It occurred to me today that the past is rather obdurate.
Fair warning, this one is a little long.
When you think about memory, and how your memory works, at least for me, I tend to remember things of emotional importance, at least over the long haul. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last Thursday because it is of no emotional importance. I can’t remember the names of all of the kids that I taught in my Senior English class ten years ago because that list has no emotional importance. I do, however, remember holding my father in my arms as he sobbed over the death of my only brother, his youngest son. I do remember the joy of seeing my wife coming down the aisle toward me at our wedding, and I suspect that I always will.
But those events are gone, inasmuch as I no longer have any power to make any changes to them. My wedding ceremony, my brother’s funeral, the birth of my three children; all of these events are solidified. The details surrounding them, the events leading up to them, everything in my life, up to and including the minute, two minutes ago, when I started writing this sentence, they are all immutable and gone. The past is the past, and the size of that past continues to grow, in each of our lives, as every moment that passes becomes a part of… the past.
This, of course, leaves our future constantly shrinking in size, as well, if you think about it.
Your past has a known size to it, however, that your future does not. I, at the moment that I am typing this, am forty-four years old. That just so happens to make me 16,322 days old, exactly. Now, go ahead and ask me (or ask yourself, for that matter) how many days I have in my future.
This puts all of us on a little slider that is sliding toward that place where there is no more slide left. As we grow closer to that point, the space that we’ve left behind –the space behind the slider as it slides– grows larger. Once you are out of slide, your past also happens to reach its maximum size –> a size that is equal to the length of your whole life. At the moment of your death (whenever it comes) your future equals zero and your past is as large as it will ever be.
The great thing about the future that the past doesn’t have going for it
–the great thing that almost makes up for the fact that we have no idea how much future there is for each of us– is that the future is malleable. I may be more than 16,000 days old, but not a single one of those days has any flexibility to it. Those days when I was a jerk to people that I love, those days when I wasted my time in a farce that mocked what life should truly be about, those days when I fell short of being the person that I aspire to be; not a single one of those days is available to me ever again. Lost. Gone. Irredeemable.
The future, despite the fact that I might have four more days or forty more days or fourteen thousand more days, is 100% chocked full of days that are 100% still adjustable. If I decided, at the very moment that I am typing on this keyboard, that I am going to spend every day that follows this one pursuing my secret dream of becoming a scuba instructor, then the future is mine to write.
* * *
Speaking of writing, I am working on a novel (actually, truth be told, I am working on a series of five novels) and the writing of the novel(s) has been an interesting process; I have powers, in my creation of the worlds in these novels, to do what I am powerless to do in my own life. If my character suffered as a child because he was a bit of a dweeb, and I’m not okay with that for him, I can simply go back and change that. My dweeby main character could just as easily be the star quarterback who marries the head cheerleader, if I change the right sentences here and there.
I, unfortunately, can’t do anything about the fact that I was a finalist in the North American Greatest Dweeb contest, representing the great state of Michigan, for six years from 1985 to 1990. I would have won in ’87, if it weren’t for the fact that the representative from North Dakota was a major nerd.
The other day, I was doing a timeline review for one of my novels and I discovered that one of my major characters had her first daughter at the age of twelve. Oops. So, I simply moved her birth year back eight years. Problem solved. If only that were possible in real life, right?!?! I’m unhappy about being middle-aged, then BAAM! I move my birth year from ’75 to ’65, and I am now just hitting the prime years of my thirties.
When it comes to creating my characters, there really isn’t much of a limit to what I can or can’t do. I have a different character who is very unlikable. To show how unlikable he is, I throw two ex-wives into his past, one of which moved to the other side of the continent, just to get as far away from his as possible, and then it’s obvious that this guy is really unpleasant.
My past, regrettably, is not open for editing.
* * *
I’ve recently, quite by accident, discovered the whereabouts of a childhood friend of mine. This revelation has focused my thoughts on him, as of late, in a way that I wasn’t expecting; to be honest, he’s been invading my mind. As a matter of fact, I think I wrote about him in my blog post on trust a few days back.
It may be generous to describe the relationship that we had, years ago, as a friendship. It really probably wasn’t.
I don’t know if it has ever happened to you –> a situation like this, where you have a chance at reaching out to someone from your past to try to reconnect. When it happens to me (it’s happened at least a few times), I wrestle with whether or not to make contact, whether or not to try to renew the ties.
But, in this particular situation, and in consideration of the circumstances of my life right now, I am feeling differently. This time, I find myself wondering about the past, and the person that this person was to me back then.
In my past, this guy was not a nice guy –> to me or to most anyone else; he treated most of the people around him poorly, as an immature teenager who was accustomed to using manipulation, threats of violence, and emotional blackmail, to get whatever he wanted.
That’s who he was in my past.
And I, in that same past, was willfully subservient to my peers, to get them to like me. I was desperately starving for social approval, so much so that I looked for friendship in dark alleys down which I had no business venturing.
That’s who I was in my past.
But today, I am further down the road than I was formerly. It would be unreasonable for me to expect that this guy is not also further down the road in his journey. Did he develop out of his slightly sociopathic ways, to become someone who is capable of properly interacting with other people, just as I was able to develop out of my futile exploits in the realm of social acceptance? Do I really want to try to reconnect with him, to discover whether he did or not?
* * *
They say that one of the most important parts of a good novel is character development. We love to read about individuals who are able to work their way through the sins of their past, or through the pressure of their present circumstances, to arrive at a future that is better than what they might have otherwise hoped for.
