It occurred to me today that the comments section gets mixed reviews.
Get it? It gets mixed reviews. It GETS mixed reviews.
I happen to think that’s one of the funniest things that I’ve ever written.
Anyway…
Imagine walking down the sidewalk in your town and coming upon someone who is dousing themselves with gasoline. As you get closer, it seems more and more obvious to you that they are about to light themselves on fire. At about the moment when you are as close as you are willing to get to this scene, the person sets down the now-mostly-empty canister of gasoline and reaches for the lighter that has been sitting on the sidewalk this whole time.
Would you say something? If so, what would you say?
What if that didn’t go well? What if you were met by an angry torrent of hateful words, cries to ‘mind your own business’ and shouts of ‘it’s my life’? Would you stick with it? If it seemed that your comments were of no interest to this person, would you keep trying?
* * *
Wow, how was that for an opening section, huh?!?! I hit you with a joke and then a major downer. Hopefully, the two evened each other out.
Seriously though, what do we think about comments?
If you’ve never read much of the Bible, let me take a quick moment to suggest that you start with the Book of Proverbs. It’s not overtly ‘evangelical’, and it’s not ‘fire and brimstone’. If you are opposed to the idea of Christianity –maybe because you’ve noticed one or two Christians in your life who would appall Jesus himself– you could still find a lot to like in the Book of Proverbs.
The Book of Proverbs actually has a lot of advice about… advice. One of the things that it says, repeatedly, is that it’s smart to take wise advice.
One of the other things that it says, repeatedly, is that fools don’t follow wise advice.
That example from the opener, that poor unfortunate soul who is going to self-immolate, may or may not be a fool. They may or may not be willing to take the good advice that you might have to offer them as you walk up on them on the sidewalk.
Maybe you’ve had bad experiences giving advice before. I know I have. I’ve offered good advice –wise advice– to people before and they aren’t interested in what I have to say, and so we become a lot less likely to give advice in the future. Maybe there are thousands, or millions, of us who have good advice to give, but we’re just keeping our mouths shut because we’ve been told to do so.
I’ve lost friendships giving advice to people who didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The ends of those relationships are partly my responsibility, I guess; if only I’d kept my mouth shut it those situations, if only I’d minded my own business, I wouldn’t have brought down the house on top of my own head. When I think about those friendships, I have to be honest with myself –> they weren’t really strong relationships in the first place.
I’ve lost some mediocre friendships when I made the mistake of thinking that I could speak truth into a relationship that wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of that truth. Conversely, I prefer to have friends in my life who will speak truth to me, even when it’s hard for me to hear it. My true friends –my closest friends– will tell me the things that I don’t want to hear and I’ll listen to them because I value their comments in my comment section.
* * *
A little over two weeks ago, I started advertising my posts on Facebook. Prior to that point in time, my daily posts were getting two or three or four views a day. Now, the posts are getting thirty or forty or fifty views a day.
Which is so freakin’ awesome!
The first one hundred days of my daily posts on this blog (from April 21st to July 29th) had a combined total of 710 views (averaging 7.1 views per day). Then, on July 30th, I advertised the post more widely on social media and I got 94 views on just that one day!
In the month of August, on 22 daily posts, I’ve received 965 views (averaging 44 views per day)!
When this first started happening, I was jazzed with all of the views –> jazzed that people were reading my writing. So exciting! I was also excited about the feedback that I was getting, via the comments on social media. And I swore to myself that I was going to try to engage everyone who left a comment with some replies, so people felt like their appreciation was, well, appreciated.
I’ve recently started falling behind on leaving comments and engaging these commenters in some ‘back and forth’. I feel a little guilty about that, actually.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I want everyone to feel free to comment in any way that they feel led to do so. But, it makes me wonder about comments that we receive from other people. Back to my example from the opener, imagine that you aren’t the first person to come upon that person who is thinking about the unthinkable right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Imagine that you are the tenth person –or the fiftieth– to come by with something to say to that individual.
It could start to become a little overwhelming.
* * *
I mentioned, once upon a time, that my favorite Pixar movie is The Incredibles (I talked about it in THIS POST). One of the interesting parts of the movie –and one of the things that I’ve often wondered about– is this: what if people don’t want to be saved?
In the first few minutes of the aforementioned film, one of the superheroes in the movie tried to save someone who was trying to kill themselves. That person ended up suing the superhero that saved him, for “ruining his death”. Because the government was on the hook for covering the legal fees of the superheroes who were just helping the government with protecting the masses, such lawsuits against these superheroes ended up costing the government too much. This sets the stage for the rest of the film, where The Incredibles, and the other superheroes like them, are forced to stop ‘saving people’.
There is an equation here that we need to think about, I believe.
If you are responsible for ‘doing you’, then that might include some inner conviction that you have to give advice to people. In certain situations, you might be wise to offer advice, while in others, you’re being foolish. Nevertheless, your responsibility is to do what you can to try to speak truth into the lives of the people around you.
That’s one part of the equation.
Of course, the other part of the equation is how that advice is received. Inasmuch as we would all love, when we offer advice, if the advice would be received and heeded, that’s not how it works. Furthermore, how other people receive your advice isn’t your responsibility –> it’s there’s. Your responsibility is to ‘do you’.
When I reach that guy, with the gasoline and the lighter, on the sidewalk, I will give him advice. That’s my responsibility. He may take it, or he may reject it.
It occurred to me today that there are worse things than failure.
Did you know that the singing gazelle in Zootopia is none other than the Columbian signer, Shakira?
I mean, I knew that she did some of the soundtrack music, and I’ve only seen the movie once or twice, so maybe I missed it somehow, but I only just realized, the last time I saw Zootopia, that Shakira is the gazelle. She features in one of the last scenes, during the denouement.
Try Everything is the hit song that Shakira put together for the movie. Its lyrics discuss the advantages of trying new things, even if those attempts end in failure, and the song ends up seeming revolutionary somehow, inasmuch as it forwards this idea that… hold on to your butts… it’s okay to fail at things.
That is not what we are teaching our children here in America, thank you very much, Ms. Shakira; you can take those crazy notions of yours right back to South America.
