It occurred to me today that rebuilding is hard, but sometimes, it’s necessary.
I wiped my phone yesterday. Completely cleaned it off. Reset it. Returned it to factory settings. Everything erased.
I did it because I’d been receiving, for about a week, messages that I was running out of storage space on the phone. Granted, my phone is three years old and it didn’t have that much memory on it to start (64GB). The phone started acting up because there wasn’t enough free space left on the phone for it to be able to function properly.
I tried removing apps that I wasn’t using any more. That didn’t work. I tried deleting unnecessary files. That didn’t work. I tried moving stuff, from the internal storage to an SD card that I’ve always had in the phone (for my music files). That didn’t work.
So, it got to the point that I didn’t think anything, short of a complete refresh, was going to work. And, I got to tell you, bringing myself to the point where I worked my way through pressing that “RESET” button, and then confirming, and then confirming again –they really don’t want you doing this by accident– was kind of scary. I was afraid of what I was going to lose. I was afraid of forgetting that one thing, on the phone somewhere, that I was about to delete, without which I wouldn’t be able to function.
But, when it became clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere with any other approach, I did what needed to be done. So now, I’m in the process of bringing the phone back to the place where it works, where it does the things that I need it to do. It will take time, and I’m sure I will discover those things that I’ve lost forever (hopefully nothing too critical).
I can say though, it is functioning much better than it was.
* * *
I feel a little guilty admitting this, even though I’ve admitted it in other blog posts of mine. The pandemic and the quarantine have been pretty good for me. I have been able to reorganize my life because of what has happened over the last twelve weeks. I remember, immediately after the quarantine began, marveling at the fact that my family calendar, usually chocked full of things for me and my wife and my children to do, was emptied out.
With all of that ‘stuff’ removed, and with the opportunity to rebuild a life that was going to get me and my family through the quarantine, we got to make some different decisions. We got to approach things in a different way. As a teacher, I was challenged to deliver content to students and to assist them in their learning remotely. All of these things were hard, but I certainly feel like I am coming out the other side of this whole thing with a better focus and perspective than I had going into this historical event.
Although I would never want something like this to happen again, I can’t say that I’m sorry for it. The reset –removing all of the stuff that had been cluttering my life so that I could have a clean surface on which to put the pieces back together in a better way– is something for which I will always be thankful.
* * *
In the wake of national unrest with respect to police brutality, and abuses of power, and racism, people are looking for answers. People want to see reform happen because they are tired of hearing the same stories happening over and over again. Federal, state, and local laws are being passed that will (hopefully) make it less likely that a police officer will kill a civilian during any of their encounters with the public.
But, some people are looking for larger changes. The city council of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, has taken steps to completely dismantle their police department, to try to get to the place where they can start from scratch, perhaps. Moves like this are certainly drastic, and the chances that a process like this will have an impact on how safe people are in their communities while the rebuilding happens, have to be weighed against other approaches that might not be as invasive.
Maybe those other approaches have been tried –I saw a member of the Minneapolis city council being interviewed and she said that they’ve tried other approaches before deciding to take these steps– or maybe change is so overdue that only the most drastic options are left.
As a nation, faced with systems that don’t work in situations where approaches have been tried and those approaches have failed, at what point are we obligated to attempt approaches of a more extreme nature?
Burning your house down because you don’t like the wallpaper is one thing, but at what point should the house be burnt down?
* * *
When we get to the point where we are forced into extreme change, it’s scary and it’s unfortunate, but it can also be positive and beneficial. The mythological phoenix is not reborn until it dies, the seed must be destroyed so that it can become the seedling, and the caterpillar gets reworked to become the butterfly.
Furthermore, it’s pitiful that we often don’t initiate change until we absolutely have to do so –> I probably should have been staying on top of the storage on my phone the whole time, and I probably should not have let my life get to the place where I needed a quarantine to set things straight, and a police department shouldn’t get so bad that it has to be dismantled in order to be made right.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, we have an opportunity whenever we are faced with rebuilding. To do things better than we did them before, to get right what we couldn’t get right previously, to advance the cause so that we end up in a better place; these are the opportunities that we have in any rebuilding.
Rather than hiding from change or griping about the work in front of us, may we seize every opportunity that comes in the rebuilding.
It occurred to me today that video footage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I am a technologist for the school district where I also teach; I’ve been doing this for nine years now, part-time teaching and part-time “fixing anything that has an electrical cord.” Part of what I do as a technologist for the school district is to maintain the video surveillance systems that we have in our buildings. Often, this will require me to get video footage off of the server, especially in situations where something has happened and our administrative team wants to see the video of the event.
This is usually a pretty straight-forward process. In fact, many of our administrators will use video footage to sort out “what really happened”, especially in the event that conflicting stories come from different people involved in various situations in any of our school buildings.
Most of the time, video footage provides us with the ability to make unclear situations somewhat more clear.
Most of the time…
* * *
My wife and I recently finished watching on Netflix whatever it was that we were watching, and she suggested that we look for something new. We ended up finding a show featuring a magician, doing street magic in front of a camera crew, usually with random bystanders as subjects. The show is called “Magic For Humans”. We’ve really started enjoying it.
