It occurred to me today that I’m lucky to not have run out of things to say.
There have been some scary times, working on this blog journey for the past three and a half months. One of the scariest things is sharing stuff with all of you that I am afraid could get me in trouble.
One of the most regular fears that I have is a fear of running out of things to say.
Interestingly enough, that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve gotten pretty close, a couple of times, to not having anything to write about, not having anything to say. But then, something usually comes to me and I have enough lead time to be able to write it up and publish it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that some of the stuff that I am putting out is ‘not my best work’. There have been some posts that I’ve put together that felt like drivel, when I was done with them, and I hit the publish button because I’d decided that it was as good as it was going to be. Other posts have been wonderful statements –if only in my
opinion– and I am excited to have other people see them. It’s pretty similar to the way that I am running toward my weekly running goals.
There are days when I am running and my performances have been inspirational; on other days, I feel like I am barely surviving what I’m doing when I got out to ‘pound the pavement’. Today, for example, I ran a 10K during which I psyched myself out five times, resulting in a less than stellar performance.
* * *
I know that I have mentioned this a couple of times in different posts, so I’m not necessarily letting a cat out of the bag here, but I am working on some creative writing –a series of related novels– as well as maintaining this blog.
That process has been a bit more of a struggle than blog post writing.
Imagine, if you will, that you receive in the mail, every few days, an envelope. In this envelope, there are five or six puzzle pieces. On some days, the puzzle pieces are related to each other, such that you could put them together without even involving the other pieces of the puzzle. On other days, none of the pieces relate to each other, but rather, they relate to what you’ve already received in the mail, or
–worse yet– they don’t relate to anything and you just have new pieces of the puzzle to set aside, for now, until something later connects. And, of course, there is no ‘finished puzzle picture’ –> that oh-so-valuable tool to the puzzler. And, it just so happens to be a thousand-piece puzzle.
That’s what novel writing has been like for me.
By comparison, writing these blog posts is a similar process. Waiting for something to come in the mail. Receiving it. Having to put it together. But, with these posts, I get an envelope (or maybe two or three) and they total a ten-piece puzzle. Sometimes, I’ll sit down to start writing a post –like this one– and the whole thing just flows out because all of the thoughts are in my head somewhere already and it’s just a process of putting them altogether in the proper order on the page. Other times, I’ll sit down to write a post, and it’s not all there; in those cases, I leave the post in a ‘draft mode’, hoping for some future point in time when the other pieces come in the mail.
* * *
If I can bridge that previous metaphor into this section, to discuss a different concept; sometimes, I think I have finished the puzzle, and then an envelope comes in the mail and it’s more pieces to the puzzle.
What I mean to say is this: there is this point when I make a decision that something is done, but then, many times, it occurs to me that there is something more to say on a subject or there is an additional piece that could have been added to an article. But, that’s the thing. There isn’t any adding. I can’t go back to something that I published last week and add to it because additional thoughts come to me. I said it was done, and I put it out there as done.
Imagine the sculptor, who would walk into the art gallery, where his art is on display, to climb up on a ladder next to a sculpture to chisel off just one more piece of marble from the face, to cause the jawline to stand out just a bit more evenly. Or, imagine the painter, who adds a brush stroke to a canvas on a wall in a studio exhibition.
When you pour out all of the water from a glass of water, when you’re done, you stop pouring. You turn the glass back right-side-up. Now, when you do that, is it the case that there is still water in the glass? Most certainly there is. Could you have accomplished a greater level of completion if you’d tipped that glass for an additional second, or five or sixty –> probably. That decision that something is done isn’t necessarily a correct decision.
If I stop vacuuming the living room floor, it’s not because there’s nothing more in that carpet that should be removed. It’s because I feel like the job is done. Is that decision correct or incorrect?
* * *
I told a close friend of mine recently that I feel like the inspiration that I get for doing the writing that I’m doing comes from outside of me. And, anyone who’s read enough of these posts, or who knows me well enough, would know that I am a Christian. Christianity doesn’t necessarily blend very well with beliefs in things like muses or the like, but I do know that I am filled with the Holy Spirit of God, and I feel like He has been inspiring me to do this writing that I’m doing.
This corresponds pretty well, I believe, with other inspiration that I receive from the Holy Spirit, throughout my regular life. When the Holy Spirits prompts me –moves me– to do something to show God’s Love to the people around me, that process feels pretty similar to how I get inspired to write. When God helps me make decisions that I struggle with, through prayer and reading His Word, the proper choices end up becoming clear similarly to the way that my writing materializes.
The most frustrating part of that, for me, is that it seems to come out of the clear blue, and I have to capture it in some way so that I don’t lose it. This morning, in fact, while I was running down the road, I got an idea for a blog post. You should have seen this idiot, running down the street, recording his own voice into his phone –while gasping– so as to not lose an idea from his mind.
Maya Angelou once described the process of her inspiration as having to capture something onto a piece of paper before –and I’m paraphrasing, here– it flew away like a butterfly.
And now that I have this butterfly captured, I am going to decide to be done.
It occurred to me today that there is one thing that I’m not missing from the fair.
SECTIONS OF THIS ARE TAKEN FROM A PIECE THAT I WROTE YEARS AGO IN RESPONSE TO THE EVENT DESCRIBED BELOW. IF THE POST AS A WHOLE FEELS DISJOINTED, I’VE TRIED MY BEST TO MARRY THE TWO PIECES –TODAY’S POST AND THE OLD JOURNAL ENTRY– TOGETHER.
Right around this time of the year, a lot of people in my neck of the woods get excited about our local fair. It’s a fun time for people to get together at the fairgrounds, and to enjoy what the fair has to offer. Our family has been involved in the fair for many years; my children exhibit their projects in multiple different barns, and my wife and I have volunteered at the fair for longer than we’ve been married.
COVID-19 cancelled this year’s fair, unfortunately.