‘Failure is okay’, are you kidding me?!?! Everyone knows that “failure is not an option”. Everyone knows that failure is that thing that you get yelled at for, by your parents or by the school teacher. Everyone knows that failure starts with ‘F’ and an ‘F’ is the worst grade you can get on a report card.
But, here’s the thing –> I just did a Google search for “quotes about failure”, and they all came back with all of this ‘Shakira-esque’ inspirational drivel about positive attitudes and never quitting and getting up more times than you get knocked down and all of this non-sense.
So, where do we stand on this? I thought for sure that, in America, we were opposed to such radical and revolutionary ideas.
* * *
In a more serious approach to the topic, let me say this, as a school teacher for almost two whole decades: I’ve had students who wouldn’t even try because trying included in it a chance of failure. However, it is impossible to fail if you don’t try. Because failure is so undesirable, even more undesirable than being labeled ‘lazy’ or ‘negligent’, students who are trying to avoid failure will pick not trying every time.
This is one of the saddest things to watch happen, as a teacher, because at some point, this student learned that there’s nothing worse than failure.
Which isn’t true, of course.
When it comes to watching my students, who just don’t try because they don’t want to fail, you can see it in their eyes and on their faces –> they think that it might be worth trying, that maybe Mr. Brackett has a point when he says that they should try. In their eyes, you can see that they want to try. But, then that sparkle in their eyes goes dark, and their face droops a little bit, and then they say, “No, I’m not going to try.”
In their minds, they believe that they can’t fail if they don’t even try. However, they believe this because they’ve believed the lie that there is nothing worse than failure, that failure should be avoided at all costs. But, I can think of one thing that’s worse than failure, and a certain Columbian pop star would be able to read my mind right about now.
Not trying is worse than failure.
Not trying is worse than failure because you might not ever know how wonderfully talented you are at something until you’ve tried to do it. Granted, you may be horrible at this thing that you’ve never tried, but, if all things are equal, then at least the person who has tried knows –one way or the other– whether or not they are good. The person who tries has the knowledge of their skill level.
The person who does not or will not try does not have that knowledge. The have their cowardice and their ignorance.
So, as Shakira would say, “Hips don’t lie.”
Oops.
So, as Shakira would say, “Try everything.”
* * *
But what about that feeling that you get when you try something and you fail at it. As horribly embarrassing as that is, it’s no wonder why people are afraid to try. I hate to tell you this, but that feeling isn’t natural. You, at some point in your life, learned that failing at something is embarrassing. Like with most things, you probably learned this at a young age. You were unfortunately influenced by an adult in your life, probably an adult who didn’t understand what they were doing to you, when they taught you that failure is bad, is embarrassing, is to be avoided.
I know I’ve done it to my kids, because I’ve seen the hesitance in their eyes when it comes to trying new things, when it comes to the possibility that they might fail.
Now, before I start whipping myself for my sins, let me say this: I don’t know if you can really blame adults for the way that they instruct children about failure. Parents, for example, often feel like their children are reflections on them –to what extent this may or may not be true is up for debate– and so, they are somewhat concerned about the failures of their children and how those failures will make them look. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s happening.
Teachers have a similar problem, inasmuch as students who fail are usually factored into some equation that schools have been using to calculate teacher effectiveness. If I thought that I could ever get away with it, that I could run a classroom experiment and not have it negatively affect my performance review, I would shoot for having a classroom full of students who have learned to at least try new things, over a classroom full of students who suggest that their teacher can teach them a few things when they’re interested in learning.
* * *
The even more unfortunate side effect here is this –> our society has become wary and hesitant about looking at different approaches, about trying new things, and I wonder if it’s not because of some collective fear that we have about failure. I’m not calling for us, as a society, to throw caution to the wind and run around trying every dumb idea that crosses our mind. I happen to believe that there are things that we ought not be doing or trying.
But, I also think it’s time to think of some different approaches to some things.
If not trying is really worse than failure, and we have noticed that there are things that aren’t working so well in our world, what do we have to lose in attempting some changes?
I graduated from Buchanan High School in the Spring of 1994, and was one of three seniors from Buchanan that year to attend the University of Notre Dame in the fall. I don’t know if I ever saw the third of us –let’s call her Becky– but I saw Laura –name changed to protect the identity of someone whose permission I did not attain before the writing of this post– on and off, especially during our Freshman Year.
Being a student at Notre Dame was hard, because the expectations were high and the pressure was always on, it seemed, to meet expectations. I remember Freshman year being a difficult time, during which I was trying to prove that I had ‘the right stuff’, which is to say that I was trying to get grades high enough to merit me staying at the University.
As Freshman year gave way to Sophomore year and Junior year and Senior year, things seemed to get easier. It was either that, or the rigors of Freshman year taught me how to do the things that were necessary to be able to succeed through the rest of the journey. In the Spring of 1998, I graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. I’ve used this degree almost every day since, psychoanalyzing just about every one I come in contact with (hee hee).
In high school, my brother and I were allowed to use a hand-me-down vehicle that my parents were finished with, for which we were extremely grateful (if I remember correctly). The car was a maroon 1987 Plymouth Horizon, which my brother and I lovingly referred to as “The Beast”. I have so many memories of that car that I could probably power a week’s worth of blog posts just talking about the crazy things that I did in that car or with that car.
But, as a student at Notre Dame in 1998, there wasn’t really much of a need for a car for me. Having family so close by, and having a roommate who had a Ford Escort on campus (shout out to Nate Van Gessel), there wasn’t much of a need for me to have a vehicle.
At the end of my senior year at Notre Dame, as a type of graduation present, my parents got me my own car. My dad bought the car from an old lady who didn’t drive it very much, so it was relatively cheap and relatively low miles. It was a 1991 baby blue Dodge Shadow. I’m guessing on the model year (my dad couldn’t remember it, either), and I don’t really remember anything else about her. As it turned out, she and I didn’t have a long relationship; I killed her.