I’d like to encourage you to let go of the rigid past. Write your story in the days that are yet to come.
It occurred to me today that the pursuit of excellence is something in which we should all be engaged.
Yesterday, I wrote about trust and how I hate to be in situations where I have to trust someone that I don’t necessarily have a reason to trust. But today, I am writing about having trusted someone, and that someone’s name is Kevin. Kevin is someone who, before yesterday, I didn’t know from Adam. I just so happened to be in a situation yesterday where I had to trust Kevin. I’m so happy to report that it seems that Kevin is my new favorite person on planet Earth.
The thing about my interaction with Kevin is that he was my second opinion yesterday. I went to someone else first, looking for a first opinion, and this other person –who will remain nameless to protect his identity– gave me information that I had a funny feeling was just wrong, and not “wrong” as in “incorrect”. I thought this person was wrong because he was telling me something that I didn’t want to hear. And, everybody knows what you do when you get an opinion that you don’t like –> you get a second opinion.
And so I sought out Kevin, and I’m glad that I did, and not just because he told me what I wanted to hear. Kevin’s approach to helping me with my problem was completely different that the other guy’s approach. In the end, I think that both approaches would have worked, but Kevin’s approach cost me half of what the other guy was going to charge me.
While I was waiting for Kevin to get back to me about what he was going to charge and how long it was going to take, the thought occurred to me that it was possible that Kevin’s quote would be even more outrageous, but honestly, I wasn’t expecting it. For some reason, I thought that Kevin was going to be able to offer a much better choice for me.
When Kevin told me what he was going to charge me, and the timeline in which he was going to be able to do the work, I told him that he was my new favorite superhero.
* * *
Maybe I’m expressing an opinion that is not as popular as I think it is, but I’m not interested in someone charging me to fix things that aren’t broken. I can’t imagine how happy people would be if they brought me their computers for repair and I charged them a crazy amount of money for fixing a bunch of things that didn’t really need to be fixed in the first place. Maybe it’s just standard practice for some people to do this, though.
Maybe they think of it as “preventative maintenance”. If I ask for someone to come in to my kitchen to replace the stove because it is dying, and they come in and replace the stove, and the microwave, refrigerator, dishwasher, and garbage disposal, as well, and they call it “preventative maintenance” because those pieces were going to die in the future at some point, I’m not sure how happy I would be to pay that bill.
Or maybe, they would have all of the pieces of a related system replaced, just to be sure that a problem within a particular system is fully addressed. If I call my HVAC guy and I say, “The furnace isn’t blowing hot air all the way to the second story”, so he decides to replace the furnace, and all of the ductwork, and all of the cold air exchanges, just to be sure that the entire system could have a clean bill of health, I’d be pretty flabbergasted by that bottom line.
Or maybe, in a hurry, and hoping to avoid too much time spent diagnosing an issue, someone would just think that an particular problem could most certainly be solved by just replacing everything, so it would most likely end up fixing the problem that the problem-solver didn’t actually have the time to pinpoint. If I tell my construction contractor that the floors in my bedroom squeak, so he takes off the entire second story of my house to replace it with an entirely new upper half, just because he doesn’t have time to pinpoint the two squeaky boards in my bedroom, I’m going to be upset with that approach.
Or maybe –and I think that this is a strong possibility– some businesses just treat their customers this way because they’ve gotten away with it so many times that they think that it legitimizes the approach. The customer before me was too dumb to realize that they were being fleeced, and the customer before that one fell for the same thing, as well, so I am the next schmuck in line to get “the royal treatment”. If it weren’t for Kevin, who shows up on the scene to save the day, I would have been the next casualty.
* * *
I guess when I started this post, I was thinking about how happy I was that Kevin was going to be able to help me out. When you need someone to be there for you, when you need someone to be at their best because you need them at their best, then it’s important that there would be someone out there who’s doing their best.
Somewhere along the way though, the post ended up taking a negative bent. If Kevin is the good guy in my story, then certainly this other guy, my first-opinion-guy, must be the bad guy in this story. However, I starting to discover that life is often not as cut-and-dried as that; there seems to be a lot more gray area than I would have originally believed.
Maybe my first-opinion-guy is just operating under a corporate philosophy that is being forced on him by his organization. Maybe he really wants to be doing his best for his customers, but he is constrained by company policy.
I guess, in the end, I just wish that everyone was doing their best. Pursuing excellence. If every individual was pursuing excellence, then companies couldn’t do anything other than to pursue excellence as a company –since their employees wouldn’t allow for any other approach. We should all be doing our best because there is someone out there who needs our best.
Answer the call. Do your very best. Pursue excellence.
Actually, this has probably occurred to me periodically for most of my adult life. When I say periodically, what I mean is, I feel like I have trust issues every time I am forced to trust someone that I don’t necessarily have a reason to trust, or when I have trusted someone and it ends up having been a bad idea.
I don’t necessarily have any theories about why it is that trust is so hard for me; I’ve been questioning the motives of people around me for as long as I can remember. The problems with this approach to life are many, not the least of which is that I end up being overly suspicious. When people are being sincere and legitimate, it often takes me longer to realize it than it would if I weren’t so distrusting. But, when there are reasons for being suspicious, I end up well-protected by my wariness.
