It occurred to me today that I may have diagnosed a national disease.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but in America, we seem to compete over pretty much everything.
–>I’ve actually witnessed heated arguments between people about whether Coke is better than Pepsi.
–>There are people who competitively eat hot dogs.
–>Let’s not even talk about the way that people worry about their place in a line.
–>Ever heard of road rage?!?! I’ve had people almost run me off the road, to beat me to the next stop light?!?!
–>Eat ten of our wings with the ‘mind-bending death’ sauce and get your name on the Wall of Fame!
–>Two words for you –> Las Vegas
We just seem, as Americans (maybe as humans), to like to compete.
If you think I’m wrong on this, scroll through the feed on your favorite social media platform, checking for posts and then argumentative comments on those posts; if you can’t find any, you win the cash prize! Argument is one of our favorite ways to compete.
“I know more than you and I’ll prove it by arguing better than you.”
But…
One of the big problems that all of this competition creates is that it eats away at our ability to be cooperative as fellows. Can you imagine working on a team with that guy who just cut you off on the highway? Can you imagine working on a team with the guy who cost you $200 because he missed a field goal in an NFL game last month? Our deep-seated desires, to be ahead of as many people as possible, create an adversarial nature in us that is, I think, counter-productive to the continuance of our society, IMHO.
As a nation of competitors, I think we are finding it harder and harder to be teammates.
* * *
Yesterday, I wrote about playing soccer as a kid. When I did, I don’t ever remember my parents, as spectators at those events, as part of any equation that resulted in inappropriate conduct, on their part. Quite to the contrary, I remember one time very vividly, when I decided to call one of my opponents a name that I’d learned in a PG-13 movie, and I got red-carded out of the game. My father was NONE TOO PLEASED.
If Bill Carson is still out there, I’m sorry about my potty mouth on that day.
But, I’m sure you’ve seen THOSE parents, as spectators –or maybe even as coaches, perish the thought– who just don’t seem to understand that it’s just a game, when their six-year-old doesn’t score five goals in every ice hockey match, and they come down on them like a ton of bricks.
THESE PEOPLE LITERALLY BECOME UNGLUED!
Now, don’t get me wrong; I have no idea what it takes to raise a world-class athlete, but I can tell you that, if yelling at and berating your kid resulted in them becoming a world class athlete, we would need to have two NFLs and three NBAs, because there wouldn’t be enough places for all of the world-class athletes to play.
Just some more examples of competition being used for iniquitous purposes.
* * *
There’s no doubt that I wrote, just a couple of days ago, a post about how important daring goal setting is and how America’s goal to get to the moon was a great time for our nation, as we strove for the stars. Of course, I also wrote about how that goal was born, at least somewhat, out of a competition with the Soviet Union. So, needless to say, competition can serve important purposes.
The problem is, as I’ve tried to illustrate, that people cross a line.
As to how we should conduct ourselves when we –or our proxies or our progeny– are involved in competition, I would like to think that everyone knows where the line is, or they feel the line inside themselves. Now, since we have plenty of examples of people –or of ourselves– crossing those lines, heading into acts of inappropriateness, we might be tempted to think that there are people who don’t know where the line is, or who might be unaware that a line even exists.
I don’t believe that to be true, simply because I can’t think of a time when I’ve done something wrong when I didn’t know, in advance, that it was wrong. Maybe, I have my mom and dad to thank for that.
I would just like to think that everyone knows that there is a line and that they all –we all– know where it is.
I do, however, also believe that there are people who have crossed lines in their mind so many times, that they stop recognizing that there is a line there at all.
* * *
A friend of mine, yesterday, commenting on the first part of this two-parter, helped me to realize that competition is mostly an extrinsic motivator. As such, it’s not as necessary as people would like to make you think that it is, at least when it comes to motivating people to get better. The best type of motivators are the intrinsic ones, since they are not subject to changes in the world around us.
I mean, I could become obsessive over my 5K time, because I want to beat the guy in my office who runs a 5K in less than twenty-eight minutes, or…
I could decide that I want to beat my best-ever 5K time, to be the ‘best me’ that I can be.
When I decide that I am only going to compete with myself, then the existence of an external ‘competitor’ is of no consequence.
But what about an offensive lineman on a pro football team? Isn’t his improvement necessarily tied to the competition that he has on the football field, against the defensive backs in the league? Not necessarily. He could, instead, focus on being the best that he could be, in the weight room perhaps, rather than worrying about how he’s able to stack up against others.
When we hold ourselves up against other people, to compare ourselves to them and to what they are able to do, isn’t that, in and of itself, a form of competition? The guy down the street from me doesn’t know it, but I have always been jealous of the fact that he lost eighty pounds by picking up a regular running routine, so I have been chasing him, unbeknownst to him, ever since.
Competition.
* * *
I’m not sure what to tell you; in my estimation, especially in the light of the perversions that currently exist which cause competition to deviate from what was once a form of pure contest, I suspect that, these days, competition does more harm than good.
Leave it to our modern society to take something that is pretty decent, in its natural form, and then we stretch it out to the Nth degree, until we end up with something, so marred beyond recognition, that we wonder why we would have been interested in it in the first place.
I didn’t even take time to talk about our society’s obsession with being distracted by these competitions –not directly, anyway– but, between our level of distraction by competitions, and the extent to which competition has been bastardized to serve other purposes, I’ve had too much of it, as it is.
So, does anyone know what time the football game is this weekend?
