It occurred to me today that I just don’t feel the same way that I normally would.

Thursday night was the first game of the NFL season, between the reigning champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Houston Texans. They played at Arrowhead, and there were only about fifteen thousand fans in the stands, in their own social unit groups, as far as I could tell from the broadcast. Continuing fallout from the COVID-19 crisis.

And, I heard throughout the day on Thursday, as different fans celebrated the pending start of the season, an excitement and almost a desperation from people who were looking for something to be distracted by. Social media discussions, and chatter around my workplace, reminded me that football is something that we usually get very excited about, those of us that love to watch that game.

I’ve only recently become excited about the NFL, probably over the course of the past three or four years, even though I’ve loved football all of my life. For me, I’ve historically been much more excited about college football.

Today, my favorite college football team will start its season, which will also be bittersweet because of the virus. My team will be playing in a stadium built for eighty thousand fans –in a stadium where my wife and I have been season ticket holders for almost twenty years– and fewer than sixteen thousand fans will be in the stands.

There are approximately fifty teams in Division 1 play that have cancelled their seasons altogether, so I guess I should just be happy that my team isn’t one of those.

But, on what would normally be one of the most important days of the sporting year, in my mind, and in light of the NFL game that I started watching last night and never actually finished watching, I am feeling like my emotional interest in these games has changed, at least somewhat.

While I was watching Patrick Mahomes being awesome and Deshaun Watson doing his best to try to go toe-to-toe with the Chiefs’ defense (the Texans need to think about the importance of pass protection a little more), I spent most of my time while I was watching thinking about the virus, thinking about the safety of the players, thinking about the fact that these players might be endangering themselves, even more than they normally do, to try to entertain me.

The whole equation made me feel a bit dirty.

I’m just not sure how to feel about sports right now.

* * *

I teach in a public high school, where the football players have been wanting to be able to play. Other athletes, like our cross-country runners, are thankful that they’ve been allowed to compete. In my discussions with some of my student athletes, I’ve come to understand that it’s something that they want to do, whether or not it entertains anyone, whether or not anyone else is watching.

I certainly can’t fault an athlete for wanting to compete. I applaud athletes who want to be able to play because they love to play the game that they play and that love drives them to want to be allowed to do what they do. But, wouldn’t a love of a sport, and a desire to be involved in that sport, drive an athlete to look for other ways to play, when faced with the reality that conditions aren’t going to allow for one’s sport to take place in a normal, regular fashion? I would think that, if I loved to play football, and my college belonged to an athletic conference whose leaders had decided to cancel our football season, my love for the game would motivate me to find other ways to play.

I guess another part of this equation, that I could be neglecting, is competition. I could certainly, if I was an athlete who burned inside to play football, get a group of people together to play a game of backyard football. If my desire to play the game was so great that I was willing to accept the consequences of whatever that contact sport might bring my way, during a pandemic, and if I could find a group of other people who felt the same way, I would think that I would be motivated to such an extent to find ways to play. But, the competition would be different, most certainly. I guess I’ve never been that competitive of a person.

I do regret what sporting has become in our society. I regret high school and college players who are being swept up in system that involves them in competition for the entertainment of others because the entertainment of others, at the end of the day, is a goal that falls short of what I would call lofty. Without launching on a diatribe about entertainment and human distraction –which I’ve done before on this blog –> look HERE or HERE— I wonder if we spent less time being entertained, we could be spending more time doing other things, like changing the world into the place that we’d like it to be.

Additionally, I think these players are risking their safety –now more than ever– chasing a dream of professional athletics, and that dream is an unlikely fantasy for all but the most talented and driven and successful athletes. In fact, unless I’m mistaken, I think you are more likely, statistically speaking, to catch the coronavirus than you are to be drafted in the NFL.

And I just can’t wrap my mind around the parents who are rabidly interested in having their children be competitive during this pandemic. I’ve heard the arguments being thrown around via the media coverage of both sides of the debate, but I think, if it were my kid, and the sport of their choice was a close contact sport, I’m not sure that I would be excited about them getting a chance to play.

This is my 143rd consecutive daily blog post in a row, for those who are keeping track. If you’ve been following the whole time –I love you and thank you– then you know that I have some significant concerns about the pandemic. I know that those concerns, at different points during this stretch, have been out of proportion with reality. I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that almost 200,000 people in America have died, but that the virus is highly survivable. I’m working on my mental position on the situation, as I have been all along.

I just don’t know how excited I am about sports anymore.

It occurred to me today that nothing –or no one– stays hidden for long.

I hid at work today. Probably not something to just throw out there and admit, but, there it is.

I left a place where people were ‘on to me’, where people seemed to be all about the business of interrupting me with their issues and their problems, and I went to a different building. Now, it just so happens that I can do this whenever I’d like –almost whenever; there are a couple of hours during the day, when I teach, where I have to be in a certain place at a certain time. The idea that I did it to escape a group of people is a fact that will probably remain unknown to the people that I was hoping to avoid.

The funny thing about this maneuver was that it didn’t work. Here’s what happened.

Under the guise of a need to answer some pressing help desk tickets, I left one building and made my way to a different one. At this other building, I set about the work of fixing some of the issues that were lingering help desk tickets in my help desk system at work. I’d knocked out about five of these help desk issues when kismet found me, after I’d tried to hide and everything.

The building where I’d gone to hide was experience building-wide online testing problems, and I needed to ‘fix it’. Since I was already there –albeit trying to hide– I was perfectly positioned to try to address the testing issues. Doesn’t that just beat all? You are trying to hide from major issues, and you end up walking into major issues.

