It occurred to me, moments ago, that we struggle so hard and it’s often for nought.
I’m a bit of a baby whisperer, when it comes to nap time, and I, just moments ago, had my skills on display. And you missed it.
I’ve raised three kids, and I have three nieces and a nephew, so over the course of the last fifteen years or so, I’ve had lots of opportunities to convince toddlers and newborns that it’s time for their nap.
If you’ve ever been a part of that particular battle, you understand how it works. The convincing and conniving, the bargaining and the begging, the “I’m not tired”, followed by the trip to dreamland.
My wife and I, as we were raising our kids, understood our roles in this particular game quite well. Often times, she was the starting pitcher, who would start off the game and carry on as far into the innings as was possible, but there always comes the point in the game when you call in your closer.
That was me.
The children who fight the nap the hardest are sometimes the most tired, while others fight the nap for mere seconds before giving up the fight and caving in.
And –I’m a little ashamed to say this– I prefer to use the strong but gentle approach: holding the fighting, crying child securely in my arms until they became convinced that 1) their fight was futile, and 2) they really were getting tired. Gently patting their backs or their bottoms, shushing them quietly and rhythmically with the sound of my whispering voice, sometimes rocking them back and forth to get them to nod off.
If this approach sounds wrong, then I’m wrong, but I will once again point to my track record.
The interesting part of this whole recollection is this –> it’s often obvious to everyone except the child that they are tired and in need of a nap. And they fight it so valiantly, as if having to take a nap was the greatest of the crimes of society against the smallest among us.
Don’t even get me started on how toddlers fight naps and adults would often kill for one.
* * *
I knew, just a few moments ago, that my niece needed a nap –> I could tell because her mom told me when should would probably need one, but I also knew just by watching her eyes droop and her head bobbing, down and then back up.
So, I took her in my arms, and she fought. I knew how it was going to end, and she did fight with valor for several minutes. But, the baby whisperer –the closing pitcher who is brought in to seal the victory– won once again.
And the whole process, which I’ve been through hundreds of times, has me thinking about life and our futile struggles.
I wonder how often we get ourselves worked up about things that can’t be helped, things that are inevitable, and how many times, when we have the opportunity to accept, with a measure of composure and tranquility, the events of life that are inexorable, do we instead rail against what is coming. Rather than focusing on the way that we react to the circumstances of life, we get all hot and bothered about every twist and turn in the road.
If you’ve ever wondered at all about Buddhism, like I have, you may want to look into their belief system a little bit, especially when it comes to the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. Now, I would never suggest that someone become a Buddhist, since I am a Christian, but I do believe that there is truth to be found in Buddhist beliefs and that all truth is God’s Truth.
The Four Noble Truths involve the suffering that exists in the world, and –more specifically– how our own ignorance and desires cause us to experience more suffering than what is actually necessary on the journey through life. The Noble Eightfold Path is a series of steps that a person can take to make suffering easier to manage, or even avoid altogether.
Like the toddler who, rather than accepting the inevitability of nap time and just coming to terms with it, opposes nap time and seeks to resist nap time and becomes consumed by their suffering during nap time, we are all subject to circumstances that could easily “get a rise” out of us.
But we chose to react to these circumstances. We chose to allow what’s going on in the world around us to dictate how we feel and to what extent we are able to be happy in the present moments of our lives.
And if it’s not the events of the world, it’s the people in it, who get under our skin. They say things and we lose our entire ability to control what we think about them and how badly we want to talk back to them and what we’d do to them, if no one was looking.
We chose to let those people dictate our thoughts and behaviors. In effect, we give them control over how we feel and what we say and do. I’d say that they rob us of our happiness, but it’s not even robbery, we give our happiness to them willingly.
* * *
I’ve heard the phrase a lot lately: the struggle is real. In fact, a quick Google search of the phrase gave me more memes than I could shake a stick at –> geesh!
But, the more I stop to think about it, I’m not sure that the struggle is real.
If we just accepted the circumstances of life with some humility and grace and serenity, we would get less worked up all the time.
The belief that we are constantly in the midst of some set of circumstances that should cause us to be outraged and alarmed is, more often than not, just a decision that we chose to make to get on the crazy train.
And, while it’s probably unreasonable to expect that anyone is ever going to be able to be in complete control of their reactions to the storms of this life, I think we could all aspire to being a little less “the struggle is real” and a little more “on the noble path”.
Now, you’ll have to excuse me; my niece just woke up from the nap that she told me that she didn’t need and she fought so hard to avoid.
It occurred to me today that lunchladies might be screwed for reasons that are beyond them.
My wife and I, years ago, in one of our many attempts to gain insight into the best ways to parent our children, read a book called Parenting with Love and Logic. It was a great book, as I recall, and it introduced us to many good parenting concepts, one of which was a governing principle regarding what we do for our children.
The idea was pretty simple –> a parent shouldn’t do for their child what the child can do for themselves. Parents need to make an agreement to not do things for children, when the children can do for themselves, so that the children learn to be functional and autonomous. Parents who do things for their children, that the children can do for themselves, demean the children and their ability to contribute.
Many children these days are so used to having things done for them, that they lack the ability to initiate their own work or to struggle in the midst of a task on their own. Additionally, children will learn not to do certain things for themselves, if the parents are always there to do it for them, and then, that feeling of lazy helplessness starts to transfer to other areas of the child’s life, robbing the kids of any initiative that they might have shown on their own.