During the spring and summer of 1998, I was working a couple of different jobs. One of them was as a graphic design specialist for the Snite Museum of Art, on the Notre Dame campus. As impressive as this might sound, it was really just a case of me knowing how to do more with a computer than play solitaire. The other gig was as a computer technician for a real estate firm in a Southwestern Michigan town. Between the two jobs, I was trying to make some money while I was also trying to figure out what to do with my life.
The baby blue Dodge Shadow came in handy for both of those jobs, as it turned out. I drove it from my home in Buchanan, across the state line into Indiana, to get to the art museum to do what they needed me to do. Then, I would go from there to my other job, helping people with their computer problems in a little real estate office in Cass County, Michigan.
During the driving, I listened to a lot of blues music –> I was really into B.B. King and Jonny Lang and the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band that year. To get a sense of what that meant in 1998, I had a cassette tape adapter for the cassette tape player in the Shadow, and I would plug the other end into the portable CD player that I owned, so I could play the blues CDs that I was into, at the time.
Then, on a beautiful July morning, on my way to work at the art museum, it all came to an end.
I was in a through-lane, heading through an intersection, with a left-turn lane on my left and a right-turn lane two lanes over to my right. There was a semi-truck sitting in the left-turn lane, waiting for the signal to change, while I was proceeding through the intersection. For some reason that I will never know, that driver decided that 1) he didn’t actually want to turn left, but rather right, and 2) nothing mattered other than his whims. So, from the left-most lane at the intersection, he crossed over both through lanes, to get over to the right-side curb to make a right-handed turn.
This impeded my progress.
At the time that he started this asinine maneuver, I was checking my rear-view mirror to see who was behind me. When I looked back to the forward, an entire semi was stretched across my path. There was nothing for me to do, but to hit it.
As it all ended up, I hit the last tire on the end of the semi tractor exactly in the middle of the hood of my baby blue Shadow. I can still close my eyes and see the imprint of that tire rim, shoved into the metal of my car’s hood. If I had hit the semi a moment later, I could have been decapitated as I would have been forced underneath the semi trailer that followed.
The insurance agency for the trucking company ended up paying me, since the accident was the truck driver’s fault. I used that money to buy a different Dodge, later that summer, but that’s a different story.
My father came to the gas station near where the accident happened, to pick me up and take me home. My girlfriend at the time, who’s on the couch in front of me right now, scolding me for eating Reese’s Pieces as I write this story, was very distraught when she heard about the accident. I’d never been in a major vehicular incident before that morning, so it was all kind of hard to process. And the baby blue Shadow was towed to a mechanic’s yard back in Buchanan. Later that day, I went to that yard to collect my personal effects from the car.
That was truly a more sad experience than the accident itself had been, probably in the same way that identifying a body at a morgue could be more distressing than whatever would’ve caused such a death.
Yesterday (as I write this, two days ago as you read this), my family became a three-car family, with the purchase of a third vehicle. And, much in the same way that my brother and I inherited “The Beast” all of those years ago, my children are inheriting my old vehicle for their driving needs, as I inherit my wife’s previous vehicle.
Moments ago, in my driveway, as I was removing my personal effects from the car that I’ve been driving for the past seven years, I was reminded of the sadness of removing my things from the baby blue Shadow in 1998. This post was born of that triggered memory.
It occurred to me today that I’m running out of time.
On March 13th (which was a ‘Friday the 13th’, by the way), my life changed significantly, as did many. As a professional educator, I left my job on that Friday, in a building with my students, and transitioned into a ‘virtual’ environment. During the weeks that followed, I did my best to try to continue to connect with my students, delivering content ‘virtually’ while also trying to foster my growing relationships with them. It was tough, and like most educators I know, I struggled at first. But, I got the hang of it. And along the way, the shake-up in my world
–personally and professionally– allowed me to discover some other things, things that I’ve fallen in love with.
And now, my life is about to change back, at least somewhat.
Teachers are to report back to work next week at my school.
I saw a meme once, and it’s probably only a meme that teachers would understand, but it said something to the effect that “August, for teachers, is just one long Sunday afternoon”. And, as funny as that meme has always been to me, as summers have faded into falls in my life for the last eighteen summers, the message is a little more poignant for me this August. I feel like I have a little more to lose.
* * *
The question is going to be, “Will I have what it takes to desperately cling to the things that I’ve discovered that I really enjoy, the things that have become central to my life, these last five months? Will I find myself strong and emboldened, staring down the same old life that wants to try to have me back, or will I, having tasted something better, decide to rearrange my world differently than it had been before?” I know, that’s more like two, or maybe three, questions.
Because, you see, it’s no big deal to do easy stuff. The big deal is to do hard stuff.
No, that’s not what I’m trying to say.
How about this: it’s no big deal to do hard things when you’ve got the energy and the time to do those hard things. It is, however, significantly harder to do hard things when you are already spread too thin, as it is. Working on my writing, through this blog and through the novels I am drafting, and taking care of my plans to get back into shape, those things have been fairly easy, without much else to get in the way these last five months. They will not be as easy when other things start demanding my attention. I have a life that, right now –at this moment– contains almost everything that I hold dear.
But, here it comes… the other stuff.
* * *
I believe that astrology –the system of beliefs that includes things like planetary positions and astrological signs, etc.– is a bunch of hooey. But, some friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day something about ‘the planets of change are in retrograde in Scorpio’ and I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m a Scorpio, and hey, I’ve got some changes coming.” That probably doesn’t prove the legitimacy of astrology, but it gives me a reason to talk about change.
That change that came at me, at all of us, back in March, didn’t feel like a good one, going into it. But, as it turns out, things went pretty well for me (or at least as well as anyone’s life goes during a pandemic). I know a lot of people who didn’t fare as well, so I am definitely thankful. This change, that’s coming up for me soon, also doesn’t having a great feeling going into it. But, change is change. You have to stay flexible and bend as the winds blow. And, I am pretty happy to say that I made the best of the situation that I was handed this spring. I hope you did, too.
I think that positivity makes a big difference.
* * *
I’ve heard it said that nothing is ever really full. You can take a five-gallon bucket and fill it with bricks. Let’s say you end up getting eight bricks to fit into that bucket.