When I was in high school the only sport that I played competitively was soccer. I played soccer from the age of five all the way to the age of eighteen. I played soccer with other kids with whom I came to be great friends. I played soccer every spring in a league called the Optimist league, and it was a lot of fun. The older I got, the more I enjoyed the game, enjoyed getting better at playing the game.
And, I enjoyed beating other teams.
I also had the chance to work with a lot of great coaches, who each had a heart for teaching kids and for fostering their growth. I remember Coach Hipshear and Coach Felty and Coach Wesner; each of them did their best to try to instruct us little kids in the finer points of the game, and in the importance of competing well and being good sports, win or lose.
Some of the kids that I played soccer with in those early years, I ended up playing with on the high school varsity soccer team. On the varsity team, we wanted to be competitive when we played other teams; no one likes to be completely decimated by an opponent. We worked hard, to be as good as we could be, so that we would be able to play other teams and not look amateurish. I was a part of the varsity soccer team in my home town during its formative years, when the program was just starting to get off of the ground.
I remember my last competitive game of soccer, my senior year, as we were competing for a regional championship in early November (which is play-off season for soccer in Michigan); it snowed during that game and it’s quite the experience to play soccer in the snow.
Throughout all of those soccer experiences, there were many things that I liked about what I was doing: team camaraderie and cooperation, building friendships, learning what my body could do and making it stronger through sport, just to name a few. But, there were some times when it wasn’t a good thing for me to be involved in –> usually those bad moments, when I wasn’t doing what was right, were moments when I lost my perspective and crossed some competitive lines.
* * *
I am, as I have mentioned in previous posts, a very die-hard Notre Dame fan; during the course of my life, this has involved some good times and some bad times. Whenever they are able to compete against other teams, I feel proud to be a Notre Dame fan. At other times, when they are not able to compete, I feel embarrassed and ashamed. Of course their performance on their football field versus their opponents really has very little to do with me, but in situations where I am cheering for them, and I happen to be in the presence of other people who are cheering against them, then there is almost a competition by proxy, where I want my team to do really well as they compete against the team whose fans are cheering against my team.
At that point, it becomes somewhat personal.
This ‘competition by proxy’ is at its worst when I am at a Notre Dame game. I have, on so many occasions, screamed to the point of laryngitis during home Notre Dame football games. I’ve yelled at refs during home Notre Dame football games. I’ve cried in anguish at home Notre Dame football games, and I’ve cried in joy at home Notre Dame football games. When I’m sitting in the stands, their competition somehow becomes more like my competition.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have rules of conduct. I don’t cheer against the other team –when I’m following the rules– as in I don’t cheer when they make mistakes or when they fail (unless it’s USC). I never cheer when anyone gets hurt –that’s just rabid and uncouth. If I happen to be at the Notre Dame-Navy game, or any other ‘service game’, I usually just keep my mouth shut because I think that our armed forces deserve significant respect.
But, here again, I just can’t seem to always control myself when it comes to competition. I have regretted acting like a nincompoop after way too many Notre Dame football games.
Maybe I’m just no good, when it comes to competing.
* * *
Recently, some friends of mine, along with my wife and I, have picked up learning the game of canasta together. Our friends learned it, and then, they taught it to us. We’ve had a lot of fun, and a bit of frustration, competing against each other. We’ve been playing together for about a year; sometimes, the guys win, sometimes, the girls win. It gets particularly frustrating when one team or the other goes on a streak of winning games.
Kind of like a certain football team from Indiana losing to a certain football team from Ohio in their last four matches, after having won the first two.
If you’ve never played canasta before, it’s a ‘partners’ game. Like many games that involve partners competing against others partners, there is a bit of strategy to the game that can be ultimately frustrating, especially when opponents are, at once, working to do their best and working to prevent their opponents from succeeding.
The essence of offense and defense.
Recently, these friends of ours, along with my wife and I, decided that we were going to enter into a bit of a tournament, among the four of us –the two teams. We decided that we were going to play a number of games together, and then, at the end of that series, the team that lost the greater number of games was going to have to cook dinner for the team that won the most games.
This, in hindsight, was a bad idea.
As if the game wasn’t already competitive enough, we added to the stakes with the wager, and we took away from how much any of us were able to enjoy those canasta games. After a number of very frustrating matches, we just quit with the whole idea.
* * *
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. I don’t think that I’m the only person around who has a problem with competition, and competing well. In fact, I know that I’ve seen other people, who seem to be mild-mannered most of the time, who just lose it when it comes to competition.
Additionally, I think there are things that we do that make the likelihood of positive and proper competition much less likely. Tomorrow, I am going to zoom the camera out and we are going to look at the problem of competition on a larger scale.
It occurred to me today that the thought of being daring is much scarier than actually being daring.
So, the real point of this post was to talk about the risk that I took a couple of days ago. I committed to opening my writing up to a larger audience. It wasn’t something that I was particularly excited about doing, because of the risk involved in sharing what I’m writing with other people. Previous to my big risk, there was only a handful of people who knew about the writing that I was doing and had access to reading it for themselves. Those people were being positive about what I was doing, and I was comfortable with them –and only them– seeing what I was doing.
Those people, however, were a pretty small audience.
So then, a couple of weeks ago, one of those people asked me about opening up to a bigger group. A greater chance for success and for a larger readership.
And, a greater chance for ridicule and failure.
But, as Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
And so, a few days back, I said in my blog post, Inventory (Part 2), that I was going to take this bold move. And then, a couple of days ago, I did it –> I made my blog post, One Hundred, more widely available on social media. And then yesterday, I did it again, with Take A Chance (Part 1). And today, you should be reading this, the third of my posts that I’ve invited a lot more people to.