* * *
I’ve owned cars, of many different shapes and sizes, for a couple of decades now. I think I can say that I have only recently found a mechanic that I absolutely trust (Tim –> if you’re reading this, here’s to you, my friend). I know that I trust Tim because he is the person I want to talk to when I am having a problem with one of my cars. I am extremely happy with all of the work that Tim has done on my cars in the past, and I know that he always does his best to make sure that the problems I have get fixed.
If that sounds like an advertisement for the guy, it’s just because I am so happy to have someone that I trust.
Before I had Tim, getting car repairs was something that would cause my blood pressure to rise. Not knowing who I could trust, always wondering whether or not someone was jerking me around, suggesting fixes that I didn’t need to separate me from my money.
In fact, I recently ended up having some trouble with a car away from home. The first thing I did was I called my mechanic. It is so nice to be able to say that I have a mechanic. He was able to tell me exactly what I needed to do to be able to get to where I was going safely. Isn’t trusting someone a wonderful thing?!?!
* * *
I’ve never been the kind of person to have a lot of friends. I prefer to have a small circle of close friends with whom I share things. I suspect that most people operate in this way, unless they happen to be a lot more trusting than me.
I think part of the reason that I operate the way that I do in this arena is past experience. I had a friend, or someone that I thought was a friend, when I was in middle school. I would tell him some of my most secret thoughts, and he would either laugh at me, which is hard to take when you’re an insecure middle school geek like I was, or worse, he would use the information against me.
As an example, I told this ‘friend’ one time about a girl that I liked. She was a mutual friend of ours. I told him how pretty I thought this girl was, and how wonderful I thought it would be to “be boyfriend and girlfriend” with this girl. My ‘friend’ not only went, almost immediately, to the girl to tell her about how I felt, but he then made his move to become her boyfriend, for a short time.
And, while I don’t know where either of these two individuals, my ‘friend’ or the girl I was interested in, are today, I do know that the lesson that he taught me is still with me. When you open yourself up to other people, it’s an invitation to betrayal and pain. You should do some significant work to make sure that the decision that you are making is a good one.
* * *
The thing about trust is that it takes a long time to create, and mere moments to destroy. When it comes to the circle of people that we trust, it is probably comprised of a group of people who have, over long stretches of time, given us reasons to believe in their honesty, integrity, and loyalty.
Unfortunately, the circle of friends can more easily become a smaller circle than it can a larger circle, at least in my experience. At any moment, anyone in your inner circle could end up giving you a reason to wonder why it is that you trust them in the first place.
But then again, I don’t know if that’s how it works for me, anymore. When I was a kid, maybe, but these days, there’s grace –> at least for the slight offenses and trespasses. I suppose that, the more time you spend building a relationship with someone, the more likely you are to weather the small problems in the relationship –with grace– because of what you’ve invested in the other person.
While this isn’t to say that large misdeeds wouldn’t have very detrimental effects, I guess I can think of examples of situations where I’ve been graceful (or other people have been graceful with me) because of the importance of maintaining the relationship. As a kid, friends come and go and there doesn’t seem to be any ground-breaking significance in whether or not you gain one or lose one, in the grand scheme of things. As an adult, you understand that there is room for forgiveness and dispensation when you are dealing with others, especially if you’d like to see that in others’ dealings with you.
It occurred to me today that the ants have something to teach us.
I was big into the Dave Matthews Band back in the late 90s and early oughts. I was admittedly late to the party on this particular matter, but my brother and sister-in-law were very into DMB, and my wife and I started listening by proxy. Come to discover, the Dave Matthews Band had been responsible for some of the songs that I was really enjoying even earlier, songs that I’d never attributed to a particular artist before that point.
One of those catchy songs was Ants Marching. It was a very popular song, probably primarily because the melody was upbeat and fun. The lyrics, on the other hand, were a bit of a darker matter. The meaning to some of the lyrics seemed to be a condemnation of the human propensity toward mindlessly making our way through our days, without much thought or inclination toward progress. This was one of the things that I enjoyed about so many of the songs from DMB: they had some significance to them, besides being enjoyable musical numbers.
I’ve recently realized that I am guilty of this more often than I’d like to admit. Figuring out that we only have a certain amount of time in our lives, and that we ought not waste that time on just going through the motions of the daily grind, is a lesson that usually requires us to have a reason for reflection. The death of someone close will often do this for people, as it reminds us of our own mortality and the finite timeline that we, most of the time, would rather not think about.
For me, though, I think I might be having a bit of a mid-life crisis, as of late. This is also a common impetus toward introspection, as we look over a life half-lived –in our estimation, mathematically speaking– and what we might do, what changes we might make, to better steer ourselves into the future. The problem with the concept of a mid-life crisis is that it assumes that we have more time than we might actually have. For me to be having a mid-life crisis at the age of forty-four requires that I assume that I will live to be eighty-eight, give or take. Truth be told, I could get hit by a bus in six months, and my mid-life crisis should have been during my senior year of my undergrad.
Nevertheless, when I think of the DMB song Ants Marching as I’m writing this post, I think that maybe I have reached a point where I am no longer going to keep blindly doing the things that I’ve been doing, just out of some obtuse promenade through the rest of my days.
* * *
My wife and I have been dealing with an ant infestation in our living room this past week. It’s only happened to us once before, in the almost eleven years that we’ve been in our current home, and the previous time was so long ago as to erase from our minds the solution that we used previously. So, we hopped on the internet and started googling things like “pet safe ant poison” or “diy ant remedy”.
What we ended up discovering, as to how to kill the little buggers, seems to have worked. As we continue to check the area where they were getting into the house from the outside world (our house’s original structure dates back to 1869, so needless to say, there are probably a million places where ants could come in), it’s been a few days since we’ve noticed any new ones coming in.