But, like all shows about magic or magicians, I usually spend most of my time trying to figure out how the magician does what they do. It becomes ultimately frustrating for me to watch someone do a magic trick and to not understand how they’re doing it. Eventually, if we watch too many episodes of this show in a row, I get overwhelmed by frustration. From a general perspective, I understand how the magician does their tricks –> it’s usually sleight of hand, of some kind or other. But, knowing how something works in general, for a guy like me, is never enough. I have always wanted to understand how things work, at a fundamental level.
But, the more I’ve been thinking about the magic that this guy does (Justin Willman is the name of the magician on the show), the more I start to wonder if my own eyes aren’t tricking me, somehow?!?! Additionally, I start to wonder if there isn’t some kind of trickery happening “off-camera” that would explain what appears to have no explanation otherwise.
* * *
I think if I see one more video of an instance of police brutality at any point in the near future, I AM GOING TO LOSE MY MIND. I’ve had just about enough of the dash cam footage and the body cam footage and the cell phone footage. But, let me put my views on police brutality aside for the moment.
It’s getting to the point that people are becoming accustomed to recording just about anything at all. Just the other day, as a matter of fact, there was a semi-truck parked in front of my house (I live in a small town where semi through-traffic is unusual), so what did I do? I started filming the cab of the semi, waiting to see what would happen.
Nothing happened. Ten minutes later, the driver drove away.
We’ve become a video surveillance society and there aren’t very many mainstream people who have a problem with it. Every smartphone ever made has at least one camera on it; these days, most of them have multiple cameras. The number of functioning video cameras in America, at this very moment, is exponentially larger than the number of video cameras created in all of the twentieth century put together.
All of these cameras, capturing just about every public moment, from multiple angles, should cause anyone thinking about doing anything questionable in public to think twice. Additionally, everyone who grabs their phone and starts recording with it at the moment when something seems like it might possibly go crazy; do you know what those recordings usually capture? The social activist who decides to record the actions of the police every time they’re around, what does that social activist usually record?
Nothing.
* * *
I’m sure you’ve seen the same kind of videos that I’m thinking about –> the particular ones that I’m thinking about right now come from a group of guys known as “Dude Perfect”. Look them up on the web and watch some of their videos. You will understand what I’m talking about.
They have these crazy videos where something amazing happens in the video, like the eighty-foot basketball shot that goes through, nothing but net. As amazing as that video is, and as much fun as they are to watch, I’m absolutely certain that these videos capture the six hundredth attempt by the person on camera to do the amazing things that they do.
The previous five hundred and ninety-nine times, the shot fails.
But we never see those videos. And not seeing them changes the way that we understand how things work in the world.
One of my kids, a few months back, decided that they were going to make one of these videos. You want to know what happened? My child stopped trying long before they were able to capture the video of the perfect shot. When they quit, they told me, “I didn’t think it was going to be that hard.”
They didn’t think it was going to be hard because they weren’t made to watch the five hundred and ninety-nine fails.
* * *
Over the course of the last two months, as I’ve worked to try to remotely assist the staff members of my school district, I’ve discovered that I miss the personal interaction that we were cheated out of –my coworkers and I– by the pandemic and the quarantine. It is INFINITELY easier to help someone with the problems that they are having with their computer when those problems can be observed right in front of me. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve had to start asking people, seeking assistance from me, to send me screenshots and image captures of what’s going on for them, so I can at least get a sense of what’s going on, with my own eyes.
Both those screen captures and cell phone videos still can’t replace my ability to see what is going on with my own eyes. And, I think that’s the point of this whole post through which I’ve now finished meandering.
No eye-witness testimony or typed-out affidavit can hold a candle to video footage, in the minds of people these days. However, our over-dependence on video runs on some false assumptions, not the least of which is that our eyes can’t be fooled –which they most certainly can be.
Just be sure, as you consume all of the videos that are out there for you to see, that you don’t let your eyes trick your mind into believing what it ought not.
It occurred to me today that people don’t like being controlled.
Especially in America, considering the American concept of freedom, and how people tend to have an over-inflated defense mechanism when it comes to their freedom. Freedom is talked about in discussions about America probably as much as any other of the central concepts at work in our nation. To many Americans, freedom is a central part of the identity of being an American. When they merely consider the possibility that they aren’t in control, they break out in hives.
Additionally, the idea of control is central to interpersonal relationships in our society, especially those of a romantic nature. Husbands and wives have been wrestling each other for control, in the goings-on of their families, for the length of human history. In fact, the feminist movement of the second half of the twentieth century is predicated on a basic argument for control. While I don’t necessarily agree with many of the underlying sentiments of the feminist movement, I do believe that A) women would be less interested in having more control if men had been doing a better job managing the control that they’ve historically been given, and B) women should NEVER NEVER NEVER be treated in any manner that subjugates them.
* * *
One of the major problems with control is this: if someone has it, someone else does not. Or, at least that’s what most people believe, despite the fact that we can all probably think of plenty of examples where control is distributed among people for the betterment of an organization. A correlate of this mode of thinking is that, for people who tend to be in control, giving control away is a scary proposition.
Another major problem associated with control is the idea that people seem to always want as much of it as they can get, but unfortunately, those same people would prefer to avoid the responsibility that comes with control. For example, earlier in this post, I suggested that men in America have, through their own incompetence, been accomplices to the feminist movement that so many of them oppose. Shirking the responsibility that comes with control should always result in someone losing that control. If you aren’t going to handle control properly, including handling the responsibilities, then don’t position yourself
* * *
I have a lot of different things to say when it comes to control. But, the concept for this blog post originated as a theological discussion in my mind; to whatever extent I’ve been able to discuss the idea of control up to this point, all of that previous discussion has been secondary to my main point.