Talk about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire!

There’s nothing like walking into a room where a teacher and her entire class of students are not able to do what the technology is supposed to allow them to do, with the expectation that you are going to be the one to ‘fix it’. It’s a pressure-cooker. Pile on top of that the text messages that are coming in to my phone, while I am troubleshooting, from the other teachers in this particular building who are having problems with on-line testing, as well.

Granted, this wasn’t brought on by my decision to hide in another building. Additionally, if I’d been in that first building where I started my day today, I would have just found it necessary to report to this other building, anyway. In a way, it kind of worked out pretty well.

In any case, as it turned out, the problem wasn’t ours –> the problem was the result of the on-line testing provider being overwhelmed by the number of testing students they were trying to host. I measured connection speeds to the servers of this on-line testing host and discovered that traffic was very fast, right until you got close to their servers.

So, not much else to do in that situation: our Instructional Services Director sent an email to the staff to let them know that we were going to continue to measure connectivity speeds and we would let them know when they could attempt to test their students.

And I went back to trying to knock out some more help desk issues.

I know some decent hiding places in the district, which isn’t to say that I locate myself behind the air circulation vents in the service balcony surrounding the high school gym, because I wouldn’t be able to do much of anything back there. The point isn’t to hide, so much, as it is to try to find a place where I can go to be able to accomplish what I need to accomplish. These places, where I ‘hide’, are really just spots where I can grab some time on a computer that no one ever uses in a certain office, or where I can sit at a desk with a laptop and no one is likely to find me. I can organize my inbox (which always gets destroyed in September) or I can iron out inventory issues with my asset tracking software, or I can check off items on the help desk website.

Late this morning, while I was answering some of the emails that had come in while I was trying to ‘fix’ on-line testing for the building I was in, I sat at this certain desk in this certain place and I just felt a little overwhelmed for a few moments.

I get to the place where I just feel like crying. Not that doing such a thing would help at all; at least I can’t imagine that it would. The need is so great and I am only able to do so much, be in one place at a time, troubleshoot one or two issues at a time. Additionally, there are all of the things that are out of my control, that people assume I can control, because they don’t understand that what I do isn’t special. I just have some knowledge.

Just because there is someone in your life who is able to do things that occur to you as being magical doesn’t actually mean that the person is magical, that they can control all things everywhere.

But, as I was sitting at the desk, gathering my composure, I knew that I couldn’t stay in that place, metaphorically speaking. I knew that I would have to leave that place.

Not only does nothing get done if I stay in that place, but it’s not a place of light. It’s a place of darkness –> the frustrations and the anxieties and the desperations are all part of a dark place that I can’t stay in. Instead, when that happens, when I feel like I am starting to be overwhelmed, I get moving.

I have to keep moving because there isn’t anything to do but to keep on, keepin’ on.

So, that’s what I did. And I went on to solve a bunch of other issues today. I even got around to helping some of the people that were bugging me so much at the beginning at the day that I felt the need to hide.

Hopefully, if you’re ever in a situation where you feel like hiding, you’ll 1) find a decent place to lay low for a few minutes, and 2) realize that you can’t stay there.

 

It occurred to me today that we need to be able to count on consistency.

I take a bus to and from work every day. The bus leaves the bus station, where I get on, at 7:15 every morning. It leaves the the bus stop, near where I work, at 4:30 every afternoon. Because I know these times, I am able to take the bus to and from work consistently. If I am late in the morning, the bus will be gone. If I have to stay at work late in the afternoon, the bus will be gone.

The consistency of the bus route is an integral part of how that whole system works. If people couldn’t count of the bus to be at a certain place at a certain time, then it would be unreliable –obviously– and people need to be able to be at certain places at certain times. If I have to be at work at 8:00 every morning, but the bus is late half the time, then I’m late half the time.

My boss won’t like that.

Or, let’s say that I like to grab a coffee from a local coffee shop, mid-morning, as a pick-me-up. It costs $2.35. I usually have two dollar bills, a quarter, and a dime ready to go. Because the price of the coffee hasn’t changed in forever, I know what I am going to pay every time and I am able to be prepared for it.

If I bought that coffee today, and it was $2.35, and then I bought it tomorrow and it was $1.99, and then I bought it the day after and it was $2.85, that would be inconsistent. While it might not be the end of the world, it would raise some questions in my mind about which of those prices was the right price. I might complain on the day that it costs almost three dollars, saying that I’d payed less than two the day just prior.

I have been running a lot this year. Just shy of three hundred and thirty miles so far. And, from time to time, I’ve stepped on the scale in my bathroom, to see whether or not it’s having an effect on my overall size.

It’s not, by the way, which is kind of frustrating.

But scales are another one of those things that we count on to be consistent. If my scale told me one day that I weighed 225 and the next day it said 185 and the next day after that it said 200, I would throw that scale in the garbage and buy a new scale –and not just because it wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear, either.

* * *

When you stop and think about it, there are a significant number of things that we absolutely require consistency from. In fact, I would say that the consistency of a thing is even more important than –let’s say– its accuracy or inaccuracy.

I’ve known people who set the clock in their car to a time that is not accurate –say, a few minutes fast– so that they will look at that clock and be in a hurry when they maybe don’t really have to be. The clock itself is inaccurate, but consistently so, and the information about its inaccuracy, paired with its consistency, can be used to establish a different standard.