Is the bucket full of bricks? Yes, because you can’t fit any more bricks in the bucket. But, is the bucket full?
No.
Because, you can then add in golf balls, along with the bricks. Let’s say you end up fitting in seventeen golf balls, in among the bricks. Is the bucket full of bricks and golf balls? Yes. Is the bucket full?
No.
Then you can add marbles. Then you can add sand. Then you can add water.
If you think back to that initial point in time, at the beginning, when we thought the bucket was full of bricks, it wasn’t even close to full.
I saw this metaphor acted out in front of an audience once; I don’t remember where or when. The person who did the demonstration was talking about the importance of prioritizing certain things and making sure that those things end up in the bucket first, because you’ll never be able to fit them in once the bucket has its marbles and sand and water inside. Those big items, that you put in first to make sure that everything else has to work around them, those are the major priorities, like family and faith and the like.
To be honest with you, I’m glad for the pandemic, in some ways. It emptied a lot of useless things out of my bucket. And, truth be told, I’m not necessarily in a hurry to have a full bucket all over again.
Have my bricks changed? Have my golf balls changed? I can pretty safely say that they have, while my life has been strangely different these last five months. Now that it’s time to reconfigure what goes into the bucket along with the ‘major items’, it will be interesting to see how that goes.
* * *
I know that it might just sound like whining, to anyone reading this who has not been afforded the past five months to rearrange their lives. Believe me, I am not whining; on the contrary, I am extremely thankful for the circumstances that have allowed me to reorganize my life. Additionally, a significant part of me has not been whole since I left my students in March. I am, after all, a teacher.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie (there’s got to be a hundred of them) where the neglected lover escapes their ungrateful significant other to start a better life, only to have that spurned lover show up later, demanding to have things returned to their previous state.
I don’t know if I want to go back to the way things were. I’m healthier. I’m happier.
Let me say this: if you are able to find the best parts of life, if you are able to find ways to make things better for yourself, if you ever get the chance to rearrange things to make them better –> don’t ever give up the great things when you find them.
It occurred to me today that I just don’t know what to think, a lot of the time.
Yesterday, in Maybe (Part 1), I began a monologue on my impressions of how the pandemic is going, specifically related to the American response, and the extent to which we seem to be floundering.
If you ask me, we’ve all gotten pretty soft, here in America, especially when it comes to having to deal with adversity. I guess that’s to be expected when we’re talking about what probably amounts to the richest society to ever have had dominion on the face of the earth. Most Americans, living in their luxury and abundance, have never had to really come to terms with the notion that life can be hard. Of course, this is relative, so before you go off on me, telling me that you’ve lived a hard life, think twice. If you haven’t had to walk ten miles round-trip everyday, for the last ten years, so that you could bring two five-gallon buckets full of dirty water home to your mother and father and fellow siblings so they could have something to drink, I don’t want you to be embarrassed when I point out that the poorest people living in America are among the richest people in the world, from an economic standpoint.
What percentage of Americans would have a mental breakdown if you asked them to walk ten miles in a day, just to collect ten gallons of muddy water?
I think I might.
* * *
Yesterday, I used the analogy of a person hiding from a would-be killer, trying to be as quiet as you can. I think I want to develop that analogy a little bit, if you’ll allow me.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the media was responding with reassuring messages via the news outlets and the celebrities, I remembered them saying, repeatedly, “We’re all in this together.”
So, imagine being in the closet, hiding from the killer, with five people. Then, not only is it your responsibility to remain quiet, to keep all five of you from dying, but it is the responsibility of the other four people in the closet to do the same. I think of countries like New Zealand and South Korea, that did their best to try to follow this type of an approach –mutual social responsibility– but even those countries are starting to see upticks in case numbers, because sustained effort requires stamina. Stamina, no matter how decent it is, eventually runs out.
Sometimes, when I think about the American approach to the pandemic, I imagine myself in a closet, being quiet, trying to hide from the would-be killer, while the person next to me is watching YouTube videos on their phone at max volume. “We don’t even have a chance”, I’m thinking to myself.
I myself am embarrassed by our nation’s response to this crisis.
The irony here is this: now that we are starting to have to look down the barrel of a prolonged pandemic, because our responsibility and our stamina are not what they could have been, the people who are most uncomfortable with those realities are some of the same people who’ve brought the consequences down on all of us.
If you shoot yourself in the foot, and then discover that you don’t like having to walk on crutches, here’s what you do –> don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
If you drive your car into a tree, and then discover that you don’t like taking public transportation, here’s what you do –> don’t drive your car into a tree.
Choices have consequences, and it’s the worst kind of whining when you complain about the realities that you are having to live through because of the choices that you’ve made.
But, then I come back to New Zealand and South Korea –> even after a successful effort to put an end to their pandemic problems, they’re back at the drawing board. Their populations weren’t able to ‘hold the line’ for very long.
Maybe, it doesn’t really matter what we do in response to the the pandemic.
Maybe, but South Korea and New Zealand have a combined 328 deaths out of a combined population of 56.5 million people. If we’d handled things in America as they handled things in their countries, our death toll right now would be about 1,900 people, rather than 170,000.
* * *
It just occurred to me, as I am working this analogy in my mind, for the second day now, that there are people that I know who want to storm the doors open on the closet where we’ve been hiding, to try to take the would-be killer by force.
It’s a simple philosophical difference, when you stop to think about it. Let’s stop hiding. Let’s start fighting.
Maybe it’s just the negative attitudes, that sometimes come with this approach, that bother me.
I could probably be convinced –sitting in the closet, afraid and as quiet as can be– by my fellows, if they decided that they wanted to stop hiding. Who wants to be the victim? Who wants to sit and wait for the would-be killer to come? We should stand! We should do what we can to overcome!
Remember, yesterday, when I talked about us being determiners?
The problem is, there isn’t a lot of that going around these days, at least not that I’ve been hearing much about, with respect to the pandemic.
Rather, correct me if I’m wrong –please, I want you to– but I’ve mostly been hearing 1) the voices of those who would have us follow the directions of the scientists as we socially distance and as we wear our masks, which all ends up sounding so conservative and cautious, or 2) the amazingly simplistic arguments of people who seems to be very gung-ho about doing what they want, and ignoring the advice they’re being given, and “SCREW YOU, I’M FREE”.