One of the things that we discovered as we were scouring the internet, looking for assistance, was that there are different kinds of ants (which we knew) and that some types of ants will only invade your home if you have something to offer. Sugar ants, for example, are specifically interested in human food scraps that might be laying around that they can come inside and steal, to take back to their homes for their own particular snack.
Now, admittedly, my family is not the cleanest family in the world, but we are also not the sloppiest family, either. We clean in the places in the house where we find obvious messes, and we (semi-regularly) engage in a cleaning regimen around the house, whether there are obvious messes or not. I would have thought that, all things considered, we were doing pretty well.
But the ants disagreed.
When we noticed them last week, we followed the line of them, from where they were getting into the house, to where they seemed to be going. They were heading to our leather love-seat. Since we were pretty sure that they weren’t looking for a soft place to rest their heels (do ants even have heels?), we decided to investigate the leather love-seat, to see what may have been of interest to the ants.
We found the mother load of food particles and dropped snack stuffs underneath that love-seat, crawling with little sugar ants. Let me tell you how much fun that was to clean up. Pieces of candy and potato chip parts and several instances of the snack that smiles back. It was a regular sugar ant buffet under that love-seat, and we had no idea.
Isn’t that how it goes? You are plodding along, thinking everything is alright and that you’ve got everything covered and then, BAAM! Something hits you out of a clear blue sky and you had no idea it was coming, or that there was even anything that you could have been doing in the first place to prevent it. I think, when that happens, the best we can do is to move forward with the knowledge we’ve gained, making changes to our processes, to prevent bad things from happening again (as much as we can ever prevent bad things from happening). As crappy as it is that we are sometimes stuck in lousy situations that we don’t appreciate, we should at least be able to appreciate the chance to learn.
* * *
So, whether it’s a song about ants, or the actual creatures themselves, I think that ants have something to teach us. Maybe they can point out where we’ve forgotten to run the vacuum cleaner. Maybe they can point out how dull and monotonous a life of unrelenting sameness can be.
It occurred to me today that humor is something that we learn.
My son just told me a joke that wasn’t funny. And, as I often do when he tells me a joke that’s not funny, I rolled my eyes and I thought to myself about his sense of humor.
I suppose it likes most things: the more you work at it, the better you get. So, if your average day or week or month of human experience is going to have in it an average number of attempts by people at being funny/telling jokes/getting others to laugh, then as time goes by, forty year olds are going to be funnier, on average, than six year olds, and neither of those groups of people are going to be as funny as your average senior citizen.
And, as with most things, there are going to be people who work at improving harder than others. Michael Jordan was, when he retired for the last time in 2003, one of the greatest players to ever play the game. He was about forty at the time. I’m forty-four, four years older than Michael was back then, and I’m not nearly as good. I think I have played in three actual basketball games in my entire life –> that might have something to do with it.
So, the passage of time improves us, just as water wears at the edges of a stone, gradually and with a patience that puts most people to shame. But, concerted effort also improves us, for those who don’t have the time or the patience to wait. You could wait for the water to smooth the stone, or you could take a file or some sandpaper to that stone, or a hammer and a chisel.
Back to the question of humor, comedians are the professionals in the ‘sport’, and their concerted effort makes them funnier than the average person. They try jokes in front of people and those jokes succeed or fail, and the comedian is paying attention to that data, to be able to tailor a set of jokes that really has them rollin’ in the aisles. As they do this work, they come to understand things about delivery and timing and knowing your audience. Because comedians know things about being funny that your average human doesn’t understand, they’d have a greater chance at being really funny, I would think, than those who just don’t fully understand.
Jokes about social media are going to flop in a nursing home, and jokes about retirement planning are going to backfire in a TikTok video.
However, aside from the people who work really hard at designing a comedy routine, there are some people who are funnier than others, even when you account for things like learning or planning. Could it be that there’s a talent involved here, like there is with so many things where learning is involved?
Maybe, like so many things, our children pick up from us –their parents– some abilities because they observe us doing certain things. I have a cousin who is good with cars, and when we were kids, he was always next to his father, my uncle, working on and paying attention to cars. My children have watched my wife and me as we exercise our musical skills, and they have, each of them in their own way, excelled in music to different extents.
* * *
Not to stray from the subject for very long, but I’ve often wondered about this question of talent vs. training and the combination of these two things that you find in the most capable of people in whatever field or discipline you might chose to focus on. Is the greatest brain surgeon the one with eight thousand hours of brain surgery experience or the one with the rock solid hands that don’t ever more a millimeter with his consent? Can you teach steady hands? Can you have enough skill to make training unnecessary?
In psychology class, my students would understand this as the question of nature vs. nurture. We have certain things that are naturally handed to us, in our genetics, while we have other things that we receive from exposure to certain environments in our lives. The son of the NBA superstar might get his father’s genes, resulting in him growing to an adult height of 6’9″, but he will probably also pick up on some things as he sits in the bleachers watching his dad in his practice sessions.
Along these same lines, I wonder if talent is actually a myth. I wonder whether or not it’s actually an illusion that anyone has ever been successful doing something really well that they didn’t work really hard to succeed at doing. Have we ever documented someone who is totally capable of something that everyone else has had to work at, and that person has exactly zero hours of experience or practice?
Bob Ross, talented artist, once said, “Talent is pursued interest. Anything that you are willing to practice, you can do.”