Or, let’s say that I know that my bathroom scale is always a few pounds heavy. I know this because I have, on several occasions, weighed myself on it, and then gone to the doctor’s office and been weighed on the doctor’s scale. The inaccuracy of my bathroom scale, paired with its consistency, can at least be used to establish a different standard.

Or the speed limit sign that I pass on my way to work every day, that has the little display underneath that tells me how fast I’m going in comparison to the speed limit. I’ve noticed every time I pass that thing, by looking at my own speedometer, that it measures me going faster than I actually am. In fact, it consistently says that I am going two miles-per-hour faster than what I’m actually doing. It’s inaccurate, but at least its consistently so.

Or, maybe the speedometer in my car is consistently under-measuring my speed.

When something is consistent, and we know it to be so, we come to understand it without having to compare it against an agreed-upon standard every time. Accurate or inaccurate, consistency matters.

* * *

When it comes to consistency, do you want to know what one of the most inconsistent things on the planet is?

People.

My speedometer in my car can say that I am going fifty-five miles-per-hour, and I can hear from three different people in my car that I am going 1) too fast, or 2) too slow, or 3) just right. Of course, that’s comparing people to each other, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies.

But, think about this example.

Would you rather have 1) a coworker who is a jerk every single day without fail, or 2) a coworker who is nice on some days and mean on other days? If you picked #1, then you prefer the consistency –> if that coworker was a jerk every day, then at least you would know what to expect.

Compare the number of people that you know who are inconsistent to the number of clocks that you know that are inconsistent –not, inaccurate, mind you, but inconsistent. Would you keep a clock that was running five minutes fast one day and two minutes slow the next and a half-hour fast the day after that?

No, you would not.

But inconsistency in people is tolerated all of the time. In fact, sometimes, we want people to be inconsistent.

I’m an English teacher, and if my students can’t write at the beginning of the semester, but they can at the end of the semester, then they’ve proven themselves to be inconsistent. But, I would cheer them and so would you. We call it growth, and we hope for it in people –we hope for them to be inconsistent.

When I know that my twenty-year-old microwave requires extra time to cook something, compared to what’s written on the packaging for what I’m cooking, I learn to live with that. But, if that antique contraption decides one day to start getting more effective, I am just going to be annoyed that I can’t count on it being consistently ineffective any longer.

It occurred to me today that there’s something about bats (the flying creatures, not the long wooden baseball implement).

I, through a series of steps which I don’t quite remember, ended up in a conversation with a coworker the other day about bats. I was sharing stories about our couple of experiences with bats in our house (it’s an old house), and she was sharing stories about her experiences –> mostly experiences of discovering bats and having to deal with them, while her husband went into hiding.

As humorous as this conversation was, I realized as we were talking that there are two basic responses to bats. And then, I realized that there are two basic responses to most situations where action is warranted.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do anything like this or not at your place of employment, but I’ve had the unfortunate experience, through the years, of having to do ‘team-building exercises’ at work. Not that all team-building exercises are bad; the problem with a lot of team-building exercises, in my estimation, is that they are so hokey as to be completely unenjoyable. Or, I’ve discovered that many team-building exercises come at you with some ‘scientific approach’, which is neither scientific nor enjoyable.

Several years back, through some process of team-building at work, we ended up taking a personality inventory of sorts, that presumed to tell us what kind of a personality we had. We answered a number of different questions, which was all well and good, but then, the exercise required that we should be grouped together on teams, based on sets of similar responses. At the end of the whole thing, we were supposed to have ended up on teams with people who were like us.

Now, I was useless during the latter part of this ‘team-building exercise’ simply because of what I’d learned during the first part. What I learned on that day got to me on a personal level; it caught me completely off-guard. For whatever reason, the events of that afternoon –and the information that I learned– has been with me ever since.

For, you see, on that afternoon, I discovered that I am an over-thinker.

* * *

Of course, there are certain situations that lend themselves to over-thinking, while others most certainly do not. For example, you wouldn’t want to over-think in an emergency situation, but non-emergency situations would be a more acceptable environment for over-thinking.

The problem with this scenario is that people tend to make poorer decisions in emergency situations, probably because they feel as if they don’t have enough time to be thorough in their thinking.

The last time we had a bat in our house, we discovered it in the middle of the night. We discovered it as it was flying around in our bedroom, right over our heads, waking us up. The first thing we did, my wife and I, was to pull the covers up over our heads. Then my wife said, “What are we going to do?”

This would not have been the time to over-think. But, it was most certainly necessary that a plan –a good plan– be devised so we could move forward. For me, it took a moment to do that.

The plan worked, and we corralled the bat and were able to get rid of it.

I remember thinking, as we were hiding underneath those blankets, that I didn’t have the luxury to weigh several different options, the pros and cons of each of those options, in order to determine which approach was going to result in the highest likelihood of success.

I remember thinking that, despite wanting to over-think that situation, as I do most situations, it was more important to ACT NOW than it was to ACT PERFECTLY. The trick was, in that moment, to understand that the circumstances dictated a different approach.

* * *

There has to be a happy medium, right?!?! If you’ve read this blog for any decent amount of time, you know that I prefer moderation whenever possible (I’ve written about finding the middle ground in THIS POST and THIS POST and THIS POST, among others).

So, if we want to avoid extremes, then I guess I shouldn’t sit around, thinking about something for so long that I lose the chance to be effective in my actions. The other extreme would consist of acting in a situation with such a speed that I haven’t thought about my choices at all, which often results in bad decision-making.