One of the great things about being an exhibitor at the fair, depending on whom you might ask, is that you get a week pass, which is unlimited free entrance to the fair for the week. Unfortunately, parents can’t get free entrance to the fair for a week. But… volunteers can.
My wife and I have volunteered for the fair for more than twenty years, mostly in the Craft Barn and with other organizations, but for the past few years now, we’ve been exclusively volunteering as ushers for the grandstand. The grandstand is that location, at the fairgrounds, where the big shows and entertainment events happen, during the week of the fair. Kirk Hansen and the team of volunteers that my wife and I work with in the grandstand work really hard to make sure that events are coordinated, safe, and enjoyable for everyone. It’s been a great thing to be involved in. In 2021, if you’re looking for a way to get into the fair, off the sweat of your brow, there’ll probably be an usher organizational meeting in late July.
In any case, you sign up for the events that you want to be a part of, and then Kirk assigns you to different areas, based on your skills and comfort level. You have to work a minimum number of events to qualify for the week pass to the fair, but it’s a reasonable number. And… you obviously get to be in the events that you work without having to buy a ticket –> of course this means that you’re working, as opposed to being a spectator, but it’s kind of the same thing. My wife and I like to work the children’s circus, usually, because that’s fun, and we also like to work certain other events.
We also usually sign up to work the demolition derby.
I hate the demolition derby.
* * *
The first year we volunteered for Kirk Hansen, we signed up for the demolition derby, since we were new to the scene, and we didn’t have any idea what we were signing up for. But then, being there that evening, I was greatly saddened by the experience.
If this seems strange to you, let me explain.
I have always loved cars. When I was a kid, I loved learning about cars, and my brother and I would sit out in front of our house –we lived on a local highway– and identify the cars as they went by. I love classic cars and modern cars. I collected matchbox cars as a kid; I had dozens of them. My two favorite television shows, as a kid, featured cars. I built model cars from the model kits that you could buy at the G.L. Perry variety store in town. I remember my dad took my brother and I to a car show in South Bend when I was a kid, and I got to sit inside the KITT car from Knight Rider.
I’ve always loved cars.
On that night a few years ago, as I was standing near the entry gate of the grandstand, looking at my first ever demolition derby, I thought it was gross; I got physically nauseous.
But, I think it also taught me something about death –not because anyone died– but because the death of a thing is still a death, in a way.
Their engines were roaring, and the roars sounded so much like screams, only to echo the screams of the watching fans, wanting to see the death of the things. The smoke was oily and thick in the air, and it was the dying exhalations from those cars. I was breathing in the dying breaths of those dying cars.
It reminded me of a bull fighting demonstration that I saw in Spain when I was in college. I think it must also be what dog fighting or cock fighting is like, not that I would know. It has something to do with a fascination that we have with fighting, with battle, with gladiators, with conflict and combat and confrontation.
With destruction.
They were just cars, of course, but that didn’t matter to me. I have always loved cars and I couldn’t watch them be killed, so I stopped. I just sat down, near the entry gate, and put my head in my hands and stared at the ground, waiting for the whole thing to eventually be over.
I felt, when I was watching, like I was watching something dark. I felt like it was connecting to something inside of me that is dark. Continuing to watch meant continuing to allow my darkness to be exposed, to be connected to what I was seeing. I didn’t want that.
And then, there were the looks on the faces of the people around me. Those faces, those blank and excited stares, made me think that the same thing was happening to them, but they kept watching; I couldn’t. They were joined by the people who’d gathered near the gate to try to peek in, who hadn’t paid to see, but they still wanted to see.
* * *
Now, I said earlier that my wife and I usually sign up to work the demolition derby. You might wonder why, if it bothers me so much. I’m not really sure that I can answer that, at least not completely. I think I go now, every year –except for this one– as a reminder about destruction. The worship of destruction, the sick levels of attention we pay to what is destructive in our society; we’ve got to knock that right off.
A while back, I wrote this post about yard signs. But, a couple more thoughts have occurred to me on the subject.
On August 5th, the morning after the primary election in Michigan, just a few days ago, I went out for my morning run. During that run, I ran past a couple of yard signs, for political candidates, who had surely either won or lost their bids on the previous day. As I ran by, I got to thinking about those political signs, and how often you end up seeing them up for a significant amount of time –days, weeks even– after the election has come and gone.
I’ve often wondered why that is.
Now of course, the other day was just a primary, and so perhaps, the signs get left up because the general election is still a few months away. Or, maybe, the signs of winners are left up, as if the property owner hopes to associate themselves with the winners, as if to linger on the pleasant aroma of the victory. But, if either of those were the case, then you would at least expect half of the signs (the signs belonging to the losing candidates) to disappear as quickly as the votes get counted.
I mean, think about how you feel, wearing your favorite piece of team gear, on the day after your team gets destroyed by an opponent. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather wear that pink paisley button-down shirt that hides in the back of my closet; at least it doesn’t advertise my association with the losers.
Of course, when my team wins, now that’s a different story. Wild horses couldn’t keep me from wearing the shirt or the jersey or the jacket that shows that my team is the team that won.
And, while I’m on this subject, have you ever noticed that there are some people who, on the day after a defeat, will wear their team gear on purpose. I don’t know what to think about those people. Aren’t they just inviting the ridicule? Are they just gluttons for punishment? Or, maybe they are daring someone to say something to them about the game, so they might be provided with the opportunity to launch the sum of all the general rage and hate that they felt on some poor unsuspecting schmuck?
In any case, something doesn’t add up, because none of the theories that I seem to come up with, to try to explain why it is that yard signs for political candidates don’t come down when you think they ought to, none of my theories works often enough to make me think that any one theory is right.
There must be something else going on.
* * *
In the previous post that I linked above, I wrote about a certain property that I pass on my way to work everyday, and about the number of political yard signs that they have, and the affiliations that I make in my mind about certain candidates that are being advertised by this property owner, alongside other candidates.