* * *
I expect that my son will eventually get better at being funny. If he doesn’t have an innate talent –which would seem unlikely at this point–he’ll at least get better through the process of practice and learning. It’s important to note that this process –> the process by which all of us tend to get better at things over time when we continue to work at improvement –> this process is called progress.
I’ve written several blog posts over the past few months about getting better at things, about making improvements, about being about the business of advancement. It’s unfortunately the case that I, only recently, have discovered that, for many years, I squandered my time, not really doing my best to move forward in being the best person that I can be.
It occurred to me today that safety shouldn’t be hard to find.
One of my family’s favorite vacations was the trip that we took to Disney in 2016. We talk about it often, when we are in the mood to recollect some of our favorite memories (it’s a game we play, see HERE for the details). One of the smartest things that we did on that vacation was to pay for the Disney PhotoPass; this service allows for a collection of photos to be built during your Disney adventures, as all of the photographers in all of the Disney parks end up linking the pictures that they take of you to an on-line account that becomes a digital photo album. I don’t remember what we paid for it, but it was worth it, whatever the cost.
As I ponder the topic of fear for this post, I am reminded of the photo that was taken of our family at the very top of the Tower of Terror in the Hollywood Studios park at Disney World. That photo, like so many others that were added to our PhotoPass album, is now forever a part of our memories from the trip. My son was twelve at the time, and my twin daughters would have been nine.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “when the bottom drops out”, it’s meant to describe a situation that goes badly very quickly. We assume that what’s under us is going to be there, and continue to be there, because we operate under the assumption that it’s normally the case that we have something under us. And it’s because we are largely unaccustomed to the feeling of having things beneath us suddenly disappear, that the feeling of it, when it happens, is particularly frightening.
I just so happen to have a picture of what that fear looks like on the faces of all of the members of my family –> how cool is that?!?!
In the instant of fear, we seek safety as part of a natural fight-or-flight response that is built into our nervous systems. That photo, from the top of the Tower of Terror, shows my son, next to me, wrapped around my arm and clinging tightly, in the moment of his deepest fright.
It’s not that I did anything to make this all go away for him. To be completely honest, I was significantly terrified, as well. But, I am strong (sometimes) and my son came to me because he knew my strength. For him, there was a bit of safety in that strength.
It might be a little sick and twisted of me, but I will always have a strange affection for that photo. I don’t like it because of the fear that it captured on the faces of all of my closest loved ones; rather, I love that photo because it showed my son seeking strength and safety from me in his moment of need.
* * *
In the late fall of 2008, my only brother died unexpectedly in a freak accident. That time, those hours and days and weeks, were mostly a blur and I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I do remember very heavily leaning on my wife. My wife, and her strength during that time when I needed someone to lean on so much, was invaluable to me. I can’t imagine how badly that period of my life could have ended up
–where I might have ended up, resulting from that darkness– had it not been for the support that Jennie gave me.
The shock of my brother’s death was the worst part; death is always horrible but I think it might be slightly less so when the death is expected and you have a chance to come to terms with what’s about to happen. We never had that chance –> we literally were caught entirely off-guard.
But, Jennie was there for my mother and father, and even my brother’s widow as well, as she recognized that the four of us desperately needed to have someone to be strong for us. In fact, she sacrificed how she was feeling and the grief that she was dealing with, in exchange for being the person that each of us was turning to during those dark times.
When a ship is on the ocean and the storms threaten it, the ship would reasonably seek a harbor.
Jennie was our harbor.
* * *
For me, and others like me, we have an even stronger place to go when we feel like the world is crashing in, when we feel like all other hope is lost. Seeking God, and knowing that He is always in control of what is going on in our world, is a great solace.
For example, take this year, thus far.
This year has been unlike any other year before it, for sure, but as upside-down and crazy as this has all seemed, none of it has surprised God. He has remained in control throughout. For those who might wonder about a god who would allow the insanity of 2020 to have taken place, I certainly trust in His plans. He is God and I am not. This doesn’t mean that I’m not afraid of what’s going on; it just means that I’ve got an ultimate place to go to find refuge from my fear.
God can accomplish His purposes through whatever circumstances He sees fit to use, in my life personally, and in the larger scope of my community and the entire world. I can still rest comfortably in His arms, knowing that He is the ultimate place to go for the strength that I seek when I fear or grieve. As nice as it is to have people around us to help us with our fears and our sadness, they will sometimes fail us.
It occurred to me today that our expectations might be a little messed up.
A friend and I were listening to music earlier today and we heard the song, I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers.
It was a one-hit wonder song from a one-hit wonder band, to my recollection, and while the song was playing, we commented on the fact that the song was basically a list of several unrealistic promises that the balladeer was making to the target of the love song.
My friend, who is always very astute and observant, made a note that you just don’t hear love songs where the singer promises to do the things that often upset spouses when they go undone.
When he said this, I laughed and thought to myself, “How little we understand about what to expect when we are first starting things out?”
How about this for the first line of a love song: “I will show you my love by picking up my dirty socks.”
Love songs like these, while they would certainly be more honest with respect to what marriage and the marital experience end up being like, they wouldn’t be very “romantic”. They wouldn’t end up at the top of the charts, I don’t think.
The funny thing about the word “romantic” is that it has two definitions –> the definition that is not “an expression of feelings of love” is rather “related to an idealized view of reality”.
Talk about ironic –> romantic means delusional.