What I’ve learned from the experience of taking an audacious leap has been interesting.
* * *
It could be that part of what we fear when we go out on a limb is that we are going to experience rejection. I would have to say that, for me and my particular example, there hasn’t been as much rejection as I was fearing –none, really– but the approval and the encouragement and the accolades were things that I wasn’t even considering as possibilities when I thought of taking this risk.
I think that’s the way that fear works, a lot of times. When it comes to taking a chance on something, we think about how it might go badly, but we don’t often look at the other side of the coin.
If you’ve not read many of my posts, I’m a big fan of looking at both sides of the coin (THIS POST and THIS POST talk about both sides of some coins).
When you think about the other side of this particular coin, it’s everything that could go so well that we aren’t thinking about when we are afraid of taking that big step. What if skydiving ends up getting me killed? What if –instead– it’s the most amazing experience of your life?!?! What if applying for that other job ends up in rejection? What if –instead– it leads you to the happiest work of your life?!?!
When we listen only to the fear, it ends up being a one-sided argument. You’ve got to give the good possibilities an opportunity to make the case for taking a bold chance.
Additionally, I do have to say that the confidence boost has been amazing. To be honest, at this point, if I’d have the chance, in the future, to encounter any rejection or negative reactions to my writing, I’d be much better prepared to deal with it, because of all of the positivity that has come my way over the last few days. I do suspect, as I continue to make progress on this writing adventure of mine, that there are going to be some let-downs.
I can say that I am much better equipped to take some additional gambles down the road, to try to make my dream come true, since I took this chance and it turned out for the best.
* * *
I think we are at our best when we are striving toward something better for ourselves, something greater than what we’ve been doing. Like I said yesterday, I don’t think America has been doing that, as of late. I do sincerely hope, for the future of this great nation, that we will find something that we can all join together to pursue, something that will unite us in a level of excitement and mutual affinity. I think it brings out the best in us, as a nation, when we are dreaming, and then, pursuing those dreams.
Taking chances can be hard, no doubt about it. The risks are a little easier when we are pursuing a dream that we believe is worth the pursuit. Remember what Kennedy said at Rice University in 1962, “We choose to do things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”
Staying safe and comfortable doesn’t usually lead to greater things –> for example, I probably could have been publishing my writings for a larger audience weeks ago, if not for the fear of what might happen. Thanks to all of you for reading these, and I appreciate the kind thoughts and compliments.
So for you, I would say this: take the next step. Go the next mile. Find that thing that you’ve been working at, and the progress has kind of stalled out, and figure out what the next daring advancement is for you to make. It’s in the adventure that we discover of what we are really capable.
It occurred to me today that we need to dare more.
If you have eighteen spare minutes, I would suggest that you watch one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history HERE. Every time I watch this video, I feel an array of different emotions. Usually, one of those is inspiration.
John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962 is required knowledge for space geeks, like myself, who have always wanted to reach for the stars, who have recently been frustrated with our nation’s lack of progress in this regard. This speech, along with a couple of other speeches on the same topic, given around the same time, really mark the call to arms that propelled us to the preeminent place in the space race. It was a challenge to our nation, a gauntlet thrown down, to then be picked up by the top aerospace engineers and scientists in our country, almost fifty-eight years ago.
Within seven years of that speech, we’d done the job, achieved the goal.
Now, I understand that the space race was largely political, and that many Americans didn’t see the point at the time; I’ve often wondered whether or not we would have even bothered to go to the moon, if it weren’t for the fact that the Soviet Union was vying for the same piece of property. But, the idea that we set that goal for ourselves, as a nation, and then we worked to make it happen –> that idea is part of what excites me and inspires me, every time I watch that speech.
The more I think about it, this speech should be something that everyone in America is required to watch. Despite the topic of the speech being about the space race to land someone on the moon in advance of other countries, who were racing us to do the same thing, the deeper meaning of the speech, beyond its particular context, is about striving, about daring. Whether or not we do the striving and the daring in competition against others, as we did in the space race, there is a whole lot to be said about reaching beyond what you think you can accomplish, to do even more.
Part of what has always inspired me about space is that it represents adventure. It is a place that we can’t get to without striving, and –when we were striving to get there– it brought the country together. Ambitious goals have a way of doing that; they unite us behind a common task to accomplish so that the team can see the mission and execute the plan.
To be honest, I think that America has not recently been daring, at least not the way that we used to be.
* * *
We must do what is hard, because the energy that we use when we do the hard things is energy that is spent, so that we might not have it to use for ill.
What I mean to say is this: I’ve noticed, in different organizations that I’ve belonged to, at different points in my life, that people who are not working hard to move forward, to make progress, are often gifted with energies –that they should have been spending on advancing– that they end up deciding to spend on endeavors of negativity. Maybe you’ve seen this, too; at your workplace, or in your family, or in some other organization to which you’ve belonged. In fact, I’ve seen it in so many instances that I am picking up on the trend.
When we are moving, as individuals, or as organizations of various kinds, in the direction of development, that pursuit gets our effort, it gets our energy. We don’t have the zeal for back-stabbing or gossip or pessimism or in-fighting when we are pursuing a goal, so those things end up happening less, in my opinion.
If you’ve ever been in an organization where this type of negativity was common –or maybe you are in an organization like this right now– let me ask you this question: “Was that organization, and its members, committed to making progress?”
The answer is no, isn’t it?!?!
Pursuit of a common goal tends to unify people in such a way that it becomes less appealing to be negative toward each other. With a communal vision in front of everybody, cooperation, teamwork, problem solving, and optimism are much more likely than they are when people are wondering what they should be doing.