If you care enough to read the previous post, you might get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
In any case, it occurred to me today that this property owner was pulling for three political candidates to gain office, according to their yard signs. One of them was a local candidate running for a local office, the second was a local candidate running for a federal office, and the third candidate didn’t have any elections to win or lose on Tuesday (if you catch my drift).
Of the three that this property owner was pulling for, two of them lost on Tuesday. The only one who didn’t lose, could not have lost on Tuesday.
Of the two, I certainly feel worst for the local candidate running for the local office. While I didn’t vote for him –not because of the affiliations that existed on someone else’s front lawn, but rather, because I had someone I preferred to vote for– I wonder if there may have been some fallout from the national political scene that affected this individual.
I think they call this the coattail effect, whereby a popular candidate of a certain party is likely to be a benefit to other members of the same party. When the opposite is true, and unpopular candidates adversely affect the chances of their fellows, they call it the negative coattail effect.
Consider how badly Barry Goldwater did in 1964; he performed so poorly as the Republican candidate for the Presidency, that multiple Republicans in the House of Representatives also lost their seats. This allowed for Lyndon Johnson to have a Democratic majority to work with in accomplishing his goals. The negative coattail effect.
* * *
I saw something, this past Tuesday night, that caught me off-guard, having to do with election-specific yard signs.
Our local library attempted, this past Tuesday, to get a “YES” vote on a millage for their funding. Because our community loves its library, they ended up getting the votes without much of a contest.
Before the evening was even over on Tuesday night, I noticed a neighbor of ours –whose husband volunteers for the library– walking over to the property of a different neighbor of ours, to retrieve a sign from their front lawn, asking voters to vote “YES” on the millage for the library.
Once it occurred to me that my neighbor was just being ‘neighborly’ as she collected the sign that was sure to be returned to the library for its purposes, whatever those might be, I started thinking about the importance of political yard signs in general.
Not everyone posts them, and I think that’s probably the case because candidate politics is not important enough for many people to take a position on, one way or the other. However, taking a stand on an issue –say, a millage for a public institution– is easier for people to commit to. It’s much more likely that supporting one’s local library is going to be the right thing to do next week, and next month, and next year, and ten years from now.
In my particular neck of the woods, you are much more likely to see political yard signs that support a particular issue on someone’s property than you are to see a property that is decked out in candidate signs.
Supporting XYZ political candidate is just not as solid of a position to take, keeping in mind how inconsistent most people –especially politicians– are.
I’m a teacher, among other things, and a lot of the teachers that I know have a favorite ‘teacher’ movie, just like police officers might have a favorite ‘police’ movie, or doctors might have a favorite ‘doctor’ movie.
For some of the teachers I know, it might be Lean On Me; for others, it might be Stand And Deliver; for some others, it might even be Billy Madison. I happen to have a tie for first-place for favorite ‘teacher’ movie: Dead Poet’s Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus. I’ll bet you can guess, from the name of this post, which one of these I’d like to discuss.
In the movie, Glenn Holland is a musical composer; many of the scenes of the movie occur while Glenn is sitting at his piano, in his home, working on the single greatest piece of his career. This is what one might call, a magnum opus. In fact, if you look up the word ‘opus’ in the dictionary, the definition specifically makes reference to artists or musicians… or composers. And so, with the movie title in mind, you might be led to believe that the movie is about Glenn’s work as a composer.
It occurred to me today that I had it all wrong, as many times as I’ve seen that movie; the movie is not about the musical piece that Glenn Holland finally completes, near the end of the movie, the piece that is played for him by an orchestra made up of some of his greatest fans.
At least, the movie is not only about that work.
For, you see, the other definition for the word ‘opus’, the more relaxed definition, is simply ‘work’. That’s what the word originally meant in Latin –> work. Today, I realized that the movie, entitled Mr. Holland’s Opus, could be narrowly considered to be about the great piece of music that he writes, or –in a more open interpretation– the movie can be seen as a statement on Glenn Holland’s work.
In the movie, Mr. Holland is a coach and a teacher, by trade. Near the start of the movie, when Glenn starts his career at a local high school as a music teacher, it is clear that he’d much rather be at home, working on his musical compositions. But, as is often the case with art, you’ve got to have something to pay the bills, and Mr. Holland starts the work of creating a music program in his new school setting.
I’m not going to give any more of the movie away; if you’ve never seen it before, you ought to.
I think it’s like that for all of us –> we ‘work’ at different things and, if we’re steady and diligent, they amount to something that we can look back on and be proud of. If you really strive, maybe you can manage to accomplish a number of things with your life.
* * *
I’ve been struggling a little bit with some conflicting changes to my identity. Over the course of the past four months or so, I’ve come to think of myself as a writer. I have dreams of publishing a series of novels that I am working on. I have dreams about continuing to do this blog writing that has been going so well, as of late. Unfortunately for me, I am still waiting for someone to come to me and say, “Gee, Phil! We’ve noticed that you have been writing a lot, lately. Here’s a year’s worth of salary; why don’t you have a go at doing it full-time for a while.”
And so, I teach.
Which isn’t to say that one is first place and the other isn’t; I surely owe my professional work for more than two-hundred paid monthly electrical bills, among other things. The friendships that I’ve made with staff and students –some of whom will read these words– are friendships that will last for a lifetime. I’ve reached into so many young minds, to plant the seeds of knowledge.
For having provided so much for me and my family, my profession wins first place.
But…
At the moment, my heart is in this writing thing one hundred percent. If that hypothetical patron did show up tomorrow to fund my full-time writing career, I would take the opportunity in an instant.
I find myself torn, just like Glenn Holland.
Yesterday, I had a meeting with my Superintendent, to discuss a few things associated with my work, and she gave me the peer survey results from a survey that she did of the staff, asking them what they thought of my work, and my contribution to the school district.
It was six pages of comments, from my coworkers and friends, about the significance of my contribution to the school district, about how much people appreciate me, about the difference I am making in the lives of my fellows.