As frustrating as it can sometimes be for people to have to deal with over-thinkers, because of their slowness in reaching decisions, I suspect that those over-thinkers are less often poor decision-makers. The converse of this, of course, is that people of action –as inspiring as they are in their ‘take-charge’ manner of doing things– are probably more likely to be wrong, for not having thought things through.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned two approaches when a decision needs to be made. Lying under those blankets with that bat flying around above my head, both approaches were obvious to me. A big part of me wanted to just lie there, hoping that the bat would go back to wherever it came from. But, I knew that wasn’t likely to happen. I realized that something was going to need to be done.

In psychology, these choices are referred to as fight or flight.

To be completely honest, I knew that my wife wasn’t going to allow for me to stay under those covers, hiding from the bat, so –in a sense– she motivated me to bravery.

As a matter of fact, she has very often been a driving force in helping me to be the right combination of ‘thinker’ and ‘do-er’.

It occurred to me today that the assignment is due and… I might not have actually done the assignment.

As a teacher, you hate to hear a student say that they didn’t do the assignment. It makes you question why you went into education in the first place, if the students aren’t even going to do their part?!?!

Of course, there are different kinds of students. There are students who, if they told me that they’d not done the assignment, would surprise me greatly, since they tend to do the assignment every time.

But, to be sure, I have other students who don’t do the assignment and it doesn’t surprise me at all. In fact, with these kids, it’s unfortunately the case that I’d be surprised if they did the assignment.

Through the years, as a teacher, I’ve heard all kinds of excuses for not doing the assignment. Excuses are, needless to say, what we offer when we don’t want to be brutally honest. For most of my students, most of the time, they don’t do the assignment because they don’t want to do the assignment. But, rather than tell me this, they give excuses.

And so, it comes down to a question of interest, perhaps. If I gave assignments that students wanted to do, I would be more likely to have students completing the assignments. But, if the assignments are so awful, why is it that some students do the assignments? Are they just more obedient? Is doing something that you’ve been assigned, even when you don’t want to do it, a question of the level of your obedience?

Most definitely.

Anyone will do something that they want to do when you ask them to do so. It’s when we are asked to do what we don’t want to do that the level of our obedience is on display. And, while a student who always does the assignments in a class might come across as looking obedient, it could just be the case that they are already interested in doing what they are being asked to do.

Try asking the student, who seems obedient in a class, to do something that they don’t want to do; then, you will be able to get a better measure of their tendency toward obedience.

I wonder how many times in my life I’ve been given an assignment that I didn’t do, simply because I didn’t want to.

* * *

My children have a system of chores that they are responsible for doing at home. It’s a decent system, if you ask me; we don’t ask the children to do too little, or too much. When they complete this system of chores, they are eligible for privileges around the house.

Now, some of my children are more likely to complete the system of chores than other children. And, to greater or lesser extents, I think that each of my children look at the list of the chores and think negatively about having to do them. But, if Child A only really hates two of the chores on the list, while Child B hates five of the chores on the list, it doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to know that Child B is going to complete the system of chores less often.

One of my children (Child B) was trying to wash the dog the other night. Washing the dog is not on the system of chores.

I started to wonder why she would be trying to coerce the dog into the bathroom, to be able to give him a bath, and then I realized…

She’s trying to avoid doing what she’s been assigned to do.

Now, to her credit, she was trying to do something decent and productive with her time, but she wasn’t doing what she’d been assigned to do. And, to my knowledge, she never did figure out a way to entice the dog into the bathroom, so she didn’t even accomplish the thing that she was trying to distract herself with, to get her mind off of the fact that she wasn’t doing what she’d been assigned to do.

I wonder if I have ever been engaged in an activity (or two, or three) that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, because I didn’t want to be doing what I’d been assigned. I suspect that I have.

* * *

I do this all the time at work, when I have a million things on my plate, I avoid doing what I don’t want to do because then I get to do the other things on the plate that I’d rather do.

The problem is that it doesn’t end up well; that stuff is still there, on the plate; even after I’ve finished all of the other things that I wanted to do, I still have those things that I need to do. They didn’t go away and I am not looking forward to them anymore than I was at the beginning, when I had a bunch of options on what I could do; if anything, I’m looking forward to them less, because in the back of my mind, during that whole time when I was doing the other things, I was thinking to myself, “I am eventually going to have to get to those other things.” That dread just grows my distaste for the things that I don’t want to do.

* * *

As a Christian, I’ve been assigned a list of things that I need to be working on. I wonder if God looks at me the way that I was looking at my child, trying to wash the dog the other night. I’ll be He’s shaking His head and thinking to himself, “Didn’t I give you a list of things that you’re supposed to be doing? Have you accomplished those things, or are you avoiding doing them by thinking up all of these other things that you might do?”

The truth of the matter is that I often don’t want to do what God is asking me to do, mostly because it will make me uncomfortable. When God told Adam in The Garden that he wasn’t supposed to eat the fruit from a certain tree, God stepped back to see what Adam would do.

Adam disobeyed.

As often as I’ve smacked my head and thought to myself, “It was one tree. All of the other fruit in The Garden, you just had to stay away from one tree!”, I know that I don’t do a very good job of being obedient in doing the assignments that I’ve been given.

I guess I need to start thinking about getting those assignments completed, before The Teacher asks me to turn them in.

It occurred to me today that contentment is a dying practice.

I have a music mix in my digital music collection called the Mega Mix. I wrote about it once, in THIS POST. This particular mix is a playlist that I’ve been refining for the better part of a decade. It has 685 songs in it, and it will play for 47 hours without repeating a song. It has some of my favorite hits from my whole life of appreciating music.