Quite to the contrary, a child who is expected to do what they are able to do for themselves learns responsibility for those behaviors and then becomes more likely to be successful down the line, when additional responsibility, or more complex responsibility, is expected.
* * *
If my children are responsible for making a meal for themselves, they will put together nacho chips with melted shredded cheese on top, and they will declare it a culinary masterpiece. They will try to convince you that it is the greatest thing that was ever devised by any chef anywhere.
If I make them a meal, they complain about it.
And, it’s not just that they make what they want, and I don’t make what they want, because they complain even when I make what they want, so there’s that.
And, now that we are on summer vacation, and my children are home –which, technically, they’ve been home since the middle of March, so this is just the beginning of a summer vacation that actually started, for all practical purposes, almost three months ago– they’ve decided to start taking advantage, at their discretion, of the summer meal program that the local school district runs.
The local school district provides breakfast and lunch for any school student who makes their way to the school to pick those meals up. We printed the calendar and put it on the fridge and the kids can look each day and decide whether or not they want to go to the school to get the lunch for the day, or if they want to make their own lunch, or if they want to roll the dice and see whether or not Mom or Dad is going to make something good.
The other day, I noticed that my children went to the school to get the school lunch for the day. As we all sat down at the dining room table to have lunch, I noticed that my children were complaining about the lunch that they got from the school.
The free lunch, that they didn’t have to do any work to create.
It had no value in their minds.
* * *
If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, which is a phrase that means to say that everything has a price and that handouts always end up costing someone something, you might understand what I’m thinking. Here I am, thinking about free school lunches, and the funny thing about these particular free lunches is that they are of less value to my children, apparently, than a plate of nachos and cheese.
Why is it that we value less what costs us little or nothing? Shouldn’t those things that have cost us little or nothing be of greater value to us, simply because they didn’t cost us?
And these free school lunches are packed with protein and fruits and vegetables –good ones, the ones that kids actually like– and the lunchladies have included all that they can to make the meal nutritious and delicious, but my kids aren’t having it.
I think it must have something to do with the work involved for my children. My kids are always proud of the work that they do, whenever they accomplish anything at all. The sink of dishes that they washed is an act worthy of the highest praise. The sticks picked up in the back yard is a feat worthy of a made-for-TV documentary.
Maybe this is true of everyone, now that I think about it.
It is certainly the case that I have been guilty of excess pride when it wasn’t warranted. I know that I could come up with a list of adults guilty of the same thing in the past. It’s a bias, I suppose, that we over-value the work that we do, and we undervalue the work that others do.
If I ask my kids how they built the amazing plate of nachos with melted cheese, they describe it as if it were a harrowing, twelve-hour brain surgery.
But, they mock the work of the lunchladies.
* * *
When someone does something for you, assuming that it is something that you can’t do for yourself, I would hope that gratitude would be a pretty natural response for any person with any kind of decency. The understanding that you could not have accomplished the thing that someone else was able to accomplish for you, should illicit a grateful attitude.
But, something entirely different happens when someone does something for you that you could have done for yourself. They undervalue your work and are less likely to be thankful. It’s a real shame, when you stop to think about it.
I’m not really sure where this whole post was going, but it has something to do with work and gratitude, independence and interdependence.
So, let me just close with this:
At the school where I work, for several years in a row, I was responsible, at the beginning of the year, for teaching our student body about the behavioral expectations in the cafeteria. I don’t remember how I originally got assigned the responsibility, but I grew into the role, for sure.
One of the things that I did, as I was teaching our students how to act in the cafeteria, was to tell them about my mother, who was a lunchlady for thirty years. I would tell my students, year after year, about the stories that my own mother would come home and tell about how horribly she’d been treated by students at her work.
And, as I told my students this story, year after year, with tears in my eyes, I reminded them to be sure to be nice and respectful to the lunchladies, because they are worthy of respect.
Now, truth be told, my mother retired a few years back from many decades in the healthcare industry, and she’d probably be mortified to hear that she was a party to a lie that I repeatedly told to get my students to be nice to the lunchladies where I work, but I think that sometimes, the ends justify the means.
All of the words that have preceded this have meant to say: I think that lunchladies get a bad rap –> partly because they are doing a job that is undervalued, and partly because they are doing something that our students could do for themselves –although it’s hard to imagine a school of any size incorporating a system where students efficiently make their own lunches.
The next time you see a lunchlady, even if it’s a fictional lunchlady like my mom, thank them for what they do. Chances are, they are underappreciated.
It occurred to me today that my amazing now isn’t what my amazing used to be.
First off, I just need to start off by saying that I have been feeling more and more lately that I have made so many positive changes during the past three months –> I don’t ever want things to get “back to normal”. Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t hope that we will one day get back to something as close to what we used to have as possible, but I also think that people who think that things are going to be the way that they were don’t have their heads on straight.
Additionally, for me personally, I don’t want to go back to the me that I was, just going through the motions and fumbling through the days, previously. I wonder if my mid-life crisis and the quarantine didn’t, in fact, coincide –> to create a new Phil Brackett. More on that in a moment…
For about the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to news reports from states, who fought hard to reopen early, that are now becoming the new hot spots for corona virus cases nationwide. In fact, it was about a month ago when I wrote THIS POST about whether or not it was a good idea to rush into opening up at all. One of these states that I’ve been watching in the news is the state where my family and I are supposed to vacation in July –> that’s got me a little worried.