So, there’s that.
* * *
What is your opus? What is the thing that you will be remembered, by others, for having contributed to the society? If you don’t know what it is, it’s not too late to find out. Or, if you’ve had something that you’ve been wanting to do, but you’ve been putting it off, you’ve been prioritizing other things, today might be the day when you decide to start to assemble a new opus, worthy of your dreams.
Furthermore, let me just take a moment to say that encouragement counts. Look around you and see if you can’t find someone to encourage, as they struggle toward a dream of theirs. The world seems to be drowning in seas of negativity, lately, in case you haven’t noticed; but the power of having someone cheering for you is a fuel that could start someone’s engine.
I can’t tell you how important it is, how powerful and enabling it is, to hear words of encouragement from people.
I know I said that I wasn’t going to give any more of the movie away, but…
At the end of Mr. Holland’s Opus, in the final scene of the movie, all of the things that Glenn has accomplished with his life –and here’s a hint: there’s more than two– are brought together in a single space during a single moment in time, and he gets to see what we all need to see: a life well-lived contributes. A life well-lived makes a difference.
I’m getting ready to enter my nineteenth year in education. For nineteen years, I have been significantly more productive as a teacher than I have been as a writer. For sixteen of those same nineteen years, I’ve also been a father. For all nineteen of those years, plus, I’ve been a husband. I would like to think that I’ve been able to make a difference, that I’ve contributed, in different ways, at different times.
Maybe, there is no longer a tie for first place; maybe the tie has been broken. At this moment, I feel like I have a lot in common with Glenn.
It occurred to me today that there’s a lot of adultery going around.
Before you get too far into this, I feel it necessary to warn you: there’s a decent chance that something in this post will offend you, for I have included a couple of different topics that could be considered offensive. Please understand in advance that this is not my intent. Rather, if anything you read after this sentence offends you, you might want to ask yourself why.
Today’s word of the day is ‘cuckold’. I’ll bet you haven’t recently –if ever– heard this one. A cuckold is a man whose wife is adulterous. The first time I ever saw this word was in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, which is one of the Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. If you haven’t read the Canterbury Tales, I wouldn’t advise it unless you have a strong stomach; a lot of it is just filthy smut. This is the height of irony, since the book is supposedly a collection of stories that are being told by religious pilgrims who are on their way to a holy shrine.
Anyhow, if you are looking for one of the stories to read, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, wouldn’t be a bad choice. It’s less sleazy than the others.
Anyway…
I’ve often wondered, when I think about the word ‘cuckold’, how it would feel to be in that position. I’m sure it would suck. I’m sure it would be painful. Thankfully, I am lovingly devoted to a woman who is lovingly devoted to me, and I take comfort in knowing that I don’t –as long as I keep up my end of the bargain– have much to worry about, when it comes to marital infidelity.
Nevertheless, I’ve recently become somewhat more familiar with what it must feel like to be a cuckold.
“How?” you ask…
When you think about it, we all have different types of relationships in which we are all engaged. Marriage is a common example of a relationship type, but most of us also have friendships, business relationships, and familial relationships that affect us in different ways, as well. Each of these relationships has the opportunity for infidelity in them, inasmuch as we could be betrayed –cheated on– by a friend or a family member or a coworker. Additionally, we have relationships, as individuals, with different groups to which we might belong. When the group fails us, we might also feel… like cuckolds.
* * *
I’ve recently become more familiar with what it must feel like to be a cuckold, largely because I have been abandoned by a group of people to whom I have been very loyal, for as long as I can remember. This group gained my allegiance early on in my life, because I believed that I shared a common set of beliefs with the other members of this group. I thought that this group represented decency and truth and goodness, all things that I have sought after in my life.
But, they left me; they went off, attached at the hip to someone else, someone with whom I couldn’t stomach associating myself.
When they left, I felt alone. I felt betrayed. I had questions about what had happened, questions that no one could answer. Some of the (former) members of that group felt the same way that I did, confused and questioning. Others were still following the group, heading off in a direction that I could never have foreseen the group heading.
And now, I don’t know what to do, but playing the cuckold sucks. I’m trying to figure out if I should move on, or if I should wait for this group to come to its senses. Other (former) members of the group are taking steps to try to shed some light on what is going on, to try to get the group to change its course, but I don’t know whether or not they’re going to be successful.
I keep asking myself, “Did I change? Did I do something wrong? Am I to blame for what happened, for the fact that I am here alone, while the rest of my team, most of them, are running around with someone else?”
I’m speaking, of course, of the Republican Party. They’ve cheated on me, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I am the cuckold.
* * *
Well, if that didn’t get you going, this one might.
If you’ll allow me, for a quick moment, to have a brief religious monologue, I’d like to discuss a couple of Biblical examples of cuckolds. The most obvious example of a cuckold in the Bible, at least in my mind, is Hosea. God instructs Hosea, at the beginning of the Book of Hosea, to go and marry an adulterous woman –on purpose– so that Hosea will come to know how horrible adultery is. Hosea’s wife, Gomer, is eventually unfaithful to him, and God instructs Hosea to take the steps that are necessary to bring her back to him. This heart-breaking book, in its entirety, is only fourteen chapters. Read it sometime, and see if it doesn’t give you a better sense of what it would be like to be abandoned, betrayed, and rejected.
Of course, if you’ve read Hosea before, then you know who I’m going to talk about next, as the greatest of all cuckolds.
God is the greatest of all cuckolds. He’s been cheated on by us.
You’ve left Him and I’ve left Him and America has left Him.
The world has left Him.
We’ve all cheated on Him with our silly idols –all of them of no consequence– and I can’t imagine Him, any other way just now, than just sitting in Heaven and weeping, for having been made the cuckold.
We are the adulterers.