And, if you stop to think about it, romantic notions about marriage are idealized views of reality. The woman who marries the husband, thinking that her new husband is going to be the ideal Prince Charming, is being a romantic –> in both senses of the word, perhaps. The man who marries the wife, thinking that her new wife is going to be the ideal, is being romantic.
The truth of the matter is that these expectations are unrealistic, because people are humans. Humans are imperfect and incapable and disappointing.
What you end up discovering is that your wife can’t cook, or your husband can’t remember to put the seat down when he’s done, or your wife doesn’t understand the basics of washing laundry, or your husband is more likely to injure himself with a power tool than to be productive with one.
The major issue here is expectations.
* * *
I partially blame Disney, at least when it comes to all of this ‘unrealistic romantic expectations’ non-sense. While, more often than, it’s quite harmless how young children are affected by any individual piece of programming that they watch early on, the overall effect of all of that programming, piled piece on top of piece on top of piece, is that it starts to lead to an entire set of unrealistic –dare I say, romantic– expectations that we carry into our relationships with other people.
As guilty as Disney might be in peddling unrealistic expectations, specifically when it comes to romance, Hollywood is –in general– another place where we tend to get our unrealistic expectations of the world. When was the last time that you saw a movie where the main character popped a zit? Or lanced a blister to let the puss out? When was the last time that you saw a romantic film where the husband had to help his wife put her anti-fungal cream on her toenails?
We end up with unrealistic expectations when we think that the real world will operate the way that it does in the videos we watch.
It just doesn’t.
* * *
There are certainly many areas of life where unrealistic expectations set us up for disappointment and hurt feelings down the line. You’ve probably heard it said that, “If you don’t expect too much, it’s harder to be let down.”
While this is a cynical way of looking at life, it does work, and I can speak from experience on this. As often as I have been disappointed in the way that things sometimes turn out in life, I have tried to make it my practice to –at the very moment when I realize that I am feeling disappointed– to ask myself to review my expectations, to see whether or not I was being unrealistic or idealistic.
Just earlier this evening, a couple of hours ago, I was significantly disappointed to discover that I wasn’t going to be getting something that I had been looking forward to all day long, something that I was led to believe that I would be getting. At that point, as the disappointment set in, I realized that I wasn’t at all reasonable to have expected the thing in the first place, in light of the circumstances.
When things don’t turn out as I would like them to turn out, it is true
–almost every time– that I was expecting too much or that I was being unrealistic in the first place.
* * *
If Bruno Mars could release his next hit single and the lyrics could go something like, “Baby, I will show you how deeply I love you by taking care of the cat litter every time it should be done”, that would get the world a little bit closer to a realistic understanding of what it really means to be devoted to someone. Or, if Disney’s next Prince Charming could avoid slaying dragons, conquering enemy armies, and traveling hundreds of miles to save the Princess, so that he could instead devote his full energy and whole-hearted enthusiasm to learning how to keep a bathroom clean, then the Princess might be even more impressed by his level of commitment.
What I’m really saying is that we need to be careful when it comes to what we are expecting of each other.
It occurred to me today that I prefer things to be stable.
When I was a kid, I remember loving roller coasters…
…once they were underway.
But, before that, there was the worst part of the roller coaster experience: the build-up to the actual start. When I was a kid, you got in the car, and the car took off from the start/finish area (where you got on the ride and then, two minutes later, you got off), only to almost immediately head into the long climb.
This part of the roller coaster experience was just a long, slow climb into the air, up to the top of the tallest part of the roller coaster, the part that led to the first drop that ended up being enough momentum that it would carry you throughout the rest of the entire ride.
I remember being terrified, on numerous occasions, by the click-click-click-click of the cars in the roller coaster as they were pulled, by the cable under the roller coaster, to the top of this enormous hill. I remember looking out either side of the roller coaster and seeing the familiar surroundings fall away as the height got to be higher and higher, until it was only treetops and distant horizons in all directions.
Knowing that the top was coming. Knowing that the fall was coming. Knowing that the excitement was coming, but not until the agonizingly slow climb to the top was completed. I remember the click-click-click-click of the climb turning into a click—-click——–click————click—————-click that signaled that the climb was almost over and that the drop was just a second or two away.
And then –> the drop, and the twisting and turning, and flying and flipping, and the fun of the roller coaster probably lasted half-as-long as the climb to the top of that biggest drop.
* * *
I am a little old these days to be riding on roller coasters, but I still get that same feeling, sometimes.
My family is leaving on vacation tomorrow. We will be gone, to parts unknown by our family, for two weeks. It will include a lot of fun memories and many enjoyable experiences.
But I won’t be happy until we are there.
Which means, between now and Saturday afternoon, when all of the highway driving and all of the significant mileage is complete, I will feel just like I am being towed by a cable, pulling me in my little two-seat cart, to the top of the tallest drop of the roller coaster.
My wife asked me a few minutes ago what was wrong. She could tell that something was up with me. She and I have known each other for so long that we understand when the other one is even just a little bit off. I told her that I was feeling unsettled. When I know that something big is coming, I just want to be on the other side of it. I know that the next forty-eight hours is going to be a transition from where I am used to being, to where I am going to be heading.
Once we get there, and we can get settled and things can return to something that looks more like what my life would normally be like, everything will be fun and fine.