* * *
We need goals, but chasing goals is dangerous, especially when we become uber-focused on the goal; take our space race as an example. We looked to the moon, we set our eyes on the moon and the plan was to land on the moon. And while we certainly achieved the goal, we haven’t been back to the moon in more than forty-seven years.
Sometimes, when you reach a goal, it doesn’t take long after that before you’ve lost interest in the striving. Without the next goal in place, the striving stops and the complacency sets in.
Or take my running as an example.
I set a goal, back in January, to get back in shape, to get back to running. In fact, I wanted to run a mile every day in 2020 (366 miles total for the year). As daunting as that might sound, especially if you are not a runner, it’s really not that hard if you put your mind to it. I was probably back in decent running form by March. But then, I wanted to get back to regular 5K running, and I ended up getting there in late April. Then, I wanted to achieve what I’d never done before, the 10K run –> I’ve done it four times in the last month.
The problem is: now what?!?! I’m not sure what to do next. It seems I’ve become fixated on goals; having met one, and then the next, and then the next, you keep having to set up a new carrot in front of yourself.
Rather, why can’t I just focus on advancing?
In my humble opinion, I think that we should commit to the concept of making progress, rather than chasing this goal and then that goal. If we can commit to just getting better, just improving, just surpassing, then the goals become almost secondary to the mission of moving ahead.
* * *
So, having written eleven hundred words on the subject, I haven’t even gotten to the real point of this post, the point I was wanting to make when I first sat down to start writing it. I took a big risk yesterday, and I wanted to talk about what being daring has taught me; alas, I’ve not even gotten there yet. So, more tomorrow on the subject of boldly going where no one has gone before.
This is my one-hundredth daily post in a row, dating all the way back to the midst of the pandemic quarantine. When I set out to start doing this, it was really just kind of an after-thought; “Oh, that’s right, I have a blog. I forgot all about that. I should start that back up. I should use it for something.”
Since then, I have published blog posts on all manner of different things, most of them having to do with how I’m feeling on a particular subject at a particular moment. Kind of lame, if you ask me; I can’t imagine what it is that the people who are regularly reading this are getting out of it. But, whether or not I’ve attracted three regular readers or three hundred or three hundred thousand, the writing has been almost entirely about me. I guess that’s the way that it should be; if I’m writing for me, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not anyone else sees it or reads it or likes it.
I’ve struggled my entire life with popularity –especially back in my school days; thoughts of who likes me and who doesn’t like me have been present in my mind for all of my life. When it comes to this blog, there is a part of me that wishes that there were a hundred people, or a thousand people, who were waking up each morning, thinking to themselves, “Man, I can’t wait to read what Phil has written lately.” But, the fact that the audience isn’t there hasn’t stopped me from writing. It seems like this process is serving my needs, more than it’s serving anyone else’s needs, and so I will keep doing it.
* * *
In the elementary school of the school district where I work (and maybe in every school district in the country, for as much as I know), the students get excited about the one-hundredth day of school. The teachers, especially in the lower el classrooms, foster this excitement by asking the students to bring in one hundred of whatever they’d like
–one hundred cheerios or one hundred paper clips or one hundred toothpicks– to celebrate the one-hundredth day of school (usually in February, if memory serves).
This celebration, of one hundred days gone by (and eighty-some days remaining) is a chance for celebrating a milestone.
Similarly, people who are able to live to be one hundred years old are called centenarians. Only five people in every one thousand people will live to be one hundred years old; nine hundred and ninety-five people, out of every one thousand, will die before the age of one hundred. So, here we have another example of how wonderful it is to make it to one hundred.
One more interesting thing to say about one hundred –> did you know that there used to be a thing called a short hundred and a different thing called a long hundred? As it turns out, prior to the fifteenth century, the word hundred meant different things in Germanic languages, than it did in the English language.
Back then, in Germanic languages, a hundred actually meant 120, otherwise known as six-score. This ended up being called the long hundred, to differentiate it from English. In English, one hundred has always been known as five-score; since a score is equal to twenty, we all understand that one hundred is the same as five-score, which of course we would, since we are all reading this cute post that I’ve written (in English).
* * *
I’ve been exporting all of the posts –all of the writing– out into a separate document. I word-counted that document the other day, and I’ve written, in these one hundred posts, the equivalent of a four-hundred page novel. THAT BLOWS MY MIND.
But, on the other hand, it’s really not that impressive.
I’ve just done the thing that I’ve always told myself that I’ve always wanted to do, instead of… not doing it.
That’s the trick, I suppose. The person who wants to be a world-class basketball player, who never plays basketball, probably isn’t getting any closer to their dream. Whether or not playing basketball on a regular basis ever gets that person anywhere in their life, they’d at least be able to call themselves a basketball player if they were… well, a basketball player.
The process of writing has made me a writer, imagine that!
One of my regular readers told me a while back that I am a very talented writer. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that this person, this friend of mine, would have never had the opportunity to decide on the level of my talent –or the lack thereof– if I hadn’t started writing.
Of course, no one wants to fail at the thing that they’ve been dreaming of doing their whole life, so there is a level of risk involved in making the attempt. Writing one hundred of these posts, day after day after day, has not been easy. It’s been a major burden on my time –which I’ve had a lot of lately, so there’s that– and there are some days that I just don’t feel much like writing.
Therein lies the determination.
