Happy Holidays and Other Cheery Things!!

Greetings and pickles!

How was your Christmas?  Did you have presents and the meal of death and the family time?  Was it full of the awesome?  I hope you had a grand time.

We have been neck deep in family activities of one sort or another all week.  As such, there is no new post in the manner you may have been expecting.  I apologize and seek your forgiveness and understanding.  Even these few paragraphs I am writing now were only made possible because a few of the family members in my living room right at this moment (read: my parents) seem to have lapsed into some sort of temporary coma.

I'm sure they will be fine.  We poke them periodically to make sure it isn't permanent.

I hope you are all planning to have a fantastical New Year.  Do you have your resolutions ready?  All planned out and ready to execute?  And do you have the back up resolution in place for when the primary one goes sideways?

And have you prepared all the believable excuses for when both of them go wonky?  That's how it usually goes.  Don't try to lie to me.  We both know it's true.  If I had a dime for every time one of my resolutions went wrong I would own an entire planet.  Probably one of the useless planets, like Pluto.  Which, as it turns out, isn't really a planet anymore.  So, even when I fail, I can't fail properly.

I believe I have lost my train of whatever.

So, in the spirit of the new year I will leave you with these words as a consolation prize.

Don't do today what you can put off till tomorrow.

Hold on... let me try that again.

Ah, you know what I meant.  Resolutions are fun and they give us hope and something to look forward to.  But the only reason we get excited over them is because they are always in the future.  We know deep down that they don't actually have to be.  

Making positive change in our lives isn't about what we want to do in the future, but what we choose to do right now.  The only moment you are assured of is the one in which you exist.

Use it wisely.  And then use every moment you get to have after just as wisely.

Until next week...

Happy Almost New Year!

Lesson 12 - The Tying of the Cat

People believe some crazy stuff.  Of course, they don’t think their belief is crazy.  We never think our belief is crazy.  But everyone has something they believe is true that others might consider wacky.

I had a student who is more than old enough to know better who was convinced that a girl could get pregnant all by herself simply by doing complex gymnastics moves.  I have met full grown adults who believe that if you go Trick-or-Treating on Halloween that you will immediately become possessed by a demon.  Then there are the parents who won’t allow their kids within 3 miles of a movie theater because they are “evil”, but will sit at home and watch gory horror films about demons and witches with their kids.  Same said parents won’t let same said kids watch Disney animated movies because they are also “evil.”

Seriously.

And, please, don’t read anything into those examples about what I believe or don’t believe about these things.  I think I’ve made my proclivity towards sci-fi, action, and fantasy clear by now.

The point is, people believe some interesting things.  It causes us to wonder where they picked that up from?  Where did they learn that?  Why do they believe that?  Who taught them that?  Why choose to die on that hill, and not another?

Let me tell you a story.  We are about at that point in this post, yes?  However, just to be upfront with you, this is a completely fictional story.  Also, for the sake of honesty and integrity and other words that end in “y”, I did not create this story.  So, if you have heard it before, I apologize if I don’t tell it the way you had heard it before.  This story is about the point more so than the details.

Once upon a time long ago there was a Rabbi.  For those who don’t know, “Rabbi” is simply the Hebrew word for “teacher”.  This Rabbi was in charge of one of the weekly prayer gatherings in his area.  The Rabbi took great pride in making sure everything was organized well and ran smoothly.

One day just as he had gotten things started in his prayer gathering, a cat snuck into the room.  As everyone was trying to pray and be focused, this cat began whining and meowing and making all manner of racket.  This made the Rabbi not happy.  He tried to catch the cat but could not.  It stayed out of his grasp as would hide behind random objects in the room.  The cat had ruined his good planning.

The next week, the Rabbi started up his prayer session again deciding to shake off the last weeks travesty of a spiritual gathering.  But just as he thought things were going good, he discovered the cat had come back and snuck in as it began to screech and whine just as loudly as the week before.  Angry, the Rabbi again tried to catch that cat, but once again he failed.