* * *
I know that I have, only recently, gathered some of you into my readership. I guess I wouldn’t blame you if you decided that I am not as “worth reading” as you’d previously thought. I could promise you that tomorrow’s post will be about cupcakes or rainbows, but… who knows?!?!
In any case, I’m doing this writing for me, like it or not.
You’re reading this on the day after an election in Michigan, but I’m writing it on the evening of that election. These thoughts have been on my mind, and will probably continue to be on my mind, for at least the next ninety-one days, if not longer.
I’m sorry if I hurt you. It hurt me to write this.
It occurred to me today that I may have diagnosed a national disease.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but in America, we seem to compete over pretty much everything.
–>I’ve actually witnessed heated arguments between people about whether Coke is better than Pepsi.
–>There are people who competitively eat hot dogs.
–>Let’s not even talk about the way that people worry about their place in a line.
–>Ever heard of road rage?!?! I’ve had people almost run me off the road, to beat me to the next stop light?!?!
–>Eat ten of our wings with the ‘mind-bending death’ sauce and get your name on the Wall of Fame!
–>Two words for you –> Las Vegas
We just seem, as Americans (maybe as humans), to like to compete.
If you think I’m wrong on this, scroll through the feed on your favorite social media platform, checking for posts and then argumentative comments on those posts; if you can’t find any, you win the cash prize! Argument is one of our favorite ways to compete.
“I know more than you and I’ll prove it by arguing better than you.”
But…
One of the big problems that all of this competition creates is that it eats away at our ability to be cooperative as fellows. Can you imagine working on a team with that guy who just cut you off on the highway? Can you imagine working on a team with the guy who cost you $200 because he missed a field goal in an NFL game last month? Our deep-seated desires, to be ahead of as many people as possible, create an adversarial nature in us that is, I think, counter-productive to the continuance of our society, IMHO.
As a nation of competitors, I think we are finding it harder and harder to be teammates.
* * *
Yesterday, I wrote about playing soccer as a kid. When I did, I don’t ever remember my parents, as spectators at those events, as part of any equation that resulted in inappropriate conduct, on their part. Quite to the contrary, I remember one time very vividly, when I decided to call one of my opponents a name that I’d learned in a PG-13 movie, and I got red-carded out of the game. My father was NONE TOO PLEASED.
If Bill Carson is still out there, I’m sorry about my potty mouth on that day.
But, I’m sure you’ve seen THOSE parents, as spectators –or maybe even as coaches, perish the thought– who just don’t seem to understand that it’s just a game, when their six-year-old doesn’t score five goals in every ice hockey match, and they come down on them like a ton of bricks.
THESE PEOPLE LITERALLY BECOME UNGLUED!
Now, don’t get me wrong; I have no idea what it takes to raise a world-class athlete, but I can tell you that, if yelling at and berating your kid resulted in them becoming a world class athlete, we would need to have two NFLs and three NBAs, because there wouldn’t be enough places for all of the world-class athletes to play.
Just some more examples of competition being used for iniquitous purposes.
* * *
There’s no doubt that I wrote, just a couple of days ago, a post about how important daring goal setting is and how America’s goal to get to the moon was a great time for our nation, as we strove for the stars. Of course, I also wrote about how that goal was born, at least somewhat, out of a competition with the Soviet Union. So, needless to say, competition can serve important purposes.
The problem is, as I’ve tried to illustrate, that people cross a line.
As to how we should conduct ourselves when we –or our proxies or our progeny– are involved in competition, I would like to think that everyone knows where the line is, or they feel the line inside themselves. Now, since we have plenty of examples of people –or of ourselves– crossing those lines, heading into acts of inappropriateness, we might be tempted to think that there are people who don’t know where the line is, or who might be unaware that a line even exists.
I don’t believe that to be true, simply because I can’t think of a time when I’ve done something wrong when I didn’t know, in advance, that it was wrong. Maybe, I have my mom and dad to thank for that.
I would just like to think that everyone knows that there is a line and that they all –we all– know where it is.
I do, however, also believe that there are people who have crossed lines in their mind so many times, that they stop recognizing that there is a line there at all.
* * *
A friend of mine, yesterday, commenting on the first part of this two-parter, helped me to realize that competition is mostly an extrinsic motivator. As such, it’s not as necessary as people would like to make you think that it is, at least when it comes to motivating people to get better. The best type of motivators are the intrinsic ones, since they are not subject to changes in the world around us.
I mean, I could become obsessive over my 5K time, because I want to beat the guy in my office who runs a 5K in less than twenty-eight minutes, or…
I could decide that I want to beat my best-ever 5K time, to be the ‘best me’ that I can be.
When I decide that I am only going to compete with myself, then the existence of an external ‘competitor’ is of no consequence.
But what about an offensive lineman on a pro football team? Isn’t his improvement necessarily tied to the competition that he has on the football field, against the defensive backs in the league? Not necessarily. He could, instead, focus on being the best that he could be, in the weight room perhaps, rather than worrying about how he’s able to stack up against others.
When we hold ourselves up against other people, to compare ourselves to them and to what they are able to do, isn’t that, in and of itself, a form of competition? The guy down the street from me doesn’t know it, but I have always been jealous of the fact that he lost eighty pounds by picking up a regular running routine, so I have been chasing him, unbeknownst to him, ever since.
Competition.
* * *
I’m not sure what to tell you; in my estimation, especially in the light of the perversions that currently exist which cause competition to deviate from what was once a form of pure contest, I suspect that, these days, competition does more harm than good.
Leave it to our modern society to take something that is pretty decent, in its natural form, and then we stretch it out to the Nth degree, until we end up with something, so marred beyond recognition, that we wonder why we would have been interested in it in the first place.
I didn’t even take time to talk about our society’s obsession with being distracted by these competitions –not directly, anyway– but, between our level of distraction by competitions, and the extent to which competition has been bastardized to serve other purposes, I’ve had too much of it, as it is.
So, does anyone know what time the football game is this weekend?