The other day, when I was playing the Mega Mix on the way home from work, Waterfalls, by TLC, came on. It has always been a great song, IMO. It’s probably the song that people are most likely to associate with the band, if they don’t mention No Scrubs.

Of course, one of my favorite parts of that song is probably one of the favorite parts of everyone who appreciates this song; it’s the rap that happens as a sort of bridge, between the second chorus and the end of the song. This rap is performed by TLC band member, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and its lyrics are very socially conscious and chilling. The rap itself is also a great testimony to Left Eye’s skills as a rapper.

I’ve secretly always wanted to learn that rap, to be able to do it whenever the song comes on, in the same way that I’ve always wanted to learn the percussion sequence from THIS SONG, so I can perform it whenever the chance might arise.

Anyway…

Let’s get down to it.

* * *

The idea of contentment is a dangerous one to discuss, inasmuch as there are entire parts of our culture and society that only function properly when we throw contentment out of the window. Being happy with what you have takes you out of this loop that so many people get stuck in, replacing what isn’t broken with new things because they’re new, because we just can’t help but always wanting more.

For example, I had a student last year who asked me for some help getting some of the Google apps installed on a new phone of his. I spent some time helping the kid get the right apps and getting them properly configured. As we were talking during this process, I asked him, “What did you do with your old phone?”, to which he replied, “I traded it in to get this phone.” When I asked him what was wrong with his old phone, he said that there wasn’t anything wrong with his old phone, and that he just wanted a new phone. I finished helping him with the apps, and then we parted company. I don’t think he even knew that what he was doing was problematic, especially if you carry that philosophy into other areas.

–> “I don’t like my house anymore, so I’ll get a new one.” That’s fine, but you’ll lose equity every time, and a thirty-year mortgage is going to be a thirty-year mortgage regardless of how many times you decide to start one, or how late in life you are when you start your last one.

–> “I don’t like my church anymore, so I’m going to switch churches.” I guess you can do that if you want, but you’ll damage relationships with the friends that you’ve made, as you move to a place where no one will know who you are.

–> “I don’t like my spouse anymore, so I’m going to file for divorce.” Whether or not this particular mindset has contributed to the high divorce rates in this country, you can’t argue about the kind of damage that this causes to families everywhere.

Maybe, people who lack contentment just have a problem seeing something through to the end. But, your average movie-goer (back when movie theaters were a thing) sits in the seat until the final credits roll, even when they don’t like how the movies going, so maybe it’s something else. I’ve got other theories.

* * *

However, in our attempt to avoid the one extreme, we should be careful not to dive headlong into the other extreme. If it’s not right to never be content, then it can’t be right to always be content, either. People, who are content in situations where they shouldn’t be, are also in a bad position.

Some people would just call this lazy, but I don’t know if that explains the whole situation. I think that there must be some other factors that are contributing to what it is that people are thinking when they stay where they’re at, even though they shouldn’t. Just as people who lack contentment probably aren’t just incapable of a full-length commitment, people who stay when they should go, are probably more complex than ‘just lazy’.

So, to summarize, the idea of contentment is a tricky balancing act; it’s important for us to be able to recognize when we should be okay with where we’re at, and we should also be able to recognize when our moves and changes are necessary for the improvement of our circumstances.

* * *

Each of the verses in the song tell a story about a situation where people are discontent and chasing after things that aren’t necessary, that are –in fact– ill-advised. I don’t know if you know anyone who just doesn’t take advice, ever when it’s good advice, but Waterfalls tells about those situations where things don’t really work out when you are set to disregard the wise counsel of the people around you.

I know I have been in situations before when, surrounded by the advice of good and intelligent people in my life, I’ve chosen to do what I felt was appropriate, only to discover afterward that others were right all along.

In those situations, where I’ve been “chasin’ waterfalls”, instead of “stick[ing] to the rivers and the lakes that [I’m] used to”, I’d have to say that my choices were more a result of immaturity than anything else. I think that we are more likely to take advice and heed it when we realize that there are people around us who’ve made mistakes that we don’t necessarily have to repeat.

So, if nothing else, check out the song and make careful decisions when it comes to being content with what you’ve got.

 

The Horizon

It occurred to me today that the earth is round.

If you’ve never seen the movie Spaceballs, this next part might be lost on you, but otherwise, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Our future is constantly in the process of arriving to become our present. And, since this is true, it also means that our present is constantly in the process of becoming our past. The question of “When will ‘then’ be ‘now’?” is always easily answered with, “Soon.”

But, for as many people as have laughed at that scene in that movie, I’d be surprised if there aren’t a whole slew of people out there who are constantly being surprised by the arrival on their future in the ‘now’.

I seem to be realizing this most as a parent, because I am watching my kids, as they grow, arriving at milestones in their development that I guess I never really expected them to get to. Now, this isn’t to say that I didn’t think that they would live to get to these stages; what I mean to say is that I wasn’t paying attention, and then these things arrived.

To put it another way, I don’t know that I have ever fully understood this truth: part of the equation of being a parent is watching your kids slip away, toward their own independence.

I’m not sure I’m okay with this equation.

* * *

When I got home from work today, the house was empty, because my wife was at work –which isn’t a ground-breaking development– and because my children had gone to a friend’s house –which wasn’t a ground-breaking event, either.

When I got home from work today, two of my three vehicles were not at home –again, not a ground-breaking event.

What was ground-breaking about my kids being gone when I got home, and for two of my three vehicles to be gone at the same time, was that one of my three cars had been piloted away from my house with my children inside it, BY ONE OF MY CHILDREN.

Pretty ground-breaking.