Maybe it’s just that those are the voices that I’ve been tuning in to.
* * *
I think I am suffering from some kind of a problem, here. I just can’t seem to get over all of this. The more I think about it, the more I get wrapped up in it. Then, I start a downward spiral of negative thinking about irresponsible people that gets me to hating my neighbor, which I know I’m not supposed to do.
Just a couple of hours ago, I was in a meeting for an organization that I do some work for, and the leaders of that organization were discussing some of the issues facing the organization, and I was thinking about casting my ‘doom and gloom’ outlook. Instead, I stopped to listen to others and what they had to say.
I was glad to hear that there are other people around me, people that I trust and respect, who think that there are reasons for hope, and reasons for optimism. I guess, MAYBE, I need to tune in to those voices a little bit more in my life.
I take that back; there’s no maybe about that one.
It occurred to me today that I’m using the word ‘maybe’ a lot more lately.
You probably have been, too.
–> My son is almost done logging hours on his learner’s permit. We should be able to get him into the DMV sometime soon to get him a driver’s license, maybe.
–>My church hasn’t had a service, with all of the congregation in the same room, since March. We should be able to do it sometime this fall, maybe.
–>I sent my sister-in-law a get-well card in the mail. It should get to her by the end of the week, maybe.
–>We’re almost out of toilet paper. I should be able to get some at the grocery store, maybe.
There are several problems with us having to use ‘maybe’ more these days.
* * *
The first of these problems is that, as Americans, we have become accustomed to being determiners. We make plans, we chart courses, we are the masters of our own fate. If something lies in our way, we mow it down. If Plan A doesn’t work, we go to Plan B.
When things don’t go our way, we figure out a way to make them go our way.
But, certainly, this pandemic isn’t the only example that we can summon to our minds of situations that exist, beyond our ability to control.
Immediately, weather occurs to me.
But, the thing about that example is that weather, even in its most inconvenient of forms, tends not to last very long. At least, not in comparison to a global pandemic.
This leads me to an interesting side observation –> maybe the real pandemic –that we’ve been suffering from for years– is a lack of patience. Tell me you’ve never seen someone –or you’ve never yourself– lost your patience, after only a moment or two of inconvenience. I know that I have (today, if I’m being honest).
Whether it’s the weather or a global pandemic, we just don’t do well when we’re not in control; we prefer to determine for ourselves how things will go.
Anybody else’s illusion of control laying shattered on the floor right now?
* * *
Additionally, having to use the word ‘maybe’ more often these days makes people uncomfortable. Last year, in August, if you’d asked me if I was going to be teaching in a school in November, the answer would have been, “Yes” –> and I would have looked at you funny. If you were to ask me if I am going to be teaching in a school in November right now, I’d have to say, “Maybe”.
This is emotionally taxing, to say the least. I have a friend, whose identity I will protect, who is in school administration. This friend was telling me the other day, about the uncertainty that all schools are dealing with right now, this friend said to me, “Phil, I’m just exhausted, mentally exhausted. I’m drained from trying to figure all of this out. I’ve never been this tired.”
And this friend of mine, that I speak of, is a work-horse, so tired doesn’t come easily for them.
In fact, I’ve noticed that people are starting to lose their cool more and more lately. I’ve seen on Facebook the same copied post on several Facebook streams in the last few days, a post that talks about “end scenarios” and “getting back to normal”. Six months into a global pandemic and people are losing their minds.
Have you ever seen that scene in the horror movie where the good guy just has to remain perfectly still and quiet for a few seconds until the bad guy decides to go look somewhere else. How does it usually go? The good guy sneezes, or the good guy drops something, or the good guy steps on a squeaky floor board; at that point, it’s all over, the bad guy knows and then chooses to strike.
Inevitably, there’s something about just staying calm for a limited amount of time that seems beyond us.
But look, I get it. It’s hard to stay positive. It’s hard to stay optimistic. And, because we’re not used to having to do it for very long, we lack the stamina to be able to maintain our positivity or our optimism for any significant length of time.
And, if you really want to know what I think about the idea of ‘getting back to normal’, I think it’s a lie that we are telling ourselves to help us to get through the days. I think normal may have left us all back in March.
* * *
I am going to cover this topic some more in my post for tomorrow, so I will dispense with some of those further discussions until then. But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how disappointing it is that this has become a political issue for so many people. If you’ve been reading my blog posts for any particular length of time, then you should have a pretty good sense of where I stand, politically. The problem that has recently come to light, in my mind, regarding the pandemic, and the political nature of the fallout from the pandemic, is this: rather than using our heads or even –perish the thought– our hearts, to help us decide how we’re going to navigate the ins and outs of the pandemic, WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE have decided to hand over the keys to their brains and their souls to politicians, to leave it to them to tell us how to handle ourselves during these unprecedented times.
This is dumb. And we should stop doing it. Once the politicians discover that we aren’t going to do any thinking at all, once they discover that we are totally okay with leaving the thinking up to them, then we are all screwed.
Of course, I am okay with you questioning the politicians that I question. I am, interestingly enough, also okay with you questioning the politicians that I have come to respect and trust. What I am ABSOLUTELY NOT OKAY WITH is you not thinking at all when it comes to what it is that you are being told by the leadership, and the reason that I am not okay with this is that I will NEVER stop questioning what it is that I am hearing from politicians.
Lilly and Sarah, my twin daughters, were born twelve weeks premature, in the middle of March, 2007. The edge of viability for preemie babies back then was right around twenty-eight weeks, or twelve weeks early, but we had the very best doctors and nurses working to help to keep them alive, so there was that.
Rough days, back then.
They stayed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Memorial Hospital in South Bend for eight weeks. It was at that point in time when the doctors thought that we would be able to bring them home. So, near the middle of May, we brought Lilly and Sarah home from the hospital, still a month before their original due date, and two months after their birth.
Sarah seemed to do well, in the first couple of days home from the hospital.
Lilly… not so much.