I don’t know why I’m this way, and I don’t know if other people operate in this same manner. I suspect that there are people who can enjoy that long and arduous trip to the top of the first drop of the roller coaster, but those kind of people don’t make sense to me. What is it that they are enjoying? You’ve certainly heard it said –including by me (hypocritically as it turns out) once or twice on this blog– that one should enjoy the journey. But, at this moment, as I am sitting in limbo between where I am about to leave and where I am yet to arrive, it would seem that I am unable to “enjoy the journey”.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that I am goal-oriented. I’ll blame my parents for that one (sorry, Mom, but I think that this is probably well-placed), since my Dad and I had plenty of exchanges while I was growing up that were, shall we say, “goal-focused”. Because of this, I don’t know if I am going to ever be able to just, spontaneously, “journey” or “wander” without a particular destination as the end-goal.
My brother, who died in 2008, was the same way –> there were many famous stories about how my brother would start a home improvement project or a home repair, and he wouldn’t stop until he was done, sometimes going right through the evening and into the night. He once hung a chandelier in his starter home and worked on it until the wee hours of the next morning because he was determined to get it figured out, determined to reach the goal.
I have a goal in front of me, and since we aren’t yet all packed and ready to go, we can’t leave yet. Thus, I am hampered in doing what I have always been trained to do –> attain the goal.
* * *
I think about the adjective, “settled”, and the adjective, “unsettled”, and I am interested in the differences. When I think about settling, I think about settlers. People who were moving from one place to another, in order to “settle” there. Conversely, I guess that someone who is unsettled is not in a place where they feel like they are comfortable or where they feel that they are able to be at peace with their set of circumstances.
It’s during times like these that I feel unsettled.
It occurred to me today that there are a lot of situations that could be described by the concept of diamonds in horse manure.
Let’s say, for example, that I took $500,000 worth of diamonds and I evenly distributed those in one ton of horse manure? Would you go looking for them?
Maybe your answer is a quick yes, but what if I said that it was only $200,000 worth of diamonds, or what if I told you that you had to look through two tons of manure. Is there a balance, or a ratio, beyond which you’d be opposed to this endeavor? Would you search for $10,000 worth of diamonds in five tons of horse manure?
The basic question is this: how much bad stuff are you willing to put up with to get some good stuff?
* * *
I have been thinking about trying to become a freelance writer, lately.
And so, I’ve signed up as a freelance writer on a couple of different freelancer sites, and I am sure that there are thousands upon thousands of users just like me on those sites, and the people who are looking to hire someone to write something for them aren’t going to wade through the thousands upon thousands of available writers that are available to find me, waiting and available. It’s too much work for them to do.
Or, if you look at it from the other side of the coin…
On one of these particular sites that I signed up for, I have been “hired” for jobs a half-dozen times over the last couple of weeks, and each time the employer ends up being some “businessman” from a foreign country (India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, to name a few) who wants me to partner with them as they tackle the U.S. job market.
Basically, these “businessmen” want me to work for them in some pyramid scheme were I employ my American friends under me and we all work for this man overseas, doing things that they won’t even mention until I’ve gone so far as to commit to being a part of one of these ventures.
How much of that particular horse manure am I willing to sort through to get to that one person who is looking for someone just like me to write something for them that I would totally knock out of the park?
* * *
I had a computer repair job come in the other day. A friend of a friend of a cousin of mine asked me to fix a laptop that was having problems booting up. When you turned the laptop on, it never made it all the way to the login screen. When I took the job, I told the guy that it would probably be a pretty easy fix and that there are only a few problems that tend to cause these kinds of issues.
And, a couple of hours later, I was looking for answers on the internet…
The way that things seem to go for me when I end up looking on the internet for assistance with a computer problem is that there is so much crap that it’s hardly worth wading through all of it. You find websites that only have the suggestions that you’ve already tried, or you find other websites that claim to have the answer, but they’re not even close. I searched and searched for the right answer, and I was ready to give up, but then…
…I found the website that had the advice that ended up working for me.
So, in light of the difficulty that I had during this particular job fixing this boot up issue, I created a document that I will keep that had the set of instructions that I looked very hard to find.
I mean, can you imagine going through the horse manure to find the diamonds, only to through the diamonds back into the horse manure –to prolong your own agony?!?!
* * *
I was at a community gathering the other night, hosted by the police department in my town. During the meeting, the police chief was talking about big city policing and how excited small town police departments have often been, in the past, to discover that they’ve been following the same protocols and procedures as the big city departments do.
The police chief said at this meeting the other night that he thinks that it’s time for big city police departments to start looking at small town departments, who are policing their municipalities with peace and service, rather than with brutality and domination, and it got me to thinking and my metaphor, here.
Who’s to say that the big city police departments are doing it right? Ask Breonna Taylor’s family or George Floyd’s family, and they would probably tell you that there is something wrong with their local police force and the way that they are handling things. Perhaps, small towns have more than a thing or two to teach to the big towns.
But, if you are a big city kind of a person, small towns are not your thing, just as the small town person is not interested in the big city. It’s not that either of these approaches are inherently correct or incorrect, but people have different preferences.
If you asked a gardener to dig around in a ton of manure to look for the half-million dollars in diamonds, they might just be more interested in the fertilizer. You can’t make the geraniums grow by sprinkling diamonds over their root structure.
* * *
The post is titled, “Diamonds in Horse Manure”, and while some would, in a mixture of one ton of horse manure and a couple of handfuls of diamonds, find more value in the manure than in the gems, others would go straight for the “girl’s best friend”. It’s certainly a matter of perspective, I suppose.