The concept of control: who has it, who wants it, why we wrestle for it, why we want to avoid situations where we are without it; all of these issues shouldn’t be issues for members of the Christian faith. After all, Christians have, as a part of their faith, agreed to giving up control of their lives as part of the agreement –the covenant– with Jesus and with God.
Christians who have problems allowing others to be in control have some serious issues indeed.
And, I hear the arguments coming from the people that I’ve made uncomfortable. They probably sound something like this, “I don’t have a problem letting God be in control. He’s God. It’s people that I have control issues with.”
So, imagine, if you will, Jesus himself, being subject to the control of authorities who were, well, people… AND THOSE PEOPLE WANTED TO KILL HIM.
If a Christian is a ‘Christ-follower’, if a Christian is attempting to emulate Jesus, and He put Himself in the hands of people as an ultimate demonstration of His faith in His Father, why do Christians have control issues? Shouldn’t one’s faith in God, as a Christian, keep one from having to worry about who’s in control?
May I be so bold as to say this: show me a Christian who has issues with allowing others to be in control, and I will show you a Christian who maybe hasn’t given all of God the control that He’s due. Or maybe, Christians have problems with other people being in control because their faith is so small that it can’t imagine a God who is on top of everything.
Here’s a timely example:
I am a Michigan conservative, and I have been for all of my life. I’ve voted for Republicans and/or conservatives every time I’ve entered a voting booth. But, despite my political affiliations, I have truly appreciated the leadership, dignity, and courage of our state Governor, Gretchen Whitmer (D). I haven’t had any issue, at any point, with her control over the people of my state because I’ve 1) kept my faith in God and in His selection of Governor Whitmer, and 2) appreciated her leadership and concern for the people of my state.
That hasn’t stopped a lot of my fellow ‘Christians’ from spewing hate-filled, disrespectful, bitter rhetoric about the governor. And, every time I bring it up, the arguments are always the same, and they tend to demonstrate a disturbing lack of faith.
“Her decisions are costing people their jobs!”
–>God supplies those people with their jobs. It is certainly within His Power to make sure they get new jobs.
“She’s responsible for the death of Michigan’s economy.”
–>God will supply for all of the needs of His Children, and He has been running the economy this whole time.
“She’s violating my rights.”
–>Well, gee, I wonder if Jesus ever had his rights violated?!?!
Talk about control issues!
* * *
Now, don’t get me wrong –> I haven’t given to God all of the control that He is due. I still wrestle with the parts of my life over which I want to be in charge. I am working on trying to not put myself first so much of the time. I still have to work at keeping the faith.
I just wish everyone else was doing the same thing.
And, as much as I love America and the life that God has blessed me with in this great country, I don’t think that a rabid love of freedom goes well with a genuine faith in God.
At maybe, this issue of control is at the heart of the broken relationship that people have always had with God. I want to do what I want to do and God (or anybody else, for that matter) is only going to get the amount of control that I’m willing to give to them.
It occurred to me today that I might be repeating myself a little bit.
I am starting to get the sense, working on this blog, that I might be starting to repeat myself in some ways, on certain topics. Part of me thinks that’s a bad thing. Part of me thinks that there are very few people who are reading these posts (I think my mom is the only person who has read the majority of them — HI MOM!).
Does it even matter if I’m repeating myself? I’m the one setting the rules, here. If I feel like it’s allowable for me to be repetitive, then it’s allowable.
I’m closing in on fifty blog posts in a row, one each day, going all the way back to the middle of April. And, as much as I’ve been trying not to cover the same topic over and over, I do find myself being ‘inspired’ by what’s going on around me along themes that seem to be recurring. Themes on hypocrisy, themes on distraction, themes on politics, themes on faithfulness and faithlessness; these show up, time and time again, in these daily essays I’ve been writing.
At first, it was easy, because I felt like I had a lot to say and the first twenty or thirty posts seemed to just flow from this reservoir of content that I had inside me. Then, added on top of the ‘reserve’ that I had, came new ideas, and I drafted many of those up into full-fledged posts, as well. But, more recently, it seems like it’s been getting harder and harder to find things to write about. It’s especially hard when I decided to listen to the voice of doubt in my mind that says, “Haven’t you already covered this?”
And, I guess, I could go back and start to make some kind of an inventory of what I’ve been writing –of what I’ve had to say– just to try to see whether or not there is some coherency there that I should further investigate. Part of me has been wondering, as I approach blog post number fifty, how much writing this would all actually amount to, if I put it altogether and counted the words. Would I be impressed with what I’ve been doing? Would anyone else?
Do I even care?
* * *
They say, in the pseudo-psychological way that so many pieces of modern wisdom seem to be coated, that windshields are larger than back windows because one ought to be more interested in what’s ahead than in what’s behind. So, part of me thinks that, to look back to see how much I’ve done, to see how repetitive I’ve been, is just a loss of focus.
Rather than looking back, I ought to be looking forward to see where this is heading.
So, where is this heading?