And, as a quick political side note –> congratulations to Governor Gretchen Whitmer on her handling of a pandemic in a state that was, initially, one of the worst hot spots, and is now one of the most exciting pandemic success stories.
Anyway, I just wonder what the rush was to get back to “normal”. I guess I can admit, with a little bit of shame, that I wasn’t living my best life before the pandemic. I was definitely too busy, which the pandemic and the quarantine pretty much took care of. I wasn’t spending as much time with my kids as I should have been. How about being locked up with them in the house for twelve weeks?!?!
But, an even bigger part of the problem was that I wasn’t pursuing my goals and my interests back then, back when things were “normal”. Now that I’ve started to re-prioritize my agenda, I don’t want to go back to the way that things were. To be honest, I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when I have to start making the tough choices between keeping these new loves that I’ve found and going back to doing what everyone else wants me to do.
Check this out:
If you take all of the blog posts that I’ve written and put them all together in one document, it’s the equivalent length of a two-hundred page novel.
If you’d asked me on March 13th, the last day that I had a classroom full of students in front of me, if I was going to be able to write a two-hundred page novel in 2020, I would’ve laughed in your face.
If you’d asked me on March 13th, the last day that I had a classroom full of students in front of me, if I was going to be able to run a 10K distance this year, I would have said something like, “I sure hope so.”
I’ve run two 10K distances this week, my first two 10K distances ever.
And I can tell you one thing, as I sit here and type these things out; I’M NOT GOING BACK TO THE WAY THINGS WERE –> THAT “NORMAL” IS NOT WORTH GOING BACK TO.
* * *
I think that I’ve discovered that my current concept of “amazing” isn’t what it used to be, because I’ve advanced. I am capable of doing what I would have previously considered amazing, because of these advancements, so now, I need to be looking further down the road.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if I ran a half-marathon? Wouldn’t it be amazing if I got a book published? Wouldn’t it be amazing if my doctor was impressed with my physical fitness at my next physical? Wouldn’t it be amazing if I signed a book deal?
These are my new “amazings”. These are the new goals. I’ve taken the first bite of the entree, and it tastes SOOOOOO good, and now I am looking forward to the next bite, and the next, and the next.
I’m not going back to waiting in the entryway, hoping to be seated.
Earlier, I mentioned my mid-life crisis and the quarantine coinciding, and I was partly kidding, but I’m also partly serious. I’ve taken a look at who I was and compared it to who I want to be and I decided that it was time to make some changes.
You should try it.
I know that, on the average day, there aren’t that many people reading these posts, and it doesn’t really bother me that there aren’t. But, I do know that there are a few people –sometimes random guests and sometimes faithful readers– who read my posts everyday.
In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I got a comment on one of my posts from someone named Pengobatan Sipilis, and they told me that something that I’d written in a post was helpful for them.
I’d have to say, that’s relatively amazing to me!
I hope that you can all look at what your current “amazings” are and say that you are closer to them than you were previously. I hope that you all are in a place where what you’ve accomplished is what you would have previously hoped to accomplish, and that you are reaching for the next level of amazing.
I saw a meme on social media the other day that said something like, “Don’t live the same year seventy or eighty times and call that ‘a life’.”
It occurred to me today that I’ve been missing the user manual… for life.
I have, at multiple times during my life, wished that there was a user manual. For example, right after I got married, I remember wondering to myself what I was supposed to be doing as a new husband, aside from the things that occurred to me to do, naturally, as part of my growing relationship with my wife. I let her choose which side of the bed she wanted to sleep on, and I made sure to compliment her cooking, and I let her choose which parking spot she wanted in the garage; basically, we figured it out, but it would have been great to have a user manual.
Or, right after my first child was born, I remember thinking that I was lost without some kind of set of instructions as to what was expected of me. Who gets up in the middle of the night when the baby cries? How am I supposed to know what the baby wants? How warm should a bottle of formula be? My wife and I had so many questions, and again, we just figured it out.
* * *
During both of these occasions, I remember going to my parents and asking them for advice. And, for whatever reasons they may have had –maybe they didn’t have much advice to give (which I don’t believe), or maybe they thought it was a bad idea to steer me with their device, or maybe they wanted to make me “figure it out” like they’d had to– they were less than forthcoming with the information that I was looking for.
Call me crazy, but I am still harboring a little bit of frustration over those failed exchanges. Surely, despite having done some things wrong and others right, they could have spared what advice they thought had piloted them well through the times when things turned out correctly?
However, I can honestly say that I can see the issue from both sides. If my parents were hoping to make me strong by making me work for the right answers, rather than just giving me the answers, I could see how that approach might have been successful. Who’s to say whether or not I would be the same person that I am today, if I had been given the answers by my parents, or by a user manual of some kind.
But, that argument –that I wouldn’t be who I am today without having had to work for knowledge– goes both ways. Maybe, the “me” I could have been would have been better, if I’d been steered even a little bit with some quality advice. With a user manual, I could have started with a certain set of basic info, and then, having had those initial steps “given to me”, I could have then advanced beyond the basic level of knowledge to more advanced levels.