That had never happened before today.

So, when they were due to get home, I waited for them out in the driveway. I wanted to capture the memory of this ground-breaking development. I have to tell you, the look of a car that you own, driving toward you, with a child of yours driving the car, with your other two children in the car –> seeing that for the first time is quite the experience.

* * *

I don’t suspect that it is ever the case that a person can be sitting in the bed-side chair in a recovery room in a childbirth ward in a hospital, next to the bed where the mother is resting after the labor of child birth, I can’t imagine that it has ever been the case that a person has been sitting in that bed-side chair thinking, “When this newborn baby starts driving, I think I am going to have to move the level of coverage on that vehicle down just to be able to afford a teenage driver.”

And yet, it comes. Sooner than you would imagine.

Maybe it’s just part of the experience of life that we tend to deal with what’s in front of us, or –if we are feeling ambitious– with what’s not too far off.

Can you imagine having to deal with the totality of a thing, from beginning to end, whatever that thing might be, once you’ve begun it? It would drive you crazy, sitting in that chair next to the recovery bed, with the baby in your arms, considering its first steps and first words and first date and first act of rebellion and first college class and the name of that child’s first child. So, rather, we do our best just to live in the joy of the moment.

But, even as we do that –for the sake of our own sanity– we get lulled into a state of mind that allows for us to eventually be surprised when that baby grows up.

* * *

The first time you do something that’s a little scary, you get a little scared. But then, the next time, maybe less so. Imagine how scary it would be to go sky-diving for the first time.

How about how scary it would be doing it for the tenth time? Or the fiftieth time?

Less so.

As we start to let go of our kids, as they grow up and venture out more and more often, it’s scary at first, but then maybe later, not so much.

Maybe that’s what parenting is, really; you spend a certain number of years preparing your children to be ready to be independent, and then you spend a certain number of years getting used to the idea that they are going to be independent.

* * *

The title of the post is The Horizon. When I got my driver’s license, my parents had a car available for me to use; it was a 1986 Plymouth Horizon. This link should give you a sense of the vehicle. As I’ve been writing this post, and I’ve been thinking about the fact that I once was a kid, just learning to drive, and now I am a father with a kid, just learning to drive, the historically circular nature of life isn’t lost on this old man.

I still miss that car, sometimes.

But, that car isn’t the reason that I called this post The Horizon. I decided on the title because I realize that, as we look at the horizon that we’ve all pointed our ships toward, and we think about the fact that we are hoping to make it to that horizon, the truth of the matter is that we already have. The place where we are now is the place where we intended be in the past.

We are –RIGHT NOW– on the horizon that we were looking toward in the past.

The horizon is coming, so prepare, but it has also already come, so enjoy.

When will then be now? Soon.

It occurred to me today that life is often a winding road.

My son took his Segment 1 Driver’s Training classes in the Spring of 2019, fifteen months ago. Only today did he get his official Driver’s License from the Secretary of State. Between breaking his ankle last summer, and the winter months, and the complications brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been hard for him to get to the place where he could make his way through the process.

As Garrett was in physical therapy last fall, for his ankle, he wasn’t able to log driving time (he’d broken his right ankle, of course) and driving time is required in order to become eligible for taking the Segment 2 course that comes next in the series. Once he cleared physical therapy, the weather (in December and January and February) wasn’t the kind that a nervous driver and his nervous parents are excited about driving around in.

Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and we were restricted to our homes for a short while. Even when that started to lift, our son was nervous about driving to log some hours when it was only supposed to be ‘necessary travel’.

But, as spring made its way toward summer, he started to want to resume his progress toward the goal, and the more he started driving, the more the hours started to accrue. Then, just as he was getting to the place where he had enough hours to be able to move on to the Segment 2 class, the driver’s training provider that we were using changed their plans, to be in compliance with state executive orders, and it became unlikely that we were going to be able to complete our son’s training through the same ‘school’ that he’d used to start the training.

But, because we understand that flexibility during adversity is one of the keys to eventual success, we looked for another place where he could get the Segment 2 training done. We found a place that would do the training, and Garrett took Segment 2, and he kept on logging driving hours.

To be eligible to take the road test, you must have fifty hours of driving experience, with ten of those hours happening at night.

As we got closer and closer to that number –fifty– I started to notice that the number of night hours wasn’t really going down at all. I knew, at that point, a couple of weeks ago, that my son and I were going to have to go on a few night-time driving trips, just to get some of those hours logged. So, we did, and I got to help him get comfortable about when to switch on your brights and when to be especially careful for deer on the move. This past weekend, as a matter of fact, my son logged his last necessary hours, which was great, since he had a scheduled appointment at the start of the week to take the road test.

Of course, the other thing that we were concerned about, in preparation for the road test, was parking practice. So, on a few occasions in the past month, my son and I have taken the family vehicle to a local parking lot, or two, to practice the big three –> pulling in, backing in, and… parallel parking.

As with many things about driving, you only get more comfortable with the finer points, once you’ve had enough practice. When I was a kid, I feel like they were giving out driver’s licenses like lollipops, compared to what kids have to go through these days. But, I’m also wondering whether or not my son is a better driver than I would have been at that same point in my development, almost thirty years ago.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve recently tried getting an appointment at the Secretary of State’s office at any southwestern Michigan branch, but it’s not easy. We booked an appointment for our son, near the end of July, for the middle of September and thought we were pretty fortunate.

But, when Garrett passed his road test earlier this week, we knew that it was going to be torture for him to wait for a couple more weeks before being able to get in to complete the application process for his full driver’s license. My wife started looking for ‘standby’ spots at any of the local Secretary of State offices, and she ended up finding an appointment for much sooner.