I guess part of what I’m accomplishing with this blog is just practice in writing. To be honest with you, I’ve been writing my whole life. But, I’ve never been intentionally devoted to the practice of it, the actual ‘nose to the grindstone’ work of writing every, single day. My experience over these last forty-plus days has been enjoyable, but also taxing and difficult. But, as far as where the practice is going to get me, it is not my end goal to write one of these blog posts every day until I no longer can.
I want to be a writer, and I guess that the process of being a writer includes, by its definition, being a person who writes (DUH!). I have, for the past forty-plus days, taken time every day to write. That is what currently makes me a writer. I wasn’t doing that before, which is to say that I wasn’t a writer back then, not like I am now.
Similarly, I am not a quilter. I have never sewn a quilt. If I learned next month how to make a quilt, I would be more of a quilter at that point than I am now. But, the question at that point would then be, “What’s ahead for me now?”
I’ve been dreaming all of my life, but especially for the past seven weeks, of being a professional writer, which is as different from being a “writer” as an NBA star is different from someone who shoots hoops at the Y on the weekends. But, that person, shooting hoops at the Y on the weekends, is closer to being an NBA star than the couch potato is; I am closer to being a professional writer than I was two months ago.
Unfortunately, there is no money is writing a blog that no one (except my mother – HI MOM!) reads.
I want to write fiction. And I’ve got a number of ideas for novels. I even have a number of ideas for novels that occur in the same town. I know the town and the people who live in it already –> many of them exist in my head and are just waiting to one day exist on a page. But, I can’t spend the time to write these blog posts and then, add on top of that, the amount of time that I’m going to have to spend in order to have a novel to show for all of my work. One day, I am going to have to quit this blog to start devoting myself to what I really want to do.
But, for now, I will continue to write these posts, as practice. They will put me in the habit, as they already have, of writing regularly. And, with this plan, I have an idea of what is in front of me, visible through the windshield. Also, I can look through the back window and see where I’ve been, if I decide that I want to do that.
But, there’s a third option –the smart reader has probably already thought of it– that exists, between the windshield and the back window. It’s where the cup holders are and the eight speaker stereo is and the power reclining driver seat is. It’s the interior. Just as the interior lies between the windshield and the back window, what lies for me, between what I’ve accomplished in the past as a writer, and what is in store for me as a future writer, is the present. It is in the present that I must do the work of leaving behind what I’ve done and moving toward what is in the windshield.
It occurred to me today that we have some serious focus issues.
I usually try to avoid overtly religious posts, but this post is going to be one of those posts.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about politics, because I am deeply concerned about where we are as a nation in terms of state, local, and federal politics. In fact, my wife told me a couple of weeks ago that she’s never seen me so consumed by politics.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been this worried. Everything seems so divisive these days.
I primarily have the news and social media to blame, so of course, there’s that.
I realized the other night that there are, right now in America (and perhaps there have been for some time), some striking similarities between the Israelites of the Old Testament and the American people (especially those who are, or would identify themselves as, Christians).
If you’ve never read the Old Testament, you don’t really need to, in order to understand what I’m about to discuss. For the most part, just read the first nine chapters of the book of I Samuel, and you should be fine. The gist of the story is this –> the Israelites (God’s people) had been fraternizing with the nations surrounding them for long enough that they were wanting to start to do what those nations were doing; they were wanting to live their lives according to the practices of those others peoples, as opposed to the directions of God.
If you’ve ever had your kids, trying to persuade you to let them do something, use the argument, “Well, Billy’s mom lets him…”, then you can imagine what the Israelites were probably thinking in their heads when they were seeking permission to do what the people in the nations around them were doing. In fact, in one particular example (see I Samuel 8), when the people come to Samuel, who was the religious leader for the nation, they told him that they were particularly interested in having a king, like the other nations around them.
Samuel’s natural response would have been something like, “You already have a king. The Greatest King! GOD!!! You don’t need any other king.” And certainly, the people would have persisted –“But, SAMUEL, the Canaanites are doing it, and the Amelikites are doing it, and the Jebusites are doing it!! PLEASE!!!“. So Samuel, in his frustration with the people, decides to speak to God.
And God says to Samuel, “Give them what they want.”
Because God is not about trying to stop us from doing the wrong thing. If He were, the Bible would have ended after only a few short chapters in Genesis. Rather, he allows us the free will to make our own choices (normally bad ones). And the Bible ends up being a book with more than a thousand chapters, many of which are chronicles of the human tendency to stray.
And so, Samuel gives the people a king. The first king was a guy named Saul. He was a real poop. The next king was better, but he also had his faults. The next king –same story. In fact, the Israelites had a whole string of kings and not a single one of them, even the best of them, would have ever legitimized the decision of the nation to start doing what the surrounding peoples were doing.
And, this decision by the Israelites, to follow a king instead of following their God, is just one example, of the many that exist in the Old Testament, of how God’s people got distracted from being faithful to Him.
* * *
So, fast forward thousands of years and here we are in twenty-first century America.
Of course, after all this time that we’ve had, and all of the practice that we’ve been allowed, and all of the instructions that are in the Bible, and all of the examples of ‘what not to do’, of course we’re finally getting it right, right?
Wrong.
Here we still are, those of us who claim to be God’s people –as Christians– still amazingly distracted by what’s going on around us. We’ve taken our eyes off of the Creator of the universe, and instead we’ve become fascinated by created things –> a list of distracting created things that is so enormous that it boggles the mind. We are especially distracted by other people, just as the Israelites were distracted by the Canaanites, the Amelikites, and the Jebusites, among others, all those many years ago.