And also, the weight of the momentum of this thing has now ballooned to the point where it feels like a run-away locomotive that I barely have a grasp on. I suppose I could let go, and be tossed to the side of the tracks, as it runs away without me. Or, I could continue to commit to keeping a firm grasp on this, so that I will still be ‘on-board’ when the train pulls in to its next station, wherever that might be.
As much work as it is to continue to try to stay committed to doing this thing, right now –> it’s all that I got.
* * *
I have a couple of dear friends, my wife included, with whom I share a lot about my writing; the struggles of doing it and the excitement that I have about it. One of these friends, the other day, when I was talking to them about my blog, asked me whether or not I’d ever thought of trying to expand my audience, making the blog and its contents available through other avenues.
That scares me a little bit.
But, it’s often in doing the hard thing that we grow.
So, maybe tomorrow, I will advertise this one-hundredth blog post in a couple of different ways. Maybe it is time to spread my wings, to see where this journey heads to next. I mean, I got here by taking a chance at doing something that has been hard and also very enjoyable and admirable. Let’s see where the next step gets me.
Here’s to the next one hundred, and where I will be when that next milestone comes.
It occurred to me today that inventory should be a part of everyone’s process.
Yesterday, I started writing a blog about inventories, and how important it is, often, to be sure of what you have and what you’re missing. Since I still have a little more to say on the matter, let’s begin.
* * *
My brother and I, when we were kids, had collections. He collected coins, I collected stickers. He collected books on World War II, I collected antique camera equipment. When we were collecting different things, everything was cool, because we weren’t likely to confuse his Time/Life book of Photographs from World War II with any of my Care Bear stickers (I don’t want to talk about it, so don’t ask). My Kodak Brownie II was not likely to wind up in among his Kennedy Half Dollars.
Unfortunately, we both collected comic books.
My brother owned the The Silver Surfer #1 comic book from 1982, and he was very proud of it. He kind of had a thing for Silver Surfer, back in the day.
Even though I wasn’t much of a Silver Surfer fan, somewhere along the way, I picked up the 50th issue of The Silver Surfer. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye. It had a silver foil depiction of the Silver Surfer, and it also had Thanos on the cover, somewhere.
My brother periodically stole that comic from me, claiming that it was his.
I would, from time to time, find my Silver Surfer #50 in his collection, and I would take it back, and then he would accuse me of having stolen what was actually mine. And we would argue about which of us actually owned the issue #1 and which of us owned the issue #50.
So, one day, I decided to create an inventory.
I created a spreadsheet (understand, that this was back in the late ’80s, so spreadsheet technology involved loading MS Office from a command prompt in DOS to launch a spreadsheet maker) that listed out all of the comic books that were a part of my collection, so that there wouldn’t be any more confusion about who owned what.
Another part of me wanted an inventory so I could use it to quickly scan through the pricing guides that I would buy, from time to time, to keep track of the value of my collection.
It just occurred to me that my insurance agent has asked us, on multiple occasions, to create an inventory of what exists in our house, in the event that we ever have to replace our belongings (due to theft or fire or some other disaster), but we haven’t done it. It’s too much work on the off-chance that we end up getting robbed, or our house burns down.
But, I can tell you that an inventory can come in handy for things like that.
* * *
I think that it benefits a person significantly to take inventory of their life, every so often, to get a sense of where you’re going and where you’ve been. Some of the most successful people I know are regulars at doing this. In fact, it might be the case that the most successful people in the world are constantly doing this, so that they never have the opportunity to veer too far from their necessary course.
If we know what we want, and we know what it takes to get what we want, why do so few people end up getting what they want? Maybe, they should have stayed on top of their ‘life inventories’.
I can’t imagine that everyone is doing this, if for no other reason than the fact that introspection is often very difficult. When we look inside, to take an inventory of what we might find there, we often don’t like what we see. We might find laziness or apathy or guilt or hate or addiction, and those things are not what we’d want to find, if we are honest with ourselves. However, without doing some inventorying like this, we can’t set out to solve the problems within ourselves if we don’t even know that the problems exist.
I can’t go shopping for peanut butter until I know that we are out of peanut butter, or that there are three unopened jars in the pantry.
The other problem with doing this type of ‘life inventory’ is what you may discover that you have to do, in situations where the inventory is way off. You see, it isn’t that big of a deal for a person to make a minor course correction in the journey of life, if they discover they are off by a mile of two, but if you end up on the entirely opposite side of the globe, there is much work to be done, and many changes to be made, to get you back to where you want to be. If that’s what a life inventory ends up showing you, then maybe you’d be better off not knowing.
They say ignorance is bliss.
* * *
Today, while I was at work, I unboxed about fifty computers, after having made an inventory record of their serial numbers, so I could attach asset tags (little stickers with inventory numbers and bar codes on them) to the laptops, to get them ready for distribution in the fall.
All the while, I was thinking about this post, because I came to a realization.Inventories are a pain to initialize, and they’re a pain to repair, if the maintenance work hasn’t been done along the way. But, a well-built inventory, that has been kept up all along the way, is a breeze to administer. At work, with only a few exceptions, my inventory of technology is pretty decent, and adding new devices to it is fairly simple.
I suspect that it’s the same way with life. Staying on top of things makes it easier to ‘steer the ship’. If you let things slide, and it’s been a while since you took an inventory of what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do, then you should expect that the results are going to be pretty ‘off course’.
But, don’t let that deter you from doing what needs to be done to get on top of your ‘life inventory’. The alternative, spinning your wheels and wasting your time, passing the days in a manner which might not amount to much when it’s all said and done, could be an epic waste.
It occurred to me today that a proper inventory is an important tool for us all.