When I was in high school the only sport that I played competitively was soccer. I played soccer from the age of five all the way to the age of eighteen. I played soccer with other kids with whom I came to be great friends. I played soccer every spring in a league called the Optimist league, and it was a lot of fun. The older I got, the more I enjoyed the game, enjoyed getting better at playing the game.
And, I enjoyed beating other teams.
I also had the chance to work with a lot of great coaches, who each had a heart for teaching kids and for fostering their growth. I remember Coach Hipshear and Coach Felty and Coach Wesner; each of them did their best to try to instruct us little kids in the finer points of the game, and in the importance of competing well and being good sports, win or lose.
Some of the kids that I played soccer with in those early years, I ended up playing with on the high school varsity soccer team. On the varsity team, we wanted to be competitive when we played other teams; no one likes to be completely decimated by an opponent. We worked hard, to be as good as we could be, so that we would be able to play other teams and not look amateurish. I was a part of the varsity soccer team in my home town during its formative years, when the program was just starting to get off of the ground.
I remember my last competitive game of soccer, my senior year, as we were competing for a regional championship in early November (which is play-off season for soccer in Michigan); it snowed during that game and it’s quite the experience to play soccer in the snow.
Throughout all of those soccer experiences, there were many things that I liked about what I was doing: team camaraderie and cooperation, building friendships, learning what my body could do and making it stronger through sport, just to name a few. But, there were some times when it wasn’t a good thing for me to be involved in –> usually those bad moments, when I wasn’t doing what was right, were moments when I lost my perspective and crossed some competitive lines.
* * *
I am, as I have mentioned in previous posts, a very die-hard Notre Dame fan; during the course of my life, this has involved some good times and some bad times. Whenever they are able to compete against other teams, I feel proud to be a Notre Dame fan. At other times, when they are not able to compete, I feel embarrassed and ashamed. Of course their performance on their football field versus their opponents really has very little to do with me, but in situations where I am cheering for them, and I happen to be in the presence of other people who are cheering against them, then there is almost a competition by proxy, where I want my team to do really well as they compete against the team whose fans are cheering against my team.
At that point, it becomes somewhat personal.
This ‘competition by proxy’ is at its worst when I am at a Notre Dame game. I have, on so many occasions, screamed to the point of laryngitis during home Notre Dame football games. I’ve yelled at refs during home Notre Dame football games. I’ve cried in anguish at home Notre Dame football games, and I’ve cried in joy at home Notre Dame football games. When I’m sitting in the stands, their competition somehow becomes more like my competition.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have rules of conduct. I don’t cheer against the other team –when I’m following the rules– as in I don’t cheer when they make mistakes or when they fail (unless it’s USC). I never cheer when anyone gets hurt –that’s just rabid and uncouth. If I happen to be at the Notre Dame-Navy game, or any other ‘service game’, I usually just keep my mouth shut because I think that our armed forces deserve significant respect.
But, here again, I just can’t seem to always control myself when it comes to competition. I have regretted acting like a nincompoop after way too many Notre Dame football games.
Maybe I’m just no good, when it comes to competing.
* * *
Recently, some friends of mine, along with my wife and I, have picked up learning the game of canasta together. Our friends learned it, and then, they taught it to us. We’ve had a lot of fun, and a bit of frustration, competing against each other. We’ve been playing together for about a year; sometimes, the guys win, sometimes, the girls win. It gets particularly frustrating when one team or the other goes on a streak of winning games.
Kind of like a certain football team from Indiana losing to a certain football team from Ohio in their last four matches, after having won the first two.
If you’ve never played canasta before, it’s a ‘partners’ game. Like many games that involve partners competing against others partners, there is a bit of strategy to the game that can be ultimately frustrating, especially when opponents are, at once, working to do their best and working to prevent their opponents from succeeding.
The essence of offense and defense.
Recently, these friends of ours, along with my wife and I, decided that we were going to enter into a bit of a tournament, among the four of us –the two teams. We decided that we were going to play a number of games together, and then, at the end of that series, the team that lost the greater number of games was going to have to cook dinner for the team that won the most games.
This, in hindsight, was a bad idea.
As if the game wasn’t already competitive enough, we added to the stakes with the wager, and we took away from how much any of us were able to enjoy those canasta games. After a number of very frustrating matches, we just quit with the whole idea.
* * *
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. I don’t think that I’m the only person around who has a problem with competition, and competing well. In fact, I know that I’ve seen other people, who seem to be mild-mannered most of the time, who just lose it when it comes to competition.
Additionally, I think there are things that we do that make the likelihood of positive and proper competition much less likely. Tomorrow, I am going to zoom the camera out and we are going to look at the problem of competition on a larger scale.
It occurred to me today that the thought of being daring is much scarier than actually being daring.
So, the real point of this post was to talk about the risk that I took a couple of days ago. I committed to opening my writing up to a larger audience. It wasn’t something that I was particularly excited about doing, because of the risk involved in sharing what I’m writing with other people. Previous to my big risk, there was only a handful of people who knew about the writing that I was doing and had access to reading it for themselves. Those people were being positive about what I was doing, and I was comfortable with them –and only them– seeing what I was doing.
Those people, however, were a pretty small audience.
So then, a couple of weeks ago, one of those people asked me about opening up to a bigger group. A greater chance for success and for a larger readership.
And, a greater chance for ridicule and failure.
But, as Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
And so, a few days back, I said in my blog post, Inventory (Part 2), that I was going to take this bold move. And then, a couple of days ago, I did it –> I made my blog post, One Hundred, more widely available on social media. And then yesterday, I did it again, with Take A Chance (Part 1). And today, you should be reading this, the third of my posts that I’ve invited a lot more people to.
What I’ve learned from the experience of taking an audacious leap has been interesting.
* * *
It could be that part of what we fear when we go out on a limb is that we are going to experience rejection. I would have to say that, for me and my particular example, there hasn’t been as much rejection as I was fearing –none, really– but the approval and the encouragement and the accolades were things that I wasn’t even considering as possibilities when I thought of taking this risk.