Specifically speaking, the twenty-first century Christian’s particular penchant for politics is especially disturbing, in light of the lesson of 1 Samuel 8.
I wish I had a dollar for every post that I’ve recently seen from a Christian who believes that liberals are demons and that conservatives are the only future for America.
Jesus is the only future for America.
I wish I had a dollar for every Christian that I’ve recently witnessed posting more about the people that they don’t like in politics than about the information that they have that can really change the world. And, another dollar would be great for every Christian who does the opposite, worshipping those creatures in politics, instead of the Creator, with their social media rants.
Only Jesus can save the world. No politician is ever going to change the world. The lesson is contained solidly in the pages of the Old Testament.
I’m nobody’s judge, and I am as wretched as the next sinner, but I have a feeling that if God struck down every ‘Christian’ who spends more time in a day thinking about the presidency than they do in prayer and Bible-reading, it would make the coronavirus death toll look like a parking lot fender-bender.
I pray that He doesn’t, though, because my family might miss me.
* * *
So, while I try to figure out how to turn my eyes back to The Father, let’s get something straight.
Isaiah 53:6
And also this: I ought to stop worrying about this silly place. This world is not my home. I will spend a few more decades here and then I will die and be reunited with The King that I should have been following all along, if He sees fit to have me. For me, for now, there is only one thing to do.
In my family, we are shopping to possibly make a switch in cellular service. Part of the reason for this is that, on this rare occasion, we have all five of our family phones paid off and it would be a good time to make a switch, if we wanted to do so. Part of the consideration is also our budget –we are about to add our teenage driver to our auto insurance policy and that’s going to be expensive, so we are looking to start saving money where we can.
But, honestly, part of the consideration is about relationships.
I got on our cellular provider’s website the other day, to see about upgrade options for our phones (is it me, or do they start to seem slow and old once you’ve got them paid off?), and I saw a price that I liked. So, I started the checkout process, and I got to the point where it was time to confirm the order and press the “Submit” button. That’s when I noticed that the price had more than doubled for the phone, from what I’d originally seen advertised on the website.
So I got into a chat with someone who told me that the advertised price wasn’t available for me, since I didn’t meet the qualifying conditions. I’d checked the qualifying conditions before moving ahead with things –> I thought that I met them. So, I decided to end the chat, not that upset about it, really. But, as I told the person on the chat that I was going to end the chat and investigate other options, that’s when the person on the chat told me that I could qualify for the advertised price after all.
And the whole thing ended up getting this stink to it and I closed the chat window. It’s been bothering me ever since.
Why would they jerk me around like that? I’ve been a customer of theirs for more than twenty years. How valuable is my relationship with them, in their eyes, when they treat me this way?
* * *
This was the last week of school for me for the year. And, at the beginning of the school year, when I was asked to identify my professional growth targets, I told my building administrator that I wanted to get better at student relationships, because I often have a hard time relating to students, especially those who don’t meet my performance criteria (if you get my drift).
And so, I started out the year with a survey that I gave to my students, asking them about what they thought of me as a teacher and about what they thought of my abilities in forming meaningful relationships with students, and I was going to take those results and use them as suggestions for growth, to be measured at the end of the year when I gave the survey a second time, to mark the changes that had occurred. But then, COVID-19 shut the school district down.
So, earlier this week, when my building administrator and I were reviewing my performance evaluation for the year, and it came time to talk about my professional growth targets, my boss told me that, during her observations of me (before the pandemic), she noticed that I was doing some things that she believed were going to be positive steps toward my goal. She then commiserated with me and said, “You and I are so busy with all that we have to do that it’s sometimes hard for people who are overworked to be able to take time to focus on the building of relationships.”
* * *
I guess that my two examples above have in common a ‘business’ element to them. And, when I stop to think about it, I guess the relationship that I am wanting to be able to rely upon in the first example is the same relationship that I am failing to provide in the second example to those ‘customers’ with whom I find it difficult to relate. Talk about hypocrisy!
When it comes to business, and the choices that we have as consumers to patronize businesses where our relationship, where our customer satisfaction, is of obvious value, I guess the choice is always there for me to stop doing business with those companies that don’t value me as a customer. The problem with finding a new cellular provider is that all of the cellular providers are massive national companies that are going to value any one single customer very little. Am I going to be any more important to one major company than I am to any other major company? Probably not.
It occurred to me today that everybody is in a position where they can’t, until they end up in a position where they can.
Today, I ran 5.4 miles and I only stopped seven times. This might not sound like much to you, but in January, I was incapable of running any significant distance at all. Earlier this week, I ran a full 5k and I only stopped once (after a particularly grueling hill). Again, maybe not that impressive, but a measure of my improving physical fitness.
Ten years ago, if you would have asked me about running, I would have told you that, “I only run if something dangerous is chasing me.”
About a month ago, I started working some one-mile speed runs into my weekly running schedule. At this point, I can run a mile in less than nine minutes, if the conditions are right (running is harder in heat and humidity, in case you didn’t know).
Ten years ago, running a mile would have probably killed me.
These days, the process of running –doing my very best during my runs, trying not to stop unless I absolutely have to, pushing myself to achieve– is a lot more in my head than in the physical ability of my body. I feel like I have become physically capable, even though my mind is still often struggling with the realization of what I can do. I hear the voices in my head that would continue to try to tell me what I can’t do, when I know what I’ve been able to do. Each significant achievement in my training raises my confidence that I am capable, so that I feel less and less like listening to those negative thoughts.