So we called the hospital –the NICU– and described what we were seeing and they told us to bring Lilly back in to the hospital. So we brought Lilly in, and we were admitted to the Pediatric unit.
At which point in time, the staff members from the NICU seized control of Lilly, from pediatrics, and moved her back into the NICU.
THE BEST NICU IN THE WORLD IS IN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL OF SOUTH BEND.
During the days that followed, while Lilly was back in the care of the NICU doctors and nurses, they worked to try to figure out what was causing Lilly to fail to thrive at home. Different tests were run. Studies were called for. Scans of this and bloodwork for that.
Then, they discovered it.
Lilly had a congenital heart defect. Specifically, a ventricular septal defect (a VSD). In layman’s terms, she had a hole in her heart, between the lower two chambers, that caused the pumping of oxygenated blood to be less effective than what was necessary for her development.
It would require open heart surgery. She would be admitted to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis and the heart surgeon would repair the hole.
The surgery happened two days after Father’s Day, 2007. We drove down to Indianapolis on Sunday, checked Lilly in to the hospital for pre-op on Monday, and the surgery happened on Tuesday.
If you like colors, you’ll appreciate this: Lilly’s doctor in the NICU in South Bend was Dr. White (LOVE THAT MAN) and her surgeon in Indianapolis was Dr. Brown. How funny is that?!?!
The surgery to repair Lilly’s heart took most of the day on June 19th, 2007. We sat in the waiting area, with our closest family, waiting for any news that would come our way. I remember playing some cards to try to pass the time on that day, and I remember reading, but even more than those things, I remember that there never seemed to be enough information coming our way, at least not enough to keep us satisfied.
There is a binder in our house, that we were given by the staff at Riley Children’s Hospital, when we were discharged in the middle of July of that year. The binder tells every last detail of what took place during the surgery to repair Lilly’s heart, every move that Dr. Brown made. I tried reading it once. I got one sentence into it, got weak in the knees, and I swore I would never try that again.
That night, as Lilly was making her way through one of the hardest nights of her life, we tried to sleep in the hospital, Jennie and I, on recliners in the ‘Family Lounge’ that were supposed to be ‘sleeper recliners’. Whether they failed at their job, or we were a lot less likely on that night to be able to sleep soundly, who’s to say?!?!
The worst part of those first several days, post-op, was all of the wires and the tubes and the monitors, the beeping, everything that seemed to be necessary for keeping my oldest daughter alive was overwhelming. She had drainage tubes leaving her chest to drain fluid from her heart as it was healing, and she had PICC lines to supply her with medicine and other fluids. To this very day, she still has the scars from so many of those lines –into and out of her body.
But, the staff in the cardiac unit at Riley Children’s Hospital were amazing, helping us to feel comfortable, answering our questions, getting us everything that we needed. We came to know them by name, and they came to understand how deeply we cared for our daughter.
During that time, which amounted to about a month, we stayed with my brother and sister-in-law, who lived near Indianapolis at the time. We slept at their house and took shifts at Riley. Garrett and Sarah, our other children, were being taken care of by other family, back home.
The time that it took Lilly to recover from the surgery was about three and a half weeks. Part of that process was the healing of the heart after the surgery. Part of the process was Lilly, jumping through the individual hoops that demonstrated that she was on the road to recovery. One of the biggest of those hoops was the day that Lilly was able to breathe on her own, to be independent of the breathing machine that was keeping her alive.
She cleared this particular hoop, of course, on Independence Day –July 4th, 2007. Garrett was three years old at the time, and he’d come down to Indy to visit with us for the weekend. We played with sparklers in my brother’s driveway, to celebrate Independence Day. For my wife and I, Independence Day is always going to make us think of Lilly’s independence from the ventilator.
The rest of the story is pretty simple, really. Lilly made it, and has continued to thrive over these last thirteen years. Every year, in February or March, we make a trip back down to Indianapolis, so that Lilly can continue to be seen by the excellent staff members associated with the Riley Children’s Hospital. It’s worth the trip, every time, and I continue to be thankful for so much that so many did for our daughter.
It cost $1,200,000 to get my two daughters through their first four months of life –> worth every penny.
It occurred to me today that so many people are using social media, but I’m not sure what the point is.
Just over two weeks ago now, I decided to start using a different social media platform for advertising the existence of my blog posts. As a result, I’ve now been spending more time on that social media platform. And it’s got me to thinking about why we use social media in the first place.
What’s the point?
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media, just looking for attention. I think that part of what I’m doing on social media falls into this category, at least when it comes to my blog. I wonder how many other people are looking for attention via what they post on-line.
Psychologically speaking, I think that we all seek attention; we all want to be noticed and it’s reaffirming for our egos to have people, on social media or IRL, pay us some regard as fellow people. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that most things, in excess, are bad, including seeking attention.
This can especially get dangerous when it causes us to foster relationships with other people who might then become more important to us than our loved ones. When those who deserve our attention and affection in the utmost are being starved for that attention, because we are out seeking the attention of people on social media, an imbalance occurs that can wreak havoc on our personal lives.
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media just trying to start fights.
I don’t know about you, but it seems like the cool thing to do these days is to say something on Facebook or Twitter that is guaranteed to get people enraged, just so that they’ll comment on your posts. Then, we can have a ‘vargument’ (virtual argument).
Varguments are so much fun, aren’t they?!?! You get to vargue with people, most of which you haven’t spoken to –in real life– in years, because they think that your post is absurd and you think their objection is equally absurd. Then, other people –friends of yours and friends of theirs– can get pulled into the vargument. Before you know it, thirty or forty or ninety people are hurling counterarguments (rarely) and insults (much more common) at each other in a freakin’ free-for-all.
What a good time!!!!!
Do you know how many people’s minds get changed from varguments?
None. No one ever.
If I’m wrong, then show me that I’m wrong. I’ll wait.
So, to combat this, I’ve recently gotten into the habit of pausing before commenting. You might want to try this, especially if you have a tendency to engage other people in varguments on social media. It’s done wonders for keeping me out of varguments. What I do is this: I’ll type out a witty and intelligent comment, sure to get the vargument started, and then I sit and wait for a moment. Then, during that moment, I come to realize that I don’t really want to vargue with anyone.