My wife and I, along the way in our marriage, have read a lot of really great marriage counseling books together, many of them in the environment of a marriage, small group, Bible study that we used to lead. So, the advice that I didn’t get on marriage, initially, I ended up getting somewhere else.
And, as far as my kids are concerned, maybe I haven’t been an awful parent, despite not having any advice –good, bad, or otherwise– to work with. I wonder if I would have done a better job, though, if I’d know a little more, starting out.
* * *
My daughter, early on when I started writing this blog, told me that she was reading them. She’s thirteen. Just recently, I asked if she was still reading them, and she said, “No. Most of them are boring.”
Advice that’s not solicited has a certain stink to it that makes it hard for us to find much value in it. When someone comes and seeks your advice, I guess it would be hard to make a decision at to whether or not to give it.
I often think of families that I know, where the parents have been wonderfully successful in their lives and their children have turned out to be wonderfully successful as well, and I think that maybe there’s a leg-up that some people are getting their hands on.
I also think about the history of humanity, whereby many generations of people have come and gone and I’m not sure how far we’ve gotten, as a species, as a society, for having spent so much time living and dying and leaving our kids to “figure it out”, in the same way that we just “figured it out”.
Have you ever seen the movie or the television show where the parent is set to die and they create some letters/videos/recordings of some kind, to be able to direct and advise their child after their death? Don’t those movies just get you in the feels?!?!
I wonder if my kids will ever read anything that I’ve written some day and get from it something that will help them to get further than I got?
It occurred to me today that, sometimes, I’m just not feelin’ it.
I have a board on Pinterest (if you don’t know what Pinterest is, check it out) that is full of running motivation. It has pictures of runners in full stride on beautifully scenic roads or paths, combined with sayings that are supposedly motivational. And, when there is a part of me that wants to run, that part of me –that intrinsic motivation, psychologically speaking– can partner with the motivational phrases and sayings on my Pinterest board and it’s enough to get me “up and at ’em”.
But, there are other times, when I’m just not feelin’ it, when the last thing that I want to do is to get all dressed up in my moisture-wicking workout clothes and to lace up the shoes and to do all of the other stuff that I have to do before a run. The intrinsic motivation is harder to find.
On those days, I think about how I will feel if I skip my run. I think about the regret that I’ll feel for the rest of the day, about how I’ll be beating myself up for being lazy, about how I’ve never regretted a work out but that I’ve often regretted skipping a workout. And, I think about the motivational pin –that’s what you call a piece of interest in Pinterest– that I have that says, “Discipline means doing the thing that you don’t want to do.” That extrinsic motivation, paired with the motivation that is inside me, but is sometimes hard to find, and I have what I need to get “up and at ’em”.
Discipline is something that I’m not good at.
Or, take this post, for example. I don’t really feel like I want to write right now. I got to looking at my other “draft” posts and none of them were “calling my name”, and I thought to myself, “What if I just skip this one?” But, it’s a little bit different with writing, somehow; it’s doubly hard to push myself into writing something when I am lacking the inspiration as to what I should write about.
So, I sat down to write this post, via the discipline that I’m not very good at, and because of the dedication that I have to becoming a better writer –via the practice that I often don’t want to do.
I wrote a post a few days back about pianos, and in that post I talked about piano practice when I was a kid and how much I hated it. Part of the problem with that was that I never wanted to become a better pianist. My mom wanted me to become a better pianist, and my piano teacher wanted me to become a better pianist, but it wasn’t inside me.
What is inside me, at least these days, is a desire to become a better runner and to become a better writer.
I ran my first ever 10K distance on Monday, and I am still jazzed about it. I am still excited about the fact that the past versions of me had always dreamed of being in the place where I could run a 10K distance. The past versions of me wanted to be –with enough conviction and discipline and dedication to run when it was hard for them to run a mile or two miles– who I am today. I don’t know if I can express how it feels to be the person that you used to want to be.
The funny thing is, it’s not going how I imagined.
I imagined, all of those years ago, that the me that would be able to run a 10K distance would be muscular and attractive. I imagined that the 10K me would have a six-pack and biceps and pectorals. And, while I am who I wanted to be, inasmuch as I can run the 10K distance, I am still not who I wanted to be.
And so, the dream continues…
Visions of the future are funny like that. In 1989, the movie Back to the Future II envisioned the year 2015 with hoverboards and flying cars. 2015 didn’t turn out that way. In the 1990s, the Star Trek franchise of the day envisioned the twenty-fourth century with tablets that looked bulky and antique compared with the tablet that my wife plays canasta on in our twenty-first century living room.
It’s hard to imagine the future correctly, but the best way to do it is to make the future that you envision occur.
I want to be a writer one day. I want to be able to walk into a Barnes & Noble –somewhere, someday– and pull my books off of one of their shelves. And whether or not I’m going to make my way to the shelf on a hoverboard, I can, through my dedication and discipline and conviction right now, do my best to make part of that vision of the future a reality.
If you’ve ever run in an organized race, there are various distances for which you can register. I’ve run in the local Sunburst race three times, and each of those times, I registered for the 5K. Now that I can run the 10K distance, I guess it’s time to look forward to my next goal distance. Maybe someday, I’ll be able to run a half-marathon –probably not any day soon, however.