Of course, there are bad days. When I set out to run a distance that I know I can run in a certain amount of time with a certain average cadence and I get into it a little bit and I stop (because I’ve convinced myself that I must stop), and then a little later, I stop again. And, before you know it, I finish the distance I set out to finish having stopped so many times that it ruins my time and it ruins my cadence and I end up beating myself up about it.
But…
Even on those bad days, when I shouldn’t have let myself down and I shouldn’t have lost the faith, I still finish the race. I make it to the end. My failure in those particular moments is only a failure by degrees.
* * *
This all sounds great and everything; a truly motivational series of paragraphs by yours truly. But, here’s the kicker.
The unfortunate part of this can vs. can’t scenario is that it goes both ways. The things that are good that you can’t do right now –> you might be able to do one day, if you persevere. Unfortunately, you can also become capable of doing that which is not good, if you head down those roads.
The college kid who has a drink at a bar with some friends, just to see what all of the fuss is about, who then ends up having a drink every time she is out with those friends, who then ends up having three or four drinks every time she is out with those friends; she may end up –slowly, and by degrees– with a lifetime ability to which she never would have aspired.
Or the guy who gets together with his friends on Friday nights to play some penny poker, who then ends up playing cards on the internet for slightly larger sums of money, who then ends up wasting all of his savings –and then some– trying to make it to the next big win that sets everything straight again. Slowly, and by degrees, that man becomes capable of what he previously wasn’t.
And I know, because I’ve been in these situations (and you probably have as well), that the mind game is there, as well. The voices that haunt you in these places of failure, the voices that say that the failure isn’t just a bad choice –> it’s who you are, those voices are harder to ignore because you feel defeated already.
* * *
Slowly, and by degrees, is the only place that we ever get anywhere in life. I can tell you that every time I think about all of the work that I’ve put into the training that I’ve been doing to try to become a competent runner, I know that progress is a grueling road. But, I don’t imagine that the drug addict, waking up in the emergency room for the third time in as many months, is wondering, “Well, how did this happen?” They’ve gotten to their place slowly, and by degrees.
When I started my training in January, I couldn’t run a quarter-mile without stopping. Looking back at that version of me makes me proud to the same extent that the shame buries the drug addict who looks back at who they used to be. In their past lies a better them that they left behind, headed down their particular road.
Every success story has failures in it, just as every failure story has some success in it. That graph, of my upward climb to further and further running success, while it might be generally pointed upward, has some backsliding in it. Conversely, you never end up in a place of catastrophe without having taken a lot of little steps along the way to get there; some of them may have even been good days.
I guess, what I’m trying to get at is this: choices are important. And not just the big ones, either, but the little ones. That big choice that I made back in January, while momentous, is now comprised of each of the little choices that I make to run.
Respect the power that lives in the little choices.
It occurred to me today that quality information has a hefty price tag attached.
I’m an English teacher, and I have been for almost two full decades. During that period of time, to an ever increasing extent, a disparity has been growing between cheap information and expensive information. Cheap information is information that is easy to get and is readily available. Expensive information is harder to find, is of a greater quality, and is more rare. The disparity between cheap and expensive information has played itself out in my classes in the realm of research writing.
I’ve always taught my students, as we’ve studied research writing, the difference between a primary source and a secondary source. The idea that some reference information might be cited by someone else, and that my student’s decision to cite the person citing the information, rather than going to find the original information at its source, is 1) lazy, and 2) a decision to use a secondary source. And I’ve always warned my students about using secondary sources and how it can be dangerous, because we are, in effect, trusting the secondary source and the manner in which they are citing the information from the primary source.
Initially, back in the early 00s, this wasn’t a big deal because the internet back then had yet to become so diluted. But, I’ve had to be more and more diligent in teaching my students about intelligent internet use, especially when it comes to quality research information. At the end of the day, I get the message across to my students, and they understand, and then they (hopefully) carry the understanding into how they consume other parts of the internet.
We must be responsible as we get information from the internet.
But, the philosophical lesson here might be harder for some people, especially those members of our society who used to have trust and faith in the national media machine.
I remember, back in the day, when people watched the nightly news. And, the news that you watched was the result of which of the nightly news anchors you trusted. Did you used to watch the CBS Evening News because Dan Rather was the guy that you trusted? Or, did you prefer the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw? Perhaps Brinkley? Or Cronkite?
I’m not sure that any level of trust in any particular news anchor, or in any particular news organization, is warranted anymore. I look at most organized news as propagandist. If you don’t –if you have a certain news organization or journalist that you give your allegiance to– you’ve got more trust than I have.
In fact, I’ve become more and more convinced that there are fewer and fewer places these days where you can go to get quality information. Rather, there are plenty of places to go if you want information that has a particular slant to it. And, if you pair this understanding with the knowledge that people tend to be 1) oppositional, 2) naive, and 3) lazy, then you get a situation where “my sources are the only good sources” and “those other sources (especially those that oppose my sources) are bad sources, used by ‘them’ with ‘their slant'”.
Don’t talk with my father-in-law about CNN, and don’t talk to my best friend at work about Fox News.