* * *
Part of me wonder about the number of people on social media who are just bored.
I don’t mean to sound flippant, but social media consumption does not qualify as a hobby, despite what people might currently believe.
I wonder if people would be on social media a little less often if they found something better to do with their time. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that sometimes, in a down moment or two, social media is the perfect way to waste a few minutes. What is hard for me to understand is how it seems like many people are on their social media accounts pretty much constantly.
Learn to paint, read a book, get outdoors, hit the gym; there have got to be some better ways to spend so much of the time of which people seem to have so much. This, in and of itself, is interesting, if you think about it, because if you’ve ever heard someone complain about not having enough time to do XYZ, but you’ve noticed a significant amount of their time gets spent on social media, then you may have identified the source of the problem.
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media, just sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.
If you are on a social media platform, checking out what it is that other people are doing with their lives, just so that you can later be johnny-on-the-spot when someone asks, “Whatever happened to so-and-so?” Or, if you are using social media to keep up with the neighbors across the street –you know, those neighbors that you wouldn’t bother to cross the street to talk to– you might have a problem.
Of course, this particular exchange is a bit of a two-way street; if you get upset that people stick their noses in your business, step one might be to stop putting all of your crap on the internet for people to peruse. You can’t blame people for knowing everything that there is to know about you when you publish everything that there is to know about you for people to see.
Another caveat along these lines should include the following: getting upset with people when they’ve got something to say to you about what you’ve posted online is a little like getting upset about somebody shooting you with the gun that you gave them and using the ammo that you supplied to them.
At least, if you are going to share yourself with people online, you could do them the courtesy of not getting upset with them when they have something to say.
* * *
I used a gun metaphor in that last section, and when I stop to think about it, that’s kind of fitting, because I think that social media is probably a bit like a loaded gun.
When you think about all of the bad things that can happen with a loaded gun, it hardly seems worth having it. Of course, we all know what the reason is for having a loaded gun, just as we all know how badly that can turn out, WITHOUT CARE. That’s the difference, really –> BEING CAREFUL.
Just as responsible people with guns in their houses understand how important it is to be careful, to educate everyone in the house about the guns, and how to use them, and how to be safe, we need to think about social media along these same lines, I believe. Social media is a loaded gun. It can certainly have legitimate uses, but the danger involved in its misuse requires education and training.
Otherwise, you end up with damage and casualties.
Sound like anything you’ve recently seen on Facebook or Twitter?
It occurred to me today that we need to establish what is worthy and what is not (as it we ever could).
My wife and I got into a slight disagreement the other morning, and the specifics of the argument are none of your business (hee hee).
But, what I can tell you is this: the argument got me to thinking about productivity. The dictionary definition of productivity goes something like this: “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.”
Wow, that seems a little technical, don’t you think?!?!
So, I guess we have to look at productivity in terms of what is produced. That’s unfortunate, because I’ve spent hundreds of hours at this keyboard this year, and I don’t know if you could make the argument that I’ve produced very much –> and before you go jumping to conclusions, my wife and I were NOT fighting about whether or not my writing is a decent use of my time (she’s one of my biggest fans). Nevertheless, she –or anyone else– could make the argument that I’ve not produced much.
Maybe, I should print it all out. Then, there would be a product.
Maybe, if we are to look at productivity, we can be a little less technical about it and modify our understanding of what a product is.
Look at the factory worker, who is able to, in one hour’s time, put out seventy-five pieces of whatever he is meant to be making. That’s more than one part per minute! Pretty productive, huh?
The guy next to him puts out ninety-eight pieces per hour.
Which of them is more productive?
What if the ‘seventy-five pieces per hour’ guy makes most of his fellow coworkers, during their lunch break, laugh and have a good time and relax, so that the afternoon productivity in the factory goes up because this guy is around, even though his ‘productivity’ on the assembly line isn’t that great. Tangible productivity vs. intangible productivity.
How about this: what if everyone is producing something?
* * *
The problem with this argument –whether some pursuit or another is a worthy pursuit, whether it’s productive– is that it’s subjective. I kind of touched on this topic a little bit when I wrote about gaming in THIS POST. When I was a kid, playing video games was, in my mind, a totally appropriate use of time. My parents were NOT of the same opinion.
Who gets to decide what is productive and what is not?
Society has a lot of influence on this matter, unfortunately, because we tend to look at our endeavors with the eyes of a society that promotes concepts like market value and popularity and conformity; therefore, productivity and products that don’t fit those norms are often not given a second glance.
My daughter recently came up with the idea to start a YouTube channel where she would share her theological thoughts with viewers. My wife and I encouraged her to record a first video, to show to us what she was planning on doing.
Well, her first video was a video where she read a passage of the Bible. When she showed us that video, I told her that there probably weren’t a lot of watchers on YouTube who were going to be interested in hearing her read passages from the Bible. She understood, and I tried to steer her in a different direction, and then she recorded a second video. It was a lot better, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
In that first conversation, where I tried to help her to see that her first concept wasn’t going to be productive, I was careful to try not to extinguish her dream; I am ashamed to say that I have probably –more than once– not been supportive of all of her ideas. I tell myself that I am just being protective, when she comes to me with these crazy ideas, that I don’t want her to be hurt when she doesn’t get the results that she is expecting/wanting.
So rather than have her discover that no one in the world is going to be interested in watching a video of her looking down at her Bible, stumbling and struggling through a reading of a chapter, I break her heart, a little bit. Maybe the right thing to do is to let her try, so that she can discover whether or not her ideas have merit –by succeeding or failing– and then I could just make myself available to catch her if she falls.
The question of being productive, of creating something that people are going to want to have, is a struggle of my own. It would be one thing for me to come to terms with it, if everyone who is reading my daily blog stopped, because I’m an adult and I can use the coping mechanisms that I’ve learned to deal with the emotional fallout. I tell myself that I don’t really care if people read my writing, I tell myself that I am doing it because I enjoy the writing process –which I most certainly do. At the end of the day, though, I watch the numbers (people viewing the post) go up on some posts and I watch them go down on other posts, and I get emotionally attached when a post that I really loved writing does poorly. Just like I think my daughter would be crushed if her YouTube channel didn’t take off.