That worked out well.

That appointment, as I said at the start of this post, was this afternoon. My son is able to drive a motor vehicle by himself. Look out, world.

* * *

I talked with him this afternoon, after he got back from his appointment, about taking steps into adulthood. Freedom becomes more real, and so does responsibility. I asked him what it was going to be like when he decided that he wanted to go for a drive by himself, and we discussed this notion that he is starting to develop into the man that is going to be able to successfully leave his mother and I, to go off into the world on his own.

As I sit here, typing these final thoughts at the end of this post, I have to say that I am getting nervous about the fact that he is at the point in life where he is starting to make a life that is, increasingly, his own. For all of the time that I’ve wasted, while he was in one room of the house doing his own thing, and I was in another room doing my own thing, I am starting to realize that my time with him is starting to wind down. I am ashamed of the time that I’ve been wasting, so many wasted moments.

They say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I don’t know if that’s entirely true, because I am starting to realize what I am losing while I still have the chance to do something about it. While I will never get those lost moments back, I should start making the most of the time that I have remaining, with all three of my children, as my wife and I guide them the rest of the way to their futures.

It occurred to me today that I really don’t like this week.

NOTE: I APOLOGIZE IF THE FORMATTING LOOKS DIFFERENT AND NOT TO YOUR LIKING; WORDPRESS MADE SOME CHANGES TO THE WAY THAT I CREATE THIS CONTENT, AND I AM STILL GETTING USED TO THOSE CHANGES.

I am the technology director for the school district where I work. While this might sound pretty fancy, it doesn’t really amount to much, other than I am the guy who fixes the technology when it doesn’t work.

Now, imagine yourself as the technology director for a school district. What week of the school year do you think would be the worst week for you, as you help people with their technology needs, as you are being pulled in different directions by different forces that are being brought to bear on you.

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a very special week of the year, for everyone in education.

* * *

Imagine the problem this way.

A man is in a boat and the boat is leaking. The rate at which the water outside of the boat is coming into the boat is two gallons per minute. The man is able to bail water at a rate of three gallons per minute. That doesn’t sound like a problem, right?!?! Except, when he got into the boat, there was already fifteen gallons of water sitting in the bottom of the boat. Bailing that water, and the new water that is coming in, becomes a math problem. At what point in time will the man in the boat have the water cleared?

That is what my job is like during hell week. I can’t ever seem to get to the point where I’ve cleared everything that was set in front of me to do. Honestly, it often ends up taking a couple of weeks for all of that work to get done. “Why does it take so long?” you ask.

Well, during this pretty simple process of bailing water out of a leaking boat, the person doing the bailing is also expected to quilt a blanket. And juggle three flaming chainsaws without dropping any of the three. And, recite from memory the complete Gettysburg Address.

Does it seem like too much?

Welcome to hell week.

* * *

The great thing about hell week is that each day is slightly better than the previous one. Once you clear the work that is in front of you on the first day, then there is that much less to do on the second day. If you are fool enough to believe that there isn’t anything else that will be coming in on Day Two, it wouldn’t seem that bad at all.

But, of course, Day Two will include its own challenges, which may keep you from emptying all of the water out of the boat. Which is what Day Three and Day Four are for. Even if you can’t clear a greater number of problems in Days One and Two than the number of issues that arise, you are really just fighting to be alive on Days Three and Four, when the rate of the influx of new problems will start to slow a little bit.

If you get knocked down six times, all you have to do is get up seven times.

* * *

Communication is very tough for me during hell week. In fact, when people are overworked, communication is one of the first things to go. I don’t have time to 1) read the email that tells me to fix something, and also 2) fix the thing, and also 3) email you to let you know that I’ve fixed the thing. So, guess which part I’m going to cut out.

The problem with cutting out the communication process is that it doesn’t assist you in cooperating with your fellows. When I don’t have time to tell someone that I’m working on a problem while, at the same time, I work on that problem, then they hear nothing from me. That can lead to a negative emotional response, when they person assumes that I am not working on the problem and they get angry or resentful. And that’s my fault, inasmuch as I can’t do what everyone is asking me to do and also spend time talking to people about what I’m doing.

The other thing that a lack of communication can result in is nagging. The users, when they don’t hear from me, communicate their problems to me repeatedly. So, my inbox gets more full because I have to empty out three emails from each of the users about the problems their having, instead of just one.

And, it’s not like the nagging is a big problem; sometimes, it is actually effective in getting me to respond to an issue. If you emailed me yesterday about a problem, and then I get fifty other emails after that one, it doesn’t even show up on my first screen of the inbox. Of course, you might ask yourself why it is that I’m getting fifty emails a day.

The answer is, “It’s hell week.”

* * *

Now, don’t get me wrong, my coworkers are great. They all understand that I am under a load of work that is difficult to bear, especially during these first couple of weeks of school. One of my coworkers said to me today, “Your job is one of the jobs in the school district that I wouldn’t want.” Part of the problem is that I am the only person who does any work on the technical issues. Because of that, every technical problem is a problem for Mr. Brackett.

While there always seems to be an increase in the discussion that the administrators have –annually, right around this time– about doing what is necessary to help the tech director so he can be as efficient as possible, their hands seem to be tied, for the most part.