The other problem with this is that these organizations have become aware of the fact that the public is aware of the fact that they are slanted. And so, faced with the choice to either 1) do something about their slanted peddling of information, 2) deny their reputation, or 3) embrace their reputation, the choice seems obvious, right?!
They’ve drawn the battle lines.
The conservatives don’t watch CNN and the liberals don’t watch Fox News and the rest of us (the most of us) don’t watch either (which is fairly easy), or we watch them both, fully understanding the slant with which each of them do their jobs (which is much more work).
* * *
Take my coffee, for example. I don’t really like the taste of coffee, per se. Rather, I just need something to put my creamer in every morning.
I would estimate that I put two-to-three tablespoons of creamer in the bottom of my coffee mug every morning when I put that mug into the Keurig. It ends up perfect, IMO.
But, would that same amount of creamer work for half a cup of coffee? Would that same amount of creamer work for a gallon of coffee? What about fifty gallons?
This phenomenon is referred to, in psychology, as the just noticeable difference. Could someone with a refined palate detect two tablespoons of creamer dispersed in fifty gallons of coffee?
Because I’m starting to feel like the presence of unbiased information in the world is like two tablespoons of creamer in an ocean of coffee.
* * *
So then, in an attempt to get information without a slant, where’s a person to go to get information that doesn’t come from the radical right or the equally radical left?
Why, we’ll go to social media, of course!
SMH.
Because the quality of the information that you get on social media may not be as slanted (unless your contacts on social media do nothing but pull in video footage from Fox News or CNN or –even worse– Yahoo News), but I wouldn’t call it quality information, either.
And, I swear, people are going to social media to get their news. What do they actually get?
You end up getting the opinions of pop stars or sports heroes or your old friends from high school or your fellow church goers or the other women in your kid’s PTO –> none of these people are experts. They might be opinionated (read: slanted/biased), but they aren’t experts.
So, then, if we can’t trust the media outlets to give us reliable information on whether our government is doing a good job, and we can’t count on our high school football teammates to understand how viruses spread, we are left with only one option –> work.
Remember what I said earlier about people being lazy?
How much work are you going to do to get to the information that has no slant and that comes from experts?
Will you do more work to get to that information than it takes for you to get to the information that A) confirms your previously-held beliefs, and B) makes you feel better?
In a world where Minute Rice seems like a lot of work for a lot of people…
It occurred to me today that our leaders are reflections of us.
If that makes you uncomfortable, let me qualify the statement a little bit to put you at ease.
Every leader, in every situation where you find yourself either 1) being lead, or 2) working as a leader alongside other leaders, reflects the character of either 1) someone being lead, or 2) some other leader in the organization.
Did that help?
What should be occurring to you at this moment is that the above, semi-bold statements are both 1) inflammatory, and 2) absolutely true.
Is it that hard for us to come to terms with the fact that our leaders are more like us than they are different than us? It might be, especially in situations where we don’t like those leaders for what they are, or for how they lead (or maybe for what they require us to do).
Additionally, any person that you’ve ever disliked for whatever reason, is more like you than they are different. 99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as the DNA of anyone that you’ve ever identified as ‘other’ or ‘them’.
Maybe, you’re just uncomfortable with my opening statement about leaders because you want to be able to disassociate yourself from ‘them’.
But, putting aside for a moment the argument of sameness, the fact remains that leaders come up out of the body of us all, as all leaders do. As such, they are similar to the body of us all, having once been a part of that body. Whether or not they are like us as individuals –like you as a person or like me as a person– they certainly do represent a sameness to some part of the whole of us.
I can prove it to you. I happen to be thinking of a leader right now, one that I don’t particularly like much at all, and I know people, among the group of us being lead by this leader, who are very similar to the person that this leader is. And, interestingly enough, I like these people as people; I just don’t like the certain things about them that make them similar to this leader.
Did you hear what I just did? It’s called the benefit of the doubt. I gave it, in the last paragraph, to people that I know, because that’s what you do. When you get to know someone –their qualities and their faults– it’s easier to give them the benefit of the doubt, because you have grounds for believing that they ought to receive some leeway.
How about a challenge? I’ll wait here while you go find an example of a leader, living or dead, famous or not, who wasn’t representative of the group that they lead, in some way.
Any argument that our leaders don’t represent us as followers breaks down when you concur that we are all more the same than we are different.
* * *
Let’s talk about societal leaders, for a moment.
The quality of leadership in a society reflects the quality of the citizens in that society, in the sense that it is not reasonable for anyone to expect that a corrupt society is going to be able to generate, from some “magical leader machine” somewhere, anybody to lead the citizenry who doesn’t have the taint of the corruption of that society. As civilizations have risen and fallen throughout the history of humanity, those societies have been corrupted through different means. In many of those examples, corrupt leaders are also easily identifiable.
If I pull a spoonful of soup out of a bowl of soup, and I taste it, and it is awful, it is not likely that I am going to continue to sample spoonful after spoonful, operating under some assumption that those spoonfuls, each one as awful as the last, are just misrepresenting what remains in the bowl.
When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts, and then Boy Scouts, for a period of about two-and-a-half years. I eventually left Boy Scouts because the man who lead the troop, that I was a part of, was an inconsolable jerk. He was mean to the boys in the troop, he was mean to their parents, he was mean to the other leaders who volunteered alongside him in leading the troop. He cursed to no end, he had zero patience for the boys he was to be mentoring. And so, I left the troop with the permission (and blessing) of my parents.