I think that’s the way that fear works, a lot of times. When it comes to taking a chance on something, we think about how it might go badly, but we don’t often look at the other side of the coin.
If you’ve not read many of my posts, I’m a big fan of looking at both sides of the coin (THIS POST and THIS POST talk about both sides of some coins).
When you think about the other side of this particular coin, it’s everything that could go so well that we aren’t thinking about when we are afraid of taking that big step. What if skydiving ends up getting me killed? What if –instead– it’s the most amazing experience of your life?!?! What if applying for that other job ends up in rejection? What if –instead– it leads you to the happiest work of your life?!?!
When we listen only to the fear, it ends up being a one-sided argument. You’ve got to give the good possibilities an opportunity to make the case for taking a bold chance.
Additionally, I do have to say that the confidence boost has been amazing. To be honest, at this point, if I’d have the chance, in the future, to encounter any rejection or negative reactions to my writing, I’d be much better prepared to deal with it, because of all of the positivity that has come my way over the last few days. I do suspect, as I continue to make progress on this writing adventure of mine, that there are going to be some let-downs.
I can say that I am much better equipped to take some additional gambles down the road, to try to make my dream come true, since I took this chance and it turned out for the best.
* * *
I think we are at our best when we are striving toward something better for ourselves, something greater than what we’ve been doing. Like I said yesterday, I don’t think America has been doing that, as of late. I do sincerely hope, for the future of this great nation, that we will find something that we can all join together to pursue, something that will unite us in a level of excitement and mutual affinity. I think it brings out the best in us, as a nation, when we are dreaming, and then, pursuing those dreams.
Taking chances can be hard, no doubt about it. The risks are a little easier when we are pursuing a dream that we believe is worth the pursuit. Remember what Kennedy said at Rice University in 1962, “We choose to do things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”
Staying safe and comfortable doesn’t usually lead to greater things –> for example, I probably could have been publishing my writings for a larger audience weeks ago, if not for the fear of what might happen. Thanks to all of you for reading these, and I appreciate the kind thoughts and compliments.
So for you, I would say this: take the next step. Go the next mile. Find that thing that you’ve been working at, and the progress has kind of stalled out, and figure out what the next daring advancement is for you to make. It’s in the adventure that we discover of what we are really capable.
It occurred to me today that we need to dare more.
If you have eighteen spare minutes, I would suggest that you watch one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history HERE. Every time I watch this video, I feel an array of different emotions. Usually, one of those is inspiration.
John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962 is required knowledge for space geeks, like myself, who have always wanted to reach for the stars, who have recently been frustrated with our nation’s lack of progress in this regard. This speech, along with a couple of other speeches on the same topic, given around the same time, really mark the call to arms that propelled us to the preeminent place in the space race. It was a challenge to our nation, a gauntlet thrown down, to then be picked up by the top aerospace engineers and scientists in our country, almost fifty-eight years ago.
Within seven years of that speech, we’d done the job, achieved the goal.
Now, I understand that the space race was largely political, and that many Americans didn’t see the point at the time; I’ve often wondered whether or not we would have even bothered to go to the moon, if it weren’t for the fact that the Soviet Union was vying for the same piece of property. But, the idea that we set that goal for ourselves, as a nation, and then we worked to make it happen –> that idea is part of what excites me and inspires me, every time I watch that speech.
The more I think about it, this speech should be something that everyone in America is required to watch. Despite the topic of the speech being about the space race to land someone on the moon in advance of other countries, who were racing us to do the same thing, the deeper meaning of the speech, beyond its particular context, is about striving, about daring. Whether or not we do the striving and the daring in competition against others, as we did in the space race, there is a whole lot to be said about reaching beyond what you think you can accomplish, to do even more.
Part of what has always inspired me about space is that it represents adventure. It is a place that we can’t get to without striving, and –when we were striving to get there– it brought the country together. Ambitious goals have a way of doing that; they unite us behind a common task to accomplish so that the team can see the mission and execute the plan.
To be honest, I think that America has not recently been daring, at least not the way that we used to be.
* * *
We must do what is hard, because the energy that we use when we do the hard things is energy that is spent, so that we might not have it to use for ill.
What I mean to say is this: I’ve noticed, in different organizations that I’ve belonged to, at different points in my life, that people who are not working hard to move forward, to make progress, are often gifted with energies –that they should have been spending on advancing– that they end up deciding to spend on endeavors of negativity. Maybe you’ve seen this, too; at your workplace, or in your family, or in some other organization to which you’ve belonged. In fact, I’ve seen it in so many instances that I am picking up on the trend.
When we are moving, as individuals, or as organizations of various kinds, in the direction of development, that pursuit gets our effort, it gets our energy. We don’t have the zeal for back-stabbing or gossip or pessimism or in-fighting when we are pursuing a goal, so those things end up happening less, in my opinion.
If you’ve ever been in an organization where this type of negativity was common –or maybe you are in an organization like this right now– let me ask you this question: “Was that organization, and its members, committed to making progress?”
The answer is no, isn’t it?!?!
Pursuit of a common goal tends to unify people in such a way that it becomes less appealing to be negative toward each other. With a communal vision in front of everybody, cooperation, teamwork, problem solving, and optimism are much more likely than they are when people are wondering what they should be doing.
* * *
We need goals, but chasing goals is dangerous, especially when we become uber-focused on the goal; take our space race as an example. We looked to the moon, we set our eyes on the moon and the plan was to land on the moon. And while we certainly achieved the goal, we haven’t been back to the moon in more than forty-seven years.
Sometimes, when you reach a goal, it doesn’t take long after that before you’ve lost interest in the striving. Without the next goal in place, the striving stops and the complacency sets in.
Or take my running as an example.