I am the technology director for the school district where I work. What this means is that I fix things that have electrical cords. I maintenance things that have electrical cords. I assign things that have electrical cords.
I also count things that have electrical cords. This process is called inventory, and sometimes (shhhh, don’t tell), I use it as a cover.
It is not unusual for me to walk into a teacher’s room in my school district to investigate different problems that may be occurring that I need to address. For example, say Sally Sunshine, a teacher in my district, has installed software on her computer that, unbeknownst to her, is giving away her banking information to foreign web servers. Since I am pretty decent at what I do, I would get multiple reports about activity like this on my network, from various different sources, and I would protect Sally from the foolish thing that she did by installing the coupon add-on for her internet browser. But, to get a sense of how this may have happened in the first place, it might be necessary for me to go to Sally’s room.
When I get to Sally’s room, rather than say to her, in front of her classroom full of students, “Hey, it looks like you’ve done something dumb on your computer, so I’m here to check it out.” I just say something like, “I’m doing some inventory.” Then, I can do what I need to do, and check what I need to check, to make things right again.
Now, none of this is to say that I don’t actually do inventory in the school district, because I do –> a lot of it. But, because I am normally spending so much time on inventory, it becomes an easy thing to say when I am walking into someone’s room and they give me a questioning look. I simply say, “Inventory”, and they turn their attention back to their students and ignore me.
If it weren’t for the inventory work that I do for the school district, we wouldn’t know what we have or what we still need to think about purchasing. An inventory is an important tool for knowing what you have.
And it makes for a great cover.
* * *
Nothing drives me crazier at my house than when something gets purchased for the house and we already have it. Someone buys chicken stock and we already have two containers of it, or someone buys onion soup mix and we already have three boxes of mix. We’ve arrived at the place, on a couple of occasions, where we have had to make a note to stop being a certain thing because we have two dozen of them at the house and it is going to be a very long time before we ever run out of what it is that we have, because we’ve purchased one here or two there, time and time again.
Equally frustrating is when we need something and we run out of it, simply because someone decided that it was okay to use the last of something without adding it to the shopping list. Then, when I go to get some Worcestershire sauce and we don’t have any, not even any unopened bottles in the dry pantry, I get a little peeved.
The issue here is an issue of inventory.
And it’s not like we don’t have tools that we can use to try to make the process of keeping an inventory as simple as possible. We are big fans of Amazon, and we have several Alexa devices all over the house. We’ve been using the Alexa app, in conjunction with those devices, to try to keep a shopping list that everyone can add stuff to and everyone can use when they go to the grocery store. In our house, when something gets low on the inventory list, we walk up to an Alexa device and we say, “Alexa, add avocados to the shopping list”, and she does it.
Or, if we’ve purchased it on Amazon before, we just reorder it.
Two days ago, I changed the furnace filter in the basement. When I did this, I noticed that it was the last one in the box of them that I had, sitting next to the furnace in the basement. I thought I remembered ordering them from Amazon before, so I brought the label from the last one upstairs to the nearest Alexa device and I said, “Alexa, reorder 3M Filtrete Clean Living filters.” They arrived today while I was at work.
But, nothing is fool-proof. When my son adds ill-advised items to the shopping list (“Alexa, add ‘Forza Motorsport 7’ to the shopping list”), or when we go shopping and we neglect to check the shopping list on the app, then the inventory process goes awry.
Additionally, my wife and I belong to two different breeds of shoppers. I am probably your typical male shopper –> with a list of ten items, I will enter a store, retrieve those ten items, and be back in the car in fifteen minutes. My wife does not approach shopping this way. She will enter the store without any need for a shopping list and without any inclination to look at one if one exists. Instead, my wife can shop for ten items (ten items that are on a list that she doesn’t care about or check) and be in the store for an hour. She will come out, sixty minutes later, with twenty items –> six of the ten additional items are things that no one else even knew we were out of and the other four items, of the additional ten, were items that we were going to run out of very soon.
At the end of the day, someone needs to perfect a method for a family to manage an inventory so that, when something gets low in the inventory, it just magically gets refilled.
* * *
I feel like I have more to say on this matter, including the point I was originally hoping to make, before all of this other stuff jumped in the post. So, tomorrow, I will finish it up.
It occurred to me that I’d be much more unhappy, if things were going the other way.
I happen to be of the opinion that America has walked away from its roots and is suffering the slow death that accompanies any decision to abandon what works, in search of other options. I’m specifically referring to the country’s moral downfall, and the fact that we used to hold certain things off-limits; these days, we are more and more often deciding that those things are now allowable.
The problem with this is the sliding scale. With the sliding scale, it is impossible to know what is right or wrong, because the scale is in motion. Any one thing might be morally unacceptable at any particular point in time, but totally okay at a different point in time. It’s relativism, really –> nothing is absolute; rather, truth and correctness are relative to the individual. While no one wants to think about where this course leads, let me say that, at some point down the road, the things that we couldn’t possibly imagine as ‘okay’ are going to be declared ‘acceptable’ by a society that has walked several miles down the road that we first started taking a few steps down.
Imagine the scale –> it has, at its one end, that nothing is acceptable and that you can’t do anything that would be deemed ‘appropriate behavior’ (sounds awful); its other end is that all behavior is acceptable and that nothing is inappropriate (sounds equally awful). The bar is moving toward this latter end, in case you haven’t been paying attention to the society, lately. We are slapping a label of acceptance on all manner of behavior which would have been morally unacceptable not so far in our past.