So, if this is true, and so much of how we look at life and what we are having to deal with is just a matter of perspective, then we ought to –in order to keep ourselves from being tossed around by the fickle and ever-changing circumstances of life– become highly skilled at looking at things at different perspectives.
So, why aren’t we?!?!
Why does it seem to be the case that so many people are just stuck looking at things from only one vantage point, incapable of the mental flexibility that it takes to consider things differently? If I were offered the opportunity to search in a ton of horse manure for a half-million dollars in diamonds, the very first thing I would do, I’d think, would be to start looking at horse manure from whatever other perspective would make me capable of digging around in equine feces.
The next time you’re in a spot or a jam, and you are frustrated by what you are having to endure in order to make it through, perhaps it would really be much simpler to look at the bad stuff as “not-so-bad-stuff”.
It occurred to me today that there is a lot of lip service going on these days.
If you don’t know what lip service is, it’s a claim that something is important that isn’t supported by a person’s actions. For example, if someone tells you that their physical fitness is important to them, but they don’t exercise, then it’s lip service. Or, if a politician tells you that public safety is important to them, but they don’t set a safe example, then it’s lip service.
Don’t tell me something’s a priority with your words and then show me that it’s not with your actions. That leads me to believe that what you say and what you truly believe are not the same thing. If I have a reason to believe that you say things that you don’t believe, then I stop trusting you –or at least I stop trusting what you say.
* * *
It’s a matter of integrity, really. And, when I think about the word “integrity” I always think about the starship Enterprise.
If you’ve been playing along on the at-home version of this blog, then you know that I’m a Star Trek fan (proof lies HERE and HERE). When the word “integrity” is used on the Star Trek television episodes or in the Star Trek movies, it’s usually a reference to the ship being under attack, and the thickness of the ship’s shields, or even the hull of the ship itself, is giving way. The problem with being in a space vessel is that the hull is what separates you from the vacuum of space. Zero hull integrity in space means bad things if you –for example– breathe oxygen,
Or, think about a submarine. The hull of a submarine is several inches thick and is usually made out of steel. The generally-agreed-upon safe depth for a submarine is not to exceed 800 feet deep in the water, because the pressure of the outside water on the hull of the submarine at greater depths is more than the steel hull can withstand. At 800 feet deep in the water, the sub is under a pressure that is 2400 times as intense as the pressure of the atmosphere on us as we normally walk around on the earth. During your average day on the planet, you are under pressure from the atmosphere around you that equals about 14.6 pounds per square inch of your skin. Because your skin and your skeletal structure is strong enough to handle that pressure, you aren’t squished like a grape by the pressure of the atmosphere around you.
A submarine at 800 feet deep in the water is under a pressure that equals approximately 35,000 pounds per square inch. While that seems like a lot of pressure, a hull that is thick enough –that has enough integrity– can withstand that amount of force. You can imagine what would happen if a submarine had a single square inch of its hull, where the hull thickness was only four inches instead of seven, and the sub was 800 feet deep in the water. That single square inch is going to be the point where 35,000 pounds of ocean is going to come in to the submarine.
In short, a hull needs to be able to stand up to pressure.
So, maybe part of the problem with integrity –> saying what we mean and meaning what we say, is that we are under pressure that causes us to fail to live up to the words that we utter, when it comes to taking the actions that we suggested that we would take. I can talk about how important my fitness is to me, but tomorrow morning, will I mount up and go for a run or will I avoid my responsibility and take the easier path? Or, when I say how much my fitness means to me, but that container of Oreos in my pantry is looking pretty awesome, can I stand up against that pressure?
* * *
In my house, we have a system of chores that seems to work pretty well –if you ask me– and the kids are able to gain access to “screens” (cellphone, TV, XBox, basically anything that has a screen that you might stare at) when the system of chores is completed.
The problem with the system, often times, is that the children don’t do their chores, and then they don’t get screen time. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth –> it’s awful. Another problem with the system is procrastination –> when my kids spend all day not doing much of anything, but then, they get to the end of the day and it’s a mad dash to try to get stuff done, so the system is completed and they can have screen time.
To which, I will often say, “You had plenty of time earlier today to do this stuff, but you didn’t. If it wasn’t important to you then, how can it be that important to you now?”
They hate it when I say that. But it’s true, and it makes me think about the three Ts –> time, talent, and treasure. What we spend our time on, what we use our talents for, and what we spend our money on (treasure) will pretty much tell the tale of what’s important to us.
What we say means almost nothing.
If I spend my money on scratch-off tickets at the local gas station, but I tell you how concerned I am about having enough money to retire someday, what are you going to believe?
If I spend forty-five minutes scrolling Facebook, but then I complain about how I didn’t have enough time to complete that certain project that you asked me to complete, what are you going to believe?
If I don’t have enough time to work out, but I definitely have enough time to play Candy Crush on my phone for two hours, what are you going to believe?
If I don’t have enough money in my budget to allow me to give to charities that support orphans in Africa, but I can eat out seven or eight times a month, what are you going to believe?
I guess, to a certain extent, many of us have a problem doing this –> saying one thing but then doing something else. It seems to be pretty central to the hypocrisy which is fundamental to the human experience, but I would suggest this, if you can’t help but say things that you are later going to have a hard time living up to:
Don’t talk. Just act. Don’t say. Just show. Don’t promise. Just prove.
In our efforts to express ourselves, we rush into statements that end up being our undoing. In a world of increasing levels of noise, the way to defeat the problem of lip service is to speak as little as possible.
It Occurred To Me Today 