* * *
The concept of being productive is hard, because we aren’t the ones that make the determination whether or not our efforts are well-spent. When we create, and others evaluate that creation, there is something in us –whatever we ended up investing in the created thing– that is wide-open to attack when people subjectively decide that we’ve wasted our time, that our creations aren’t worthy.
I said, at the end of the first section of this post, that it might be the case that everyone is producing something. Some people have products that are more intangible than others. Let me go even a step further than that: I truly believe that it is the case that even bad things are productive, inasmuch as they could lead –down the road– to good things.
The drunk driver that kills the teenage daughter driving home; when that event draws a family closer together, while it’s certainly not ideal, it could be considered ‘productive’, in a sense. The moronic leader, who awakes the underlings by being so inept as a manager, that ‘boss’ has been productive, in a sense.
I guess that makes us all producers; congratulations on being a producer. Go out and be the kind of producer whose product reflects well on them.
It occurred to me today that I buy a lot of stuff on the internet.
We have four Alexa devices in our home; if you don’t know what an Alexa device is, it is a voice-activated, internet-enabled smart device that you can use to do different things in your home, in connection with Amazon. We are BIG Amazon fans in our house.
The Alexa devices have become a big part of how our home works. The lights in our kitchen, living room, and master bedroom are all controlled by Alexa. We ask her for information about the weather –A LOT– and when we have questions about the definitions of words
–> we are all pretty decent readers in our house, so it’s not uncommon for someone in the house to be coming across a word, in a book, that they don’t know the meaning of.
When it comes time to put a grocery item on our shopping list, everyone in the house knows that we do that through Alexa. When one of the kids notices that we are out of Lucky Charms, they walk up to an Alexa and they say, “Alexa, add Lucky Charms to the shopping list”. Then, when it’s time to go shopping, we check our Alexa app on our phone to get the shopping list taken care of, lickety split.
We even use Alexa to buy items directly from Amazon, which is even more convenient. When I notice that I’ve used the last furnace filter, I walk up to an Alexa and I say, “Alexa, reorder furnace filters”, and she’ll say back, “Based on your order history, I’ve found 3M Filtrete furnace filters. The six-pack of filters is $22.89. I’ve put the order in your Amazon cart for review. To purchase, say, ‘Buy it now’.” At that point, I reply, “Buy it now”, and the order gets placed and it shows up at the house a couple of days later. We do this with candy and laundry detergent and bar soap and dryer sheets and all sort of other stuff.
Like I said, we are big Amazon fans at our house.
And I’ve heard people say that they’d be nervous about 1) having all of those Alexa devices listening to you all of the time, and 2) having Amazon know so much about your purchasing habits. In my experience, people who are nervous about those kinds of things often 1) have something that they’re trying to hide as they protect their privacy rights, and 2) think more highly of themselves than they ought. I’m pretty sure I’m not important enough for Amazon to care much about what my family is saying around the dinner table, and I’m also pretty sure that it’s not a matter of national security that Amazon knows that I order Downy Unstoppables about once a week.
* * *
Up until just recently, I would say that the strangest thing that I’ve ever ordered online was a mattress. That was an interesting experience.
A few years back, my wife and I were in need of a new mattress; I think you know it’s time for a new mattress when it takes mountain climbing experience in order to get out of the divots that you’ve worn in your side of the bed. Anyway, we started thinking about going to stores and trying out mattresses, and the thought of doing that started to overwhelm me. So, instead, I started looking on the internet, to see if I could do some advance research on mattresses, to try to ease the experience that I expected that we were going to end up having in these mattress stores.
What I ended up finding was that you could buy mattresses online.
So, I pitched the idea to my wife, and it wasn’t a hard sell, but it did require a little bit of persuasion. We ended up getting a mattress from Wayfair that arrived in a box that was two-feet by two-feet in diameter, and about as tall as my wife.
When we opened the box, it said inside that we shouldn’t open the box unless we were in our bedroom with the box. So we closed the box.
Then, we took the box, to our bedroom, and opened it (again) and followed the instructions inside. The mattress was shrink-wrapped into a tube-shape inside the box. So, when we cut the mattress’s shrink wrap, it –over the course of several hours– took its appropriate shape on the bedroom floor.
And now, I can say, a few years down the line, that it was a great internet purchase. But, I can’t any longer say that it’s the strangest thing we’ve bought online.
* * *
Moments ago, I just bought the craziest thing that I’ve ever bought on the internet. My wife and I just bought a car from Carvana. Let me tell you about how weird that was.
I’m not an expert when it comes to buying a car, but I’ve done it a few times. Often enough, at least, to start to understand how the whole process works. So, when it came to buying a car online, it’s pretty similar to the experience of buying one in person at a dealership.
I know that the big difference, for me, was not being sure of what I was doing as we were ‘checking out’ with the car that we’d chosen, but then again, I guess I feel like that when I’m in the dealership, as well, filling out all of the paperwork. I will say that I was pretty nervous, making sure that I was clicking on the right things, making sure that I was reading all of the fine print. That final button on the final page of the check-out process, the button that says, “Submit Carvana Order”, I had to nudge myself into clicking that button.
Of course, the problem here is that I feel a little guilty about taking advantage of the dealership that we used to get some test-driving done (sorry, Wendi). The idea of buying a car that we’d never even driven before was a bridge-too-far in our minds, and my wife –it will be her car when it arrives next week– was adamant about getting to drive what we were going to end up buying. And, we most definitely would have bought from the dealership, if they’d had what we were wanting.
That’s one of the most appealing things about buying stuff on the internet, at least in my mind; if I want something specific, and my local grocery store, or local hardware store, or local car dealership, doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for, I can probably find that specific thing on the internet. My wife wanted some specific things in her next vehicle, and she wanted them at a specific price point, and that wasn’t available from the dealership. Shopping online gives me, as a consumer, a higher level of control over the product that I’m getting.
It Occurred To Me Today 