* * *
I live in a town in Michigan that has decided to jump onto the pot bandwagon, ever since marijuana was legalized in Michigan for recreational use. We now have a number of dispensaries in town, and it’s starting to change some of the dynamics of the town. Depending on who you might ask in my town, those changes might be for the better, or they might be for the worse.
As an example, most of these dispensaries exist on the main street that runs through our downtown area. As a result of the business that is coming in to the downtown area, we are starting to get traffic congestion in this area, where none existed before. The area, which is built for small town traffic, is now having to handle cars from all over the tri-state area, and I suspect that it will only be a matter of time before this traffic starts to become a real problem.
Whether or not you think that the legalization of marijuana for recreational use is a good thing or a bad thing, it is certainly an example of our society and its recent decisions to legitimize previously unacceptable behavior, to be henceforth deemed as permissible. Remember the scale that I was talking about earlier? Whether or not you are in favor of us, as a society, making decisions of this nature, this example is certainly an indication that our sliding scale is moving toward a greater level of leniency than what has existed in the past.
* * *
I know that I have written this post before. Moral decay, America’s declining, blah blah blah. But, this is the point where this post parts ways with what I’ve previously had to say on the subject.
If I’m going to be honest, then I might have to admit that the moral sufferance of our current society frustrates me because I’d love to just let my guard down and abandon my own personal moral code, since it seems that everyone else is doing it. Maybe all of these other people, without any ethical boundaries, are getting to enjoy life in a way that I’m not, shackled by my principles. That’s an issue that I am going to have to deal with, if things continue on their present course.
Furthermore, it occurred to me that I’d be significantly less happy if the sliding scale was headed in the other direction.
Imagine our society getting more intolerant of behavior that might fall outside of a set of acceptable norms. Imagine that we might start to get more strict with our laws, and that we should start to become more dogmatic, when it comes to our licit behaviors.
Take, for example, an issue that was recently raised to me by a friend
–> the respect for human life. While steps like abortion and euthanasia take us down the road to undervaluing human life (unfortunately), imagine what it would be like if we started to try to head in the other direction. Imagine that the video game that I play, where I shoot zombies, becomes illegal. That would suck. Or, imagine saying things like “I’ll kill you” and then getting arrested for threatening a human life. That would suck.
The legalization of gambling on sports has taken our society a little further down the road to total fiscal irresponsibility, but imagine trying to move in the other direction. If I bet my son a quarter that I can do a hundred sit-ups in five minutes, and I win, imagine the police showing up to arrest me for petty gambling. That would suck.
These are just two examples.
My point is this –> a sliding scale of behavioral acceptance slides both ways. And it wouldn’t have to slide very far toward dogmatic intolerance before I would become uncomfortable with my guilt. In fact, the slide toward tolerating more behaviors is probably reactionary, now that I think about it. As society becomes engaged in doing things that are illegal, it then slides the scale so that people can stop feeling so bad about their behavior.
It’s about guilt.
And laziness.
Because getting on top of the set of behaviors that I am comfortable with, when society tells me that they’re not acceptable, would involve work.
I guess I am wishing that we could just leave ‘well enough’ alone.
It occurred to me today that even the simplest things are ultimately complex.
They say that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. What this means, when you stop to consider it, is that the journey is actually significantly complex.
* * *
Last week, I tried to run a 5K in the hills between Branson and West Branson, Missouri. It was amazingly similar to, and also completely different from, running at home in Southwestern Michigan. Put one foot in front of the other, do it quickly enough to take about 180 steps per minute, head in a certain direction, turn around when it’s time to head back, etc., etc..
What made it different was the hills.
If you’ve never been to Branson, Missouri, some people swear by the place. I, as far as places go, could have taken it or left it. I enjoyed my time there because I enjoyed being with the people that I was with, but there wasn’t anything about the place, necessarily, that I fell in love with.
Quite to the contrary, I didn’t appreciate the hills.
I didn’t appreciate running (or trying to run) on them. I didn’t appreciate driving on them. I didn’t appreciate hiking on them, which we tried to do once and it didn’t work out so well for certain members of the family in less than peak physical condition.
Just about the only thing that I liked about the hills around Branson was looking at them, and also watching the sun rise up from behind them and set down behind them.
The real problem was this:
Back home, I’d become accustomed to running on fairly flat stretches on land, punctuated by the occasional rise or drop in elevation. Having gotten used to doing that kind of running, I was wholly unprepared for the kind of running that I was to face when a hill –a real hill– loomed before me. Some of the hills that I faced in Branson were steep climbs of a hundred feet within a half-mile, while other hills were sixty foot climbs stretched out over a mile.
Running in my home town is simple running. Running in Branson is too complicated.
* * *
According to Google just now, the journey of a thousand miles is actually comprised of two million steps, based on an average stride length. Therefore, if the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then that first step is merely .00005% of the journey. Another way to look at it would be this: you have to take twenty thousand steps, on the journey of a thousand miles, before you’ve even completed one percent of the journey.
Dallas, Texas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Augusta, Maine; Jacksonville, Florida; Denver, Colorado; each of these locations is about a thousand miles, give or take, from my home. To walk to these places –a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step– would be ridiculous.
So instead, let’s drive.
It’s going to take multiple tanks of gas, multiple meals at restaurants, and probably also an overnight stay, to be able to finish the drive in the morning. That involves dealing with about a dozen places of business along the way (food, gas, shelter).
Or maybe, it would simplify things if we flew.
Buying airline tickets, shopping for the best price, checking luggage at the airport, the Transportation Security Administration, pre-flight checks on the plane, learning how to find a flotation device in the event of a water landing.