Or, consider the story that my wife has told me on a number of occasions, about a church leader from her past who ended up divorcing their spouse when that spouse got sick and required more care than the church leader was willing to give.
Or, consider any national leader who might represent themselves in a certain light to get the support of the people, during their rise to power, only to pull off the mask after that power has been grasped, to reveal themselves as truly deplorable people.
Maybe it’s the case that certain leadership positions include a responsibility to which the people in those positions must rise. It’s not okay for those positions to be occupied by people who are unwilling or incapable of being worthy of the office. It’s not okay that they shed the burden of being a proper leader while at the same time taking the privilege that often comes with leadership. It’s not okay that those who are lead by such leaders are subject to the inabilities of people who shouldn’t even be in leadership.
Maybe it’s the case that EVERY leadership position includes a responsibility that good leaders embrace and bad leaders avoid.
That Boy Scout troop leader and that church leader and those national leaders; they are despicable. They are reprehensible, disreputable, and dishonorable.
And they are us.
Because, in big ways and in small ways, we are all leaders. We all have people who are watching us with the intent to follow us, and with that position of power –as inconsequential as it might seem– we all have a responsibility to lead well. The parent must lead well. The office manager must lead well. The site foreman must lead well. The Sunday School teacher must lead well.
Our leaders are reflections of us. If you don’t like my opening statement, don’t look to them to change who they are. As Gandhi once said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
It occurred to me today that, sometimes, you have to persevere.
I have been, for about the past ten years, an avid reader. Of course, as an English teacher with nineteen years under his belt, you would’ve thought that I would’ve been an avid reader for much longer than that. For me, it was always a question of enjoyment.
Then, about ten years ago, I set it as my goal to read all of the works of Stephen King. At the time, King was among a half-dozen authors that I’d read whose works I’d ever actually enjoyed. That journey took me about eight years. I enjoyed every minute of reading all of those books.
During that time, the path was simple. What books have I still not read? Get a copy. Read it. What books have I still not read? Get a copy. Read it.
And then, one day, I was out of books.
And while King is still writing books, he certainly doesn’t write them as fast as I read them and I needed something else.
So, I tried some Pinterest lists like, “What To Read If You Love Stephen King”, or “Stephen King Recommends…” (whether or not he actually ever did), or “If You Love ‘Carrie’, You’ll Also Love…”.
That worked for a little while. But I wasn’t on a clear path. It was piecemeal work, and I often didn’t like what I was reading (even though someone on Pinterest swore that I would).
You see, I work with a guy, a fellow teacher in the English Department, who is a voracious reader. He’s read more books in the last two years than I’ve read in my life. He and I often talk about what we’re reading with each other, and I swear that he finishes a book every two or three days. I can’t keep up with that! I’m jealous of that kind of speed, since I happen to be very particular about my reading –> I will often read passages over two or three times just to fully understand them (no, I’m not a dunce) and I enjoy making sure that I’ve gotten everything off of the page before I turn that page.
The other thing about this fellow of mine that makes me jealous is that he can read anything and seem to enjoy it. He could seriously read about the lifetime development of a character’s skill in basket-weaving and find that to be ‘just riveting’. I’ve taken some of his reading recommendations before, and it’s a crapshoot for me, reading what he recommends.
For me, if it’s not enjoyable, it’s drudgery.
As any good English teacher knows, you do a student a terrible injustice by forcing them to read something that they don’t want to read –> especially when the student is supposedly to have the choice of their book. English teachers should encourage their students to abandon a book, twenty pages in, if it feels like a ‘no-go’, because it’s more important for students to establish a love of reading than it is for them to establish a commitment to the drudgery of finishing something that you’ve started.
Anyway, back to me (if you haven’t read many of my blog posts, it’s all about me).
At some point, probably during my childhood when I didn’t have the rights to keep it from being done to me, I was indoctrinated into this philosophy of ‘if you start a book, you must finish it’. It’s probably the primary reason why I spent so long –as an adult, when no one was forcing me to– not reading.
And, it’s the reason that, still to this day, I have to finish a book once I’ve started it.
It drives my wife nuts, when I start a book that is awful and I complain about it and she tells me to quit the book and get something else, but I don’t.
For, you see, I am on another path and I have to walk this road that I’m on.
About a year ago, I decided to commit to reading all of the Hugo Award winning books. In case you’re not familiar, the Hugo Award is given every year to the year’s best science fiction novel. There are seventy-some of these books, with a new one added every year, to make the task seem more Sisyphean.
Now, the way that this particular reading path is different than the one I was previously on should be obvious. With only a few exceptions, I am reading a different author every time. Heinlein is on there multiple times, and certain other authors have appeared multiple times, but most of these authors are only on the list once.
Right now, I’m stuck in the middle of a four-hundred-page novel that has not been very enjoyable at all. But, I’m on this path, and in my way it lies.
And I guess, here’s what I’m getting at.
Sometimes, life is a drudgery, a struggle, an amount of toil for which we hardly seemed equipped and through which we would never volunteer to go. But, we are –each of us– on a path. The path for me, through the glorious meadows of Stephen King township, was lovely and wonderful and I look back on it with a fondness. The path for me now, as I continue to try to make myself be interested in an interstellar war brewing between two different trading companies, is hard.
It Occurred To Me Today 