I set a goal, back in January, to get back in shape, to get back to running. In fact, I wanted to run a mile every day in 2020 (366 miles total for the year). As daunting as that might sound, especially if you are not a runner, it’s really not that hard if you put your mind to it. I was probably back in decent running form by March. But then, I wanted to get back to regular 5K running, and I ended up getting there in late April. Then, I wanted to achieve what I’d never done before, the 10K run –> I’ve done it four times in the last month.
The problem is: now what?!?! I’m not sure what to do next. It seems I’ve become fixated on goals; having met one, and then the next, and then the next, you keep having to set up a new carrot in front of yourself.
Rather, why can’t I just focus on advancing?
In my humble opinion, I think that we should commit to the concept of making progress, rather than chasing this goal and then that goal. If we can commit to just getting better, just improving, just surpassing, then the goals become almost secondary to the mission of moving ahead.
* * *
So, having written eleven hundred words on the subject, I haven’t even gotten to the real point of this post, the point I was wanting to make when I first sat down to start writing it. I took a big risk yesterday, and I wanted to talk about what being daring has taught me; alas, I’ve not even gotten there yet. So, more tomorrow on the subject of boldly going where no one has gone before.
This is my one-hundredth daily post in a row, dating all the way back to the midst of the pandemic quarantine. When I set out to start doing this, it was really just kind of an after-thought; “Oh, that’s right, I have a blog. I forgot all about that. I should start that back up. I should use it for something.”
Since then, I have published blog posts on all manner of different things, most of them having to do with how I’m feeling on a particular subject at a particular moment. Kind of lame, if you ask me; I can’t imagine what it is that the people who are regularly reading this are getting out of it. But, whether or not I’ve attracted three regular readers or three hundred or three hundred thousand, the writing has been almost entirely about me. I guess that’s the way that it should be; if I’m writing for me, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not anyone else sees it or reads it or likes it.
I’ve struggled my entire life with popularity –especially back in my school days; thoughts of who likes me and who doesn’t like me have been present in my mind for all of my life. When it comes to this blog, there is a part of me that wishes that there were a hundred people, or a thousand people, who were waking up each morning, thinking to themselves, “Man, I can’t wait to read what Phil has written lately.” But, the fact that the audience isn’t there hasn’t stopped me from writing. It seems like this process is serving my needs, more than it’s serving anyone else’s needs, and so I will keep doing it.
* * *
In the elementary school of the school district where I work (and maybe in every school district in the country, for as much as I know), the students get excited about the one-hundredth day of school. The teachers, especially in the lower el classrooms, foster this excitement by asking the students to bring in one hundred of whatever they’d like
–one hundred cheerios or one hundred paper clips or one hundred toothpicks– to celebrate the one-hundredth day of school (usually in February, if memory serves).
This celebration, of one hundred days gone by (and eighty-some days remaining) is a chance for celebrating a milestone.
Similarly, people who are able to live to be one hundred years old are called centenarians. Only five people in every one thousand people will live to be one hundred years old; nine hundred and ninety-five people, out of every one thousand, will die before the age of one hundred. So, here we have another example of how wonderful it is to make it to one hundred.
One more interesting thing to say about one hundred –> did you know that there used to be a thing called a short hundred and a different thing called a long hundred? As it turns out, prior to the fifteenth century, the word hundred meant different things in Germanic languages, than it did in the English language.
Back then, in Germanic languages, a hundred actually meant 120, otherwise known as six-score. This ended up being called the long hundred, to differentiate it from English. In English, one hundred has always been known as five-score; since a score is equal to twenty, we all understand that one hundred is the same as five-score, which of course we would, since we are all reading this cute post that I’ve written (in English).
* * *
I’ve been exporting all of the posts –all of the writing– out into a separate document. I word-counted that document the other day, and I’ve written, in these one hundred posts, the equivalent of a four-hundred page novel. THAT BLOWS MY MIND.
But, on the other hand, it’s really not that impressive.
I’ve just done the thing that I’ve always told myself that I’ve always wanted to do, instead of… not doing it.
That’s the trick, I suppose. The person who wants to be a world-class basketball player, who never plays basketball, probably isn’t getting any closer to their dream. Whether or not playing basketball on a regular basis ever gets that person anywhere in their life, they’d at least be able to call themselves a basketball player if they were… well, a basketball player.
The process of writing has made me a writer, imagine that!
One of my regular readers told me a while back that I am a very talented writer. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that this person, this friend of mine, would have never had the opportunity to decide on the level of my talent –or the lack thereof– if I hadn’t started writing.
Of course, no one wants to fail at the thing that they’ve been dreaming of doing their whole life, so there is a level of risk involved in making the attempt. Writing one hundred of these posts, day after day after day, has not been easy. It’s been a major burden on my time –which I’ve had a lot of lately, so there’s that– and there are some days that I just don’t feel much like writing.
Therein lies the determination.
And also, the weight of the momentum of this thing has now ballooned to the point where it feels like a run-away locomotive that I barely have a grasp on. I suppose I could let go, and be tossed to the side of the tracks, as it runs away without me. Or, I could continue to commit to keeping a firm grasp on this, so that I will still be ‘on-board’ when the train pulls in to its next station, wherever that might be.
As much work as it is to continue to try to stay committed to doing this thing, right now –> it’s all that I got.
* * *
I have a couple of dear friends, my wife included, with whom I share a lot about my writing; the struggles of doing it and the excitement that I have about it. One of these friends, the other day, when I was talking to them about my blog, asked me whether or not I’d ever thought of trying to expand my audience, making the blog and its contents available through other avenues.
That scares me a little bit.
But, it’s often in doing the hard thing that we grow.
So, maybe tomorrow, I will advertise this one-hundredth blog post in a couple of different ways. Maybe it is time to spread my wings, to see where this journey heads to next. I mean, I got here by taking a chance at doing something that has been hard and also very enjoyable and admirable. Let’s see where the next step gets me.
Here’s to the next one hundred, and where I will be when that next milestone comes.
It Occurred To Me Today 