Maybe I’ll just walk.
The average person walks about three miles per hour, and will need to rest and eat, as well as doing other things, in any twenty-four hour period of time. If you worked hard at it, you could walk thirty miles in a day. I’d estimate the journey of a thousand miles, beginning with that first step, will take you five to six weeks.
So complicated.
* * *
I think we fool ourselves into thinking that things are simpler than they are, to make ourselves feel better about the massive complexity of life. If you really stop to think about it, everything that is going on around us is so complex as to boggle the mind. Even the simplest of things are themselves comprised of intricate networks of atoms and molecules, particles so small as to lie beyond the sight of all but the most powerful of scientific tools. These particles are linked together through bonds and cohesions that are strong enough to hold everything together, without us having to worry much about all of that.
Or, maybe we choose to focus on the simplicity of life because it helps us to feel as if we have more control than we actually do. Shall I point out that the global society has recently been ravaged by a virus? If you took a meter and broke it down into a billion smaller pieces, each of those pieces is a length called a nanometer. The coronavirus is only 125 nanometers wide, on average, including its little spikes. That small of a thing has given billions of humans, in all of their glorious egocentricity, many moments of pause.
As complex as life really is, maybe we just aren’t equipped to think about that level of complexity for very long, or very often.
It occurred to me today that there’s something about coming home.
Today was the last day of our summer vacation, and since it’s over, I can now safely talk about it on social media –> since we normally try to avoid broadcasting to the world that our house is unoccupied while it is, in fact, unoccupied. And, even though I can only think of a few people who regularly read my posts, and most of them would have been aware that we were out of town, I told my wife that I would restrain from telling about our adventures while we were still in the midst of them.
This particular vacation was two weeks long, the longest vacation that we’ve ever taken before. We went with another family, also something that we’ve never done before, and we stayed in rented homes, rather than in our camper (which is what we would normally do on a family vacation in the summer). So, needless to say, this vacation was unlike any other we’ve ever had.
And, to further alter the landscape of our family vacation this year, from what it would normally look like, I’d like to introduce –> COVID-19. Our family vacations are normally a combination of relaxing and seeing the sights, but we tried to ‘unpeople’ as much as possible on our trip, which resulted in more relaxing and just hanging out in the houses that we’d rented (three houses in fourteen days). With the pleasant company of family and friends, just hanging out with each other, passing the time in restful, low-stress ways, we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit, with less of an agenda than we might normally have.
Of course, the vacation had its ups and downs. We had some automotive trouble on the way to our first destination, but thanks to our regular mechanic and a trustworthy mechanic that we found near the first house that we rented (thanks to Kevin and the team at Express Lube and Inspection in Baytown, Texas), we ended up getting a solid repair in a decent timeframe for a great price. We also had some problems with swimmer’s ear (a bacterial infection of the outer ear, commonly contracted when water gets in the ear and then doesn’t drain back out) for three of the four kids on the vacation, which involved a antibiotic ear drop prescription called in for us by our pediatrician. But, even when things went wrong on our journey, we found ways to make things work and to get the problems solved.
Additionally, renting houses is an interesting experience that we were largely unfamiliar with before this vacation began. We discovered that you can rent very nice houses for pretty decent prices, but each house rental situation is a little bit different and none of them quite live up to all of your expectations. This one might have a lousy kitchen, while the other one has a great kitchen with lousy bedrooms, even while the third one has a decent kitchen and decent bedrooms in a lousy neighborhood, just as an example.
Of course, we were able to stay in each of these three houses for long enough so that we became familiar with where to find the measuring cups in the kitchen or the extra blankets in the hall closet. But, each of the houses that we rented had certain oddities that seemed to serve to remind each of us that we weren’t in our own homes. Who would put the laundry detergent in a kitchen cabinet?!?! Why is there a switch for turning on an electrical outlet?!?! What kind of a recliner swivels?!?! Why isn’t there a towel rack within fifteen miles of the shower?!?!
When things aren’t set up the way that you would have them set up, it gets on your nerves. And then, after living in a rental house where you finally get things figured out, having to move to another rental house, with more mysteries to solve, is just a little more aggravating. And then, after a few more days, another relocation. After a while, you just want to go home so you can find the coffee filters without having to search for them.
They say that home is where the heart is, but I’m pretty sure that home is the place where you know where to look to find things.
Without fail, I have always neared the end of vacations, thinking to myself, “I think I am ready to head for home.” In situations where I haven’t been enjoying myself, that thought might enter my head days in advance of the end of the vacation. This time, I only really thought that it was time to head home relatively recently. Nevertheless, I woke up this morning in a bed that I don’t own and thought to myself, “Tonight, I will sleep in my own bed.”
It is great to be back in the place where I am always going to be most comfortable. Getting away on a vacation means getting away from home, and that might be necessary sometimes –especially when we sometimes feel like we can’t be in our home without having a list of things that need to get done– but I don’t think I can ever be as comfortable in some other home as I can be in mine.
Don’t get me wrong; it was a great vacation. But, that’s the thing about vacations –> they can’t last forever. My daughters, this evening, were sad when we arrived home because it meant that the vacation was over and my wife and I consoled them to try to help them feel better about the eventuality that they’d apparently not considered until it was right upon them –> vacations end. The return to life as we knew it before our vacation began is now upon us.
I suppose I will be sad to not have a pool within six feet of my back door, or a beautiful mountain range to watch the sun setting on, or a beautiful college neighborhood for my morning jogs, but I will be glad to be back in the place where I know where the paprika is.
It Occurred To Me Today 