I guess, if I have a parting remark to make about what life is like for me during this week of school, I’ll make these two. 1) The struggles that people go through in their lives are real and significant, and you don’t know, when you cut someone in line at the grocery store, or when you cut them off on the highway, what that person is going through when you decided to be unkind to them. So, be kind. Everyone is going through the own private ‘hell week’, at one point or another. 2) Find the strength to rise to the challenges in your life. You’re never going to find a way to avoid every challenge, so getting good at facing them is a coping mechanism for this thing we call life. Once you start to get good at challenges, they don’t end up seeming that challenging, when they come.

And, when you’re in the midst of the struggle, keep your perspective proper. It has been said that, “This, too, shall pass.” So, just keep your eyes on the horizon and weather the storm.

I guess that was three things.

It occurred to me today that the chasms are many, and they all seem so wide.

Yesterday, on a run, I ran by a business that put up a pro-presidential candidate banner, stretching from one side edge of the front of the business to the other side edge. The banner suggested that one ought to vote for a certain candidate in order to make members of the opposite political party cry.

Now, before you jump to conclusions about what the sign might say (unless you actually know which sign I’m talking about), let me say this, I’ve seen pro-campaign propaganda for the party opposite from the party whose candidate was being advertised on this business banner, and the pro-campaign propaganda on the opposite side is just as bad. Just as offensive. Just as disparaging.

I just don’t know how we got to this place. There is so much hate.

* * *

If you’ve read a decent number of the post that I’ve put up since April 22nd, then you should know where I’m standing politically right now, and I’m not going to go into rehashing that, in case you haven’t been reading. But, to say that I have never been so unaffiliated with either political party is probably the truest statement that I’ll make on the subject. Part of the reason that I feel disenfranchised by the two-party political system in America is all of the hate.

I keep seeing this meme on Pinterest; maybe you’ve seen it, too. It’s a picture of JFK (a prominent Democrat) standing next to Dwight Eisenhower (a prominent Republic), and the two of them seem to be pleasantly enjoying each other’s company. The meme, alongside the picture, talks about the good ol’ days when people didn’t use to hate political parties so much, back in the days when we were all united as “We The People”, blah, blah, blah.

So, the first step is to imagine that there was a time when partisan politics wasn’t a major impediment to progress in the United States.

Once you are there, the questions then becomes, “At what point did we move from being a country where partisan politics wasn’t a destructive force, to the place where we are now, occupying our opposite sides of a line drawn in the sand?”

* * *

Today, I involved myself in a political conversation with a woman with whom I work. We normally wouldn’t have much to talk about, when it comes to politics. She’s a little bit too far to the left for me to have much to say to, politically.

But, as the conversation progressed, it wasn’t like that.

In our discussion, I discovered that she isn’t that different from me –> she’s most certainly further left than me, but not as much as I would have thought before we talked today.

THAT’S PART OF THE STORY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THEY’VE GOT US THINKING THAT WE ARE ENEMIES, WHEN WE’RE NOT THAT DIFFERENT.

* * *

Hate is extremist. Extremist Democrats hate. Extremist Republicans hate. Extremist Whites hate, as do Extremist Blacks.

While most people aren’t going to go to the extreme of ‘hating’ someone, the extremists (by definition) will.

If hate is extremist, where does that put love? Is love extreme?

I believe that it is.

And, the funny thing about the extremes is this: there aren’t that many people out there, in the extremes.

Take, for example, a bell curve. If you don’t know what a bell curve is, Google it.

In Psychology class, with my high school students, we study the bell curve as a way of plotting the frequency of any particular characteristic within a population of people. I teach my students that the bell curve, which starts at a low level of frequency at one end (or extreme) and results in an equally low level of frequency at the other end (or extreme), is populated by the most people in a moderate range between either extremes.

The people who want to turn America into a new, twenty-first century socialist experiment; there’s like twenty of them in the whole nation and you don’t know any of them so stop freaking out about a socialist left that doesn’t actually have any foothold.

The people who want to turn America into an authoritarian regime of fascism; there’s like twenty of them in the whole nation and you don’t know any of them so stop freaking out about a fascist right that doesn’t actually have any foothold.

Here’s the truth –> the Democrats aren’t as far left as the Republicans would imagine them, just as the Republicans aren’t as far right as the Democrats would imagine them. Check out a bell curve when you get a chance.

* * *

Up above, when I wrote that I think that hate and love are both pretty extreme, it occurred to me that, when I was a kid, I ended up at a lot more funerals than what I think your normal kid ends up at.

At each of these unfortunate family reunions, I struggled with my appropriate emotional response, especially in those situations where some ancient and/or distant relative of mine had died, and I was at their funeral.

Truth be told, in at least a couple of these situations, I honestly didn’t care one way or the other if this particular person was dead.

How awful is that to say!

I tried sometimes, at funerals as a kid, to force myself to cry for the dead people who’d had no effect on me at all, mostly because I thought that the other people at the funeral were expecting me to do so. Those tears, of course, never came. Do you know why?

If love is extreme and hate is extreme, what most of us tend to live in, most of the time, is apathy.

As offensive as this might sound, and as tempted as you might be to lash out at me for saying something like this, let me ask you, “How many people do you love, whose deaths would be ultimately devastating to you? Add to that, the number of people that you hate. Compare that total number to the number of people for whom you’d be hard-pressed to feel very emotional at all at their funeral.”

Remember the bell curve.

In light of this, it’s important to note that a war is being waged, in society, right now. The goal of the war is to get us to hate more or to love more. Since the majority of people would tend to be moderates, since that’s the definition of a normal distribution, we might love a few people and hate a few people, but we have an opportunity to show love to enough people to tip the scales in the proper direction.

Who will decide? You will.