Well, anyway, I guess I’ve written all of this to say a couple of things: motivation to do something, especially when you don’t want to, can come from a larger dream, a larger vision of the future. If that vision isn’t there, discipline and dedication are going to be weak, at best. And, when you tap into the power of that larger vision, it can be significantly helpful in overcoming those moments when you may be less than enthusiastic.
I mean, look at me, I just whipped out a thousand words, and I wasn’t even feeling it.
It occurred to me today why parenting is so frustrating for me.
Did you hear the one about the tomato family?!?! What did the mother tomato say to the baby tomato? Why won’t you ketchup?
It’s frustrating when my kids aren’t where I want them to be, or where I am. This frustration, no doubt, results from the fact that I’m mostly a selfish person and, while my child is in the process of learning to do something, I’m just focused on me and where I’m at and why can’t my child just be at the same level as me.
This frustration has been coming out most recently in the process of my son learning to drive. I wish he was as good at making turns, as I and my wife are. I wish he could brake more smoothly and accelerate more gradually, like my wife and I do. When he can’t drive the way that my wife and I drive, and all I can do is sit next to him and try to be patient (and mostly fail at that), I know that I am focused on me, rather than being focused on him, and where he’s at, and what he needs.
Of course, I understand how this works, and how it is that my parents were most likely frustrated by me and where I was, as a child, and where they wanted to me to be. I wouldn’t be the kind of driver that I am today if it weren’t for the thousands upon thousands of hours that I’ve spent practicing. I know that those initial hours were not pleasant hours to be in a car with me.
My daughter played her first trumpet solo at church this past weekend. She played so well, and I was so proud of how well she performed and how much practice she’d put in. But, let me tell you, as the father of, not one, but two trumpet players, the initial stages of someone learning to play the trumpet are some irksome moments. All you really have during those initial days, when their trumpet playing sounds more like someone strangling an elephant, is hope.
I also understand that it’s my job to get the kids to where I wish them to be, by training them and teaching them and parenting them. Being frustrated with where they’re at now, without having done anything to advance them, is me being frustrated with what I haven’t done –the kids are just innocent bystanders in the tragedy of how I often fail as a parent.
I think of myself as intelligent, but it’s a crying shame that I didn’t figure this simple fact out much sooner. I guess I’m ahead of those parents who still haven’t figured this out and behind those parents who have been watching me, wondering what the heck I’m doing to my children.
We’re all on the road, just at different places on the road. And, there’s always hope.
* * *
That list bit comes from Dr. Rita Pierson. Dr. Pierson was a world-class educator and school administrator with a deep heart for kids and for the profession of teaching.
At the school district where I teach, every few years, a TED talk featuring Dr. Pierson makes its rounds. The TED talk is entitled “Every Kid Needs A Champion”. In it, Dr. Pierson talks about the connections that teachers need to have with their students and how important it is for students to feel like they have that connection with their teachers. In the TED talk, Dr. Pierson recalls an interaction with a student who’d performed poorly on an assessment. Dr. Pierson chose to celebrate what the student accomplished on the assessment, rather than highlighting their failures. In this interaction, Dr. Pierson recalled telling the student, “You’re on the road!”
* * *
I think waiting until my forties to try to get back in shape was a mistake. I am writing this portion of the post for anyone in their thirties who’s thinking to themselves, “I still got time before I need to get serious about all of that.” To you, my friend, I say, “Start now.”
I guess I could have put it off until my fifties, and that would have been worse.
It occurred to me yesterday that I think I am in the best shape of my life, including my varsity soccer days back in high school. In fact, I will take a moment to brag –> I ran my first 10K yesterday, and to my surprise, I ran the whole thing without stopping.
For me, the journey toward physical fitness has been about five or six years of fits and starts. But, I’m proud to say, “I’m on the road.”
And, while the road has other people on it that I know who are further down the road, and I often find myself being jealous of them and chasing after them, I realize that there are still other people on the road who are behind me, looking at me and thinking the same things about me and where I’m at.
The truly mind-bending thing is this: if I could ever become capable of quitting the comparison game, quitting the jealousy of others and the envy of what they have that I don’t have, I’d look at the road and see that there are many different versions of me on this road, past versions and future versions. The versions of me on this road that are behind me, in my past, are looking at me and thinking, “I want to get there some day”, while the current me is looking down the road, at possible future versions of me, and hoping, “I want to get there some day”.
And there’s always hope.
* * *
I’m forty-four years old, and I’m embarrassed to say that I am still learning things that I should have known years ago. Only recently have I learned the concept of progress. I’ve spent too much time, too many years, not moving forward. While I’m frustrated when I think of all that wasted time –all that time standing in the same spot on the road– I’m choosing to not to dwell on that. I feel like it’s time for me to start the process of continuing in my journey.
It occurred to me today that I have been screwing myself, and possibly others, for years, and I never even knew I was doing it.
I am a computer guy, which means that I’m the guy that people call when their computers/phones/tablets don’t work because they want me to fix the thing.
I even tried to make a business out of it, a few years back. Put together really professional looking invoices and created a Facebook business page (which is probably still out there, now that I think about it). I even put together a rate-scale and made my services reasonably affordable.
And, back when I was starting out –or trying to, at least– word started to get around a little bit. But, it never really took off and I stopped trying, at least partly because it was going to be a drain on my time if things ever were successful, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted that to happen.
