summer of shy conversation, we became pen-pals which later blossomed into romance.  We spent four years together, planned to get married and then one day in January of 1994, she simply said that it was over.  There was no conversation, no discussion.  She cried, but that was about it.  Actually, that just about sums up our relationship.  I talked.  Colette made decisions and cried.

I know that all the textbooks will say that a relationship just doesn’t end like that, and that there had to be signs.  If I look back, I’m clear there were.  To this day though, I really don’t know what happened.  I mean really what happened.  There were just more questions to fascinate me.  Like how did I go from being the one to NOT the one?  Why did the community around Colette give support to her decision?  No one said to her, “Gosh you spent four years with him.  You talked of marriage.  Don’t you think you should at least talk to him, make sure he’s okay?”  

I’m clear that somehow, in some way being with me had become a cage for Colette.  One that she had to escape at all cost; I just wasn’t sure why I became the cage.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting I was a prince.  I had issues, but I didn’t become a wholly different person in four years.  I didn’t change in physical appearance.  She rarely made requests of me to be or do something differently.  I don’t know if my questions and observations about life became too much for her.  Regardless, for whatever reason, she was done and that was it.

I know this reads like these are still recent questions for me.  They’re recent to the extent that anything unresolved in your past comes up from time to time.  Most of these questions is the thinking of a devastated 25-year old whose life had come apart and was forced to live with the cultural answer, “You’re young.  She’s young” as if that somehow let her off the hook and explained away my pain.  

In fairness, Colette did eventually contact me eight months later.  We had some conversations about our relationship, but none of them ever bordered on real.  That experience began a process of humbling that continues today.  My fascinations, my questions, my desire to understand?  I knew nothing.  After all, if I knew something, then surely this wouldn’t have happened.  Little did I know, I was about to discover what I’d been searching for.  I was about to discover a little bit of something about nothing.

Before I can take you there, I need to fill in some significant gaps.

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After high school, I went to Cornell University to study engineering.  In college, one of the things I began to become ever so slightly conscious of was my discontent with life.  I wasn’t really interested in what I was studying.  There wasn’t anything really that I could think of that I wanted to study and what I was learning didn’t seem to penetrate my thinking.  There were things that I didn’t understand in class, but then would sort of “get” when I was out in life.  For example, I never understood the very simple concept of relative speed when I was taught it in the classroom.  It was just vectors and equations.  It had no meaning to me.  Then, the following summer, I was driving along the highway when a car passed me.  I looked over at the driver; saw her coasting by me, and the light bulb went on.  In that moment, I “got” relative speed.  In retrospect, it seems ridiculous because it’s such a basic concept.  

I think part of the problem was I didn’t want to understand these things.  I wasn’t interested in how to solve equations.  I was interested in understanding life; but not from an academic perspective – like studying psychology or philosophy.  Even then, I wanted to understand life and how to live it.  My psychology class explained certain things to me about the inner workings of the mind, but it didn’t tell me whether I should ask a certain girl out, or what classes I should take, or what I should do with my life.   I wanted to understand why my good friend Otis could go to a party and be someone who was going home with someone that night; while I could be at the same party with the same people and be someone who had no shot?

I realize that it’s not a very deep question.  On it’s face, it’s shallow, but that’s only because I was eighteen years old and those were the concerns of an eighteen year old.  Even then, I knew I wanted my life to be about something else, but I couldn’t see beyond what life was putting in front of me.  I was looking for something that didn’t seem to exist anywhere.  Still, even in the concerns of an eighteen year old, the questions were beginning to take form.

In those days and even today, I came off to most as aloof.  It was odd to me because I knew that impression wasn’t who I was.  People were often surprised at who I was once they got to know me.  The thing I couldn’t articulate to them then was, like relative speed, I was just trying to make sense of it (life), of them, and of me.  Mostly, it didn’t make any sense to me, and so I came off as being uninterested in them.  In reality, I was completely fascinated with them, so much so that I didn’t fully realize that I wasn’t participating with them; instead, I was studying them, it (life), me.  Yes, perhaps, I was missing the point, but it didn’t even occur to me that there might be a point I was missing.  At that time, I had enough awareness to ask questions, but I wasn’t aware enough to challenge the questions I was asking.  I was just caught up in the fascination of it all.

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I wanted to take an opportunity to share with you who I am and how I ended up writing A Life Worth Living and starting this blog.  I won’t delve into every detail of my life, just the high points (and low points) that helped shape who I am.  Mostly I just want you to get to know me, and hopefully at some point, I’ll get to know you too.

I was born September 26, 1969 to Rocco and Maryann Giruzzi.  I have one brother, Rocco III, and a sister Pam.  I know it sounds cliché but I pretty much had a normal childhood.  My father owned a pharmacy; he and my mom worked very hard to give us a great life.  We had one family vacation a year to Cape Cod.  Otherwise, life was filled with the usual things – school, friends, fighting with siblings, girls, and baseball.  

I was the baby of the family and when I say that I don’t just mean my family.  I was the baby of the entire family – the entire Giruzzi clan and the Hobaica clan (my mother’s side).  Most of my cousins were five plus years older than me.  I mention this because while my family loved me (and still loves me today, thank goodness), I missed out on something.  There were all these stories of my brother, sister, and cousins growing up together, hanging out, getting in trouble, etc. that I was never a part of.  To this day, they still talk about those times and it feels to me like they are talking about another family.  Don’t get me wrong, like any position in life, there’s the good and the bad.  There were many advantages to being “the baby” of the family, but from a very young age, I was used to being on my own.  I wasn’t living on an island or locked in an attic never to be involved with my family, there was just this window of time where they sort of all grew up together that I wasn’t part of.

And so began my life on the fringe, and trying to find my place.

One of many cherished memories I had was my cousin Eric grooming me to be a Little League pitcher.  I actually ended up being fairly good – pitched a no-hitter in an All-Star game, struck out 10.  Isn’t it funny the things we remember?  Struck out ten.  One of the difficulties I faced growing up was with my vision.  At around age 8, I went blind in my right eye and as I grew, I developed a cataract in my left eye.  By age 16, I could barely see the pages of a book right before my eyes.

In baseball, there was this rule that every boy had to play two innings in a game.  They really should have suspended that rule for me because in most instances, I couldn’t see the ball anywhere but from the pitcher’s mound.  I remember once I was playing right field (it seemed the “safest” place to put me), a ball was hit my way (which I only knew because my teammates were screaming at me).  I never saw the ball until after I heard it hit the ground behind me.  This brought laughter from the opposing team and embarrassment to my teammates and myself.  Despite my achievements in baseball, academics (graduated in the top 10 of my high school class), my lack of vision shaped my social interactions.

In my junior year, I had two surgeries on my “good” eye, which ultimately restored my vision to 20/20.  I remember driving home with my parents from a post-surgery checkup and really being able to see life for the first time in a long time.  I noticed the details of life that most of us miss.  Don’t think the irony is lost on me that A Life Worth Living is about creating a new vision.

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