During the venture, and even before it and since, I’ve always refused to charge my family and friends for computer repairs. This, I suppose in hindsight, could have been one of the most significant reasons that I wasn’t ever able to make the business a success. In the end, I was hoping that it would be the case that my family and friends –getting their repairs for free– would then turn around and recommend my services to their family and their friends (word of mouth), resulting in the eventual business I was hoping to get.
It never ended up working out that way.
These days, the business, which never really was a business, consists of me continuing to do the repair work, for free, for my family and friends.
* * *
One lady in particular, who I will refer to as Sarah, to protect her identity, seems to bring me her computer every few months. It shouldn’t be the case that Sarah is able to mess up her computer that often, but she does. She’ll download and install something off of the internet that mucks things up, or she’ll add some software to her browser that makes her browsing ultra-slow. Since Sarah doesn’t really know what she’s doing when it comes to her computer, her ignorance leads her to making these same mistakes over and over again. I suppose I could take the time to try to teach her to avoid doing the things that get her into trouble every time, but I never do.
Instead, every time she does it, she drops it off at my house, and I fix it.
And it occurred to me that there are no consequences for her actions. I realized this the other day as I was finishing the fixes on her computer. There are no negative ramifications for Sarah when she messes up her computer, because she doesn’t have to pay me to fix it.
Maybe, if I started charging her, she’d be a little more careful?
One of the reasons I thought about going into business all of those years ago was because so many people I knew back then were taking their computers to Best Buy to get them repaired and Best Buy was (and still does, from what I understand) charging people an arm and a leg for such repairs. I thought back then that it was reprehensible that they would do such a thing. I told people to avoid Best Buy like the plague, back then, because I used to think of them as unfairly taking advantage of the public.
Maybe I’ve been doing a greater disservice than Best Buy?
If, in a free market society like ours, people assign value based on what they have to pay for something, my service has been of no value to any of the family and friends that I’ve assisted along the way. How sad of a thought is that?!?!
Now, I know this isn’t true because, even though I’ve not charged a good number of people in my life for the assistance that I’ve given them, a good number of that good number of people have paid me back in other ways. I have a cousin whose computers come to me regularly and she’s paid me in gifts or in gifts for my kids. I have coworkers whose own personal computers I’ve fixed, who’ve paid me in books (I love to read). I know that these people value the work that I do for them because they feel this obligation to repay the favor.
But, does Best Buy actually help people by gouging them? One might think so: if that customer, who ends up paying dearly for a computer repair, gets their computer back, and then goes about some different set of behaviors to keep from having to pay so dearly ever again, then Best Buy –through some subliminal free market educational process– teaches people to be more careful.
What have I been teaching Sarah?
Truth be told, I’ve always been opposed to the concept of welfare (as a loyal conservative, I’m supposed to be), but as a Christian, I have always felt that it’s the right thing to do to help people. I think welfare creates an unhealthy dependency, whereas helping people involves coming alongside someone to assist them in what they are doing.
A hand-up vs. a hand-out.
But, as I think about Sarah, and what I’ve been doing with her over the years, I’m not even sure I’ve been helping her –of course, she would say I have been, but I’m no longer sure. I suspect that I’ve been giving her hand-outs and not hand-ups. It’s easy for me to fix her computer each time she “breaks” it –it usually doesn’t cost me more than a few minutes of my time– but I think the real work that needs to be done is a hand-up.
I need to come alongside Sarah and sit down with her and teach her what it is that she’s doing to her computer each time, so she can stop doing it. This would be a significantly greater investment of my time –I would imagine– and the less easy thing for me.
Come to think of it, I would be paying –through the investment of my time with Sarah– to have me fix her computer. Wrap your head around that!
Perhaps, each of the times that I’ve fixed her computer over the years, the sum of all of that time that I’ve spent, starts to become a more substantial investment than the one that I fear I would be making if I sat down with her to teach her how to do things right.
If all of my hand-outs to Sarah haven’t resulted in a change in her behavior, I wonder how often welfare works to assist people in making changes in their life. The cycle of dependency becomes stronger and stronger, and it persists until someone decides to step in and replace the hand-outs with hand-ups. And, while it’s not the easy thing to do when you consider it on its face, it might be, in the longer run, the less expensive option, in terms of time and money spent.
I guess I know what I need to do with Sarah. I’ll cut this off here so I can go schedule some time with her.
It occurred to me today that it’s pretty damn frustrating when the crowd isn’t worth following.
My son is learning to drive, and while this has come with its own set of frustrations for his mother and me (an upcoming blog post, for sure), it has also allowed for us to have a different window into the the kind of person that he is and how he interacts with others.
A perfect example of this is my son’s frustration with other drivers and to what extent those drivers are, or are not, following the traffic rules. Having recently learned the rules, via Driver’s Education, my son is ultra-aware of what other drivers are doing and whether or not they are doing what they ought.
Now, admittedly, the vast majority of today’s drivers fall on a middle ground between A) a rigid adherence to all traffic laws, and B) a reckless abandon of safety and concern. My son, fresh out of driving school, has not found his way to the middle of the road yet.
Yesterday, he was getting frustrated with the number of people who were passing him and/or tailgating him. This regularly happens, because my son, who believes that the traffic rules are holy laws from up above, tends to obey speed limits in an unyielding fashion –unlike most people (including me). Earlier in the week, he got angry when someone honked at him, from behind, for taking his time making a turn off of the road.
And so, I explained to my son yesterday that people don’t follow the rules or obey the speed limits with the same loyalty that he does. I told him that he can continue to expect that, as long as he is following the rules of the road, people around him that don’t follow the rules are going to behave differently.
And then, I got to thinking…
…about sheep.
* * *
Someone called me a sheep on Facebook about a month ago –or maybe it was two; hard to keep track these days– because I was talking about wearing a face mask in public and that I thought it was the right thing to do. This person, who deserves to be nameless in this recollection, tried convincing me that I was just a follower and that I was only doing it because I was being made to do it by “the man”.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I don’t know if you know much about sheep, but they are dumb. They wander off, getting themselves into trouble, getting lost, and then they wind up in need of a shepherd.
Sometimes, that definitely describes me.
But, more often than not, I think a lot about the decisions I’m making and the choices that lie before me. Anyone who really knows me knows that I tend to overthink things, as a matter of fact. But, because I was making a choice that this person on Facebook thought was the wrong one, I was the sheep.
This idea, at least in my mind, is related to the concept of herd mentality, also referred to in social psychology as mob mentality, in which people tend to do what it is that other people around them are doing, just because everyone else is doing it, without much regard to the thought that should accompany all of our decisions to act.
I think you see a lot of herd mentality going on in the world these days, and the people who would prefer to think before taking action are becoming a rare breed. Additionally, introducing a layer of complexity that muddies the waters, there are many herds who seem to be rising up to offer individuals the comfort of having a group of people to follow in whatever behavior the group decides to espouse.
If you have any trouble thinking of an example of such groups working in our society these days, I’ll give you a hint: donkeys and elephants. If you’ve been paying any attention to the donkeys and the elephants lately, things are –or maybe they’ve long been this way– starting to get nasty. And this behavior, really all behavior where groups of people get nasty with other groups of people, reminds me of Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell, one of the preeminent thinkers of the twentieth century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1950), wrote about herd mentality; “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
I’ve been noticing a lot of “ferocity” lately.
* * *
My son’s frustrations with the fact that people just don’t seem to obey traffic laws like they should is a reminder to me that I am often frustrated by the world and its failure to abide by certain previously agreed upon codes. I think that at least part of the frustration is that people who follow the rules don’t seem to get anything for doing so, while those who don’t follow the rules only rarely seems to draw any reproof.
Truly though, the strength that is necessary for anyone to make a decision to act contrary to what the rest of the world is doing, is a strength that has to come from within, even if that decision is simply a decision to follow the rules when no one else seems to be.
I think every parent has, at some point or another, encouraged their children to fight against the herd mentality approach to life with the world-famous, “Would you set yourself on fire/throw yourself off of a bridge/jump off of a cliff just because everybody else was doing it?!?!” argument. I know I have.
And, I’m actually proud of my son for following the rules when no one else seems to be. I hope he continues that throughout his whole life.
It occurred to me today that our past is an important part of who we are.
My wife and I have a game that we play together, and we’ve been playing it for years and years. We play it to pass the time, on road trip or in waiting rooms, or as we did this morning, on lazy weekend mornings of rest and relaxation.
The game is called The Memory Game. It involves my wife and I, taking turns, recalling moments from our shared past. Each player starts their turn by saying, “I remember…”, and then recalling whatever they have to recall. The memories might be cute or consequential, mundane or monumental. We usually tend to get into themes, for several rounds, that focus on periods of our history or on other similarities.
More recently, as our children have become able to participate, we’ve started including them in the fun. For them, it’s sometimes quite the challenge, because of their youth and the relative short amount of time that they have from which to draw memories for recall. The themes help the kids, because they can be thinking along certain lines, while other members of the family are taking their turns, to come up with what they intend to use as their next memory. We’ve even made a game out of it, with point totals and such, to try to help the kids to engage in the “fun”.
By bringing the kids in, my wife and I are wanting to have them to be able to recall their shared experiences with the rest of us. It’s always fun to hear one of the kids talk about a memory that they have of something that I would have sworn they didn’t remember. Sometimes, understanding that they remember things that I would prefer that they not remember can be a reminder to me to be cognizant of how I behave as their father.
For my wife and I, the game is a mutual exercise in honoring one of the most important things that we share –> our past.
My wife and I started dating at the end of March in 1994, which means that we’ve been together for over twenty-six years. We’ve been together for more than half of each of our lives. Twenty-six years allows for a couple to make a lot of memories. We have memories of favorite restaurants and favorite television shows, memories of favorite Christmas presents and favorite vacations, memories of the most important moments of our lives, and even memories of some of the least important sections of our past.
That’s part of what any relationship becomes, over time: a combination of shared experiences that contribute to a life lived together
There’s a movie that we own. My wife, assuming that she ends up reading this, will be surprised to hear me mention this movie, because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned to her the importance of this movie to me.
The movie is called, “Shall We Dance?” (2004), and it stars Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Jennifer Lopez. It’s definitely worth a watch, in case you’ve never seen it before.
Without giving too much away, Susan Sarandon’s character begins to suspect her husband, played by Richard Gere, of cheating on her. She hires a private detective to spy on him, and then she meets with the detective to go over the results of his investigations. During this scene, Susan Sarandon is scared of what she is about to hear from the detective, and she is waxing philosophic about the nature of matrimony and the marital relationship. It’s a great scene.
Susan Sarandon ends up finding out that her husband is not cheating on her, but before she can receive that news, she shares with the detective her philosophy of marriage, in which she says, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Marriage allows for us to have a witness to our lives. Marriage allows that our lives will not go unnoticed because our spouse will be our witness.”
We play the Memory Game, my wife and I, to continue to verify that we have been paying attention to our shared experience together. My wife’s life has been noticed, when it might have otherwise been unnoticed by me, and the converse is also true.
She and I often goof around with each other; she’ll say to me that I could trade my forty-two year old wife in for two twenty-one year old replacements, and I will shoot back that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with two twenty-one year olds. Then, I’ll tell her that she needs to trade me in for a newer model, with fewer defects, and she’ll reply that she doesn’t have the patience to train another husband, having worked so hard to train the first one.
We joke back and forth.
But, truth be told, I can honestly say that I would never cheat on my wife, for many reasons, one of which being that I would never be willing to turn the page on the life that we’ve been sharing together for more than a quarter of a century. I can’t think of any other part of my identity that is closer to the core of who I am than the part of me that is my wife’s husband, my wife’s best friend, my girlfriend’s boyfriend. I have nothing that is more central to being “me” than being with her.
The way that “Shall We Dance?” ends, after the scene that I described above, is touching, if for no other reason than Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere are able to re-fortify their relationship. In fact, at the end of the movie, they are moving ahead, stronger than ever.
The memory game reminds my wife and me that we have shared so many wonderful times together. We’ve shared a multitude of ups and downs, and we’ve been able to cooperate together to create a narrative worth recalling, from time to time. Our past has become one of the most beautiful parts of the story of who we are together.
It occurred to me that my wife is the most important person in the world.
You can call me a purist, if you want to, but I hate starting a campfire with lighter fluid.
As a matter of fact, if you ask anyone in my family, they’ll tell you my “pet name” for lighter fluid.
–>Girl scout juice.
Now, after you’ve taken a moment to forgive my misogyny…
I think that a person with a brain and a match and the proper tools should be able to start a fire without accelerant. When my family camps, I have the proper tools and the brain and the match and I can, and have, create(d) a campfire that’s worth enjoying.
However, when the proper tools and/or the match and/or the brain aren’t available, lighter fluid becomes a means to an end. No one squirts lighter fluid on wood because they are wanting to watch lighter fluid burn. Rather, people want a campfire that will burn for hours past the point where the lighter fluid has been burnt off of the wood on which it was sprayed.
The burning of the lighter fluid leads to the burning of the wood, which is the goal, of course.
Lighter fluid is a petroleum-based solvent, an accelerant. It’s not that the wood on which you would spray the accelerant is not flammable, it’s just less flammable than we would have it be when we are trying to start a fire.
Now, what does any of this have to do with love?
* * *
My wife criticized me, constructively and for my benefit, the other night, and then apologized for having done so. I thought her concern was cute and endearing, and I told her that it was easy to take criticism from her because I knew her so well, as to know that she meant her criticism for good and not for ill.
Which started us reminiscing about our relationship and the old days and how far we’ve come together. We talked about the depth of our love and how it has deepened across time, and how shallow and superficial it seemed to have been early on, as we looked back on those early days.
I told my wife that my infatuation with her has long since passed, to have been replaced with something much more stable and strong and true.
It was at that point, it occurred to me that infatuation is an accelerant.
Love, when it starts, often starts as an infatuation. We become consumed by our interest in someone and they become consumed by their interest in us. The infatuation makes the possibility of a deeper relationship possible, if things progress well. Because of the infatuation, we spend time together, getting to know each other, developing a shared narrative. These things become the start of the actual relationship, and without us probably even noticing, the infatuation gives way to these developments.
In the same way, it’s hard to tell when a campfire becomes a campfire, when it is no longer the burning of the lighter fluid.
Now, one of the problems with using lighter fluid to start a fire is that it doesn’t always work, and what you end up with is a fire that lasted only as long as it took for the lighter fluid to burn away, without having caught anything else ablaze. Similarly, the real fire has to start, in a relationship that’s going to last, before the infatuation fades. A lot of different problems can lead to the fire never really starting –> too windy, wet wood, etc.
What you end up with, when there’s a problem getting the wood to catch fire, is a substantial problem. No romantic relationship can grow if it can’t get past the infatuation stage, just like you can’t have a campfire by just burning liter after liter of lighter fluid. As much fun as that infatuation stage is –I can’t stop thinking about them and I can’t wait to see them and I wonder what they’re doing right now and I wonder if they’re wondering about me– love doesn’t stay there. Love turns into the campfire that can be enjoyed for so much longer than it takes for the infatuation to burn off.
* * *
I take pride in my marriage with my wife. I take pride in the work that we’ve done to keep it going, and I take pride in the soothing, warming, radiant campfire that it’s become. We’ve maybe had a few times when we let the flames get low, but the coals beneath have always been hot enough to bring the fire back to life.
Similarly, I’ve taken pride in building campfires and maintaining campfires. Putting a fire together properly so that it can be started without “girl scout juice” isn’t that complicated, and now that I’ve come to think about it in depth, it’s really not worth being so proud.
Whether one uses lighter fluid or not, the goal is the same: a campfire that will last, to be enjoyed by those gathered around it.
It Occurred To Me Today 