The next week he decided to be smarter than the cat.  He arrived earlier than usual making sure everything was in order, and then proceed to hide outside and wait to see if the cat would show up.  His patience and planning paid off.  The cat showed up right on schedule and the Rabbi snatched it up before it could sneak inside.  Being the kind man that he was, he didn’t harm the cat, but instead tied it to a tree just out side of where they were meeting.  Once the meeting was over, he released the cat and let it go on its way.

The next week he did the same thing.  He waited, caught the cat, tied it to a tree, and then released it after the meeting.  And so it was that every week he continued to do this just to keep the cat from sneaking in and disrupting the meeting.

Unfortunately, the Rabbi was an old man and some time later, he died.  His disciples loved him and tried to honor him by taking over his weekly prayer session.  As such, they made sure there was someone waiting outside to catch that cat.  They would do so, tie it to the tree, and then release it after the meeting.

Well, after a number of years, the inevitable happened.  The cat grew old and also died.  The Rabbi’s disciples knew exactly what to do.

They bought a new cat.

Every week they would take the new cat and tie it to the tree.  The disciples did this week after week, year after year until finally that cat grew old and died at which point they would find another cat.  The tradition passed from disciple to disciple for generations until finally the tree itself died.

Undeterred, the distant followers of the Rabbi simply planted a new tree in the same spot so they could continue to tie a cat to it.

And so, for generations upon generations, the followers tied a cat to the tree every week as the Rabbi had done.  As time passed, books were written about the Tying of the Cat.  They talked about the meaning of the cat and the symbol of the tree and the significance of tying a cat to it and what it all meant and it’s implication on life and God and salvation.

All because some dude didn’t want a cat screwing up his meeting.

People believe some crazy things.  But what matters even more than what they believe is why they believe it and how they came to believe it.

As I mentioned last week, motive is everything.  Intention is everything.  What you do is important, but why you do it is much more important.  The “why” always dictates the “what”.

The reality is that, most of us don’t really know why we do what we do or believe what we believe.  When I ask people, the most common answer I get is “I heard from (insert random non-expert: here).”  The internet.  A TV show or movie.  Their grandmother.  Their parent.  Some person in a random conversation they were close to.  Sometimes they don’t even remember where they heard it.

And yet, they insert it directly into their belief system and regular practice with out ever having sought out it’s purpose or validity or usefulness.

It becomes belief without motive.  At least, not their motive.  And as such, their own motives become muddy and uncertain because they begin to live at cross purposes with their own motives, intentions, and desires… and those of someone else who wasn’t anymore in the know than they were.

If you as a person do not choose to take control of who you are as a person, what you believe and why you believe it, you will always be living at cross purposes with yourself and never be truly fulfilled in life.  Choose to know what you know.  Find the reality obscured by the myth.

Set yourself free.
     Otherwise, all you will be doing is tying a cat to a tree and you won’t even know why.

Lesson 11 - It's a Piece of Cake

Do you know what’s hard about life?

Everything.

Which is crazy, right?  Because, life really isn’t that hard.  Life could be so much easier for most of us.  It’s like we aren’t even trying.  Or maybe we are trying in all the wrong ways and wrong directions.

Or maybe about all the wrong things.

Ego, pride, vanity… the things that keep us focused on ourselves.  How awesome I am or should be and you aren’t.

Always trying to impress others with our awesome awesomeness.  And whenever this is our goal, it’s almost guaranteed to end in awful.

It’s a tricky line to walk.  The line between trying to look good for the sake of narcissism, and looking good simply because taking care of oneself and appearance is healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually.  Having the appropriate appearance in a given context is useful for putting people at ease and gaining trust.

Motive matters.  Always.

You remember going to banquettes and dances and such in high school, right?  You took time look your best and spent money on the pretty flowers or dress or tie or tux.  You wanted your date be impressed with you (maybe a little vain?) but also you wanted your date feel like you cared enough to try hard (much more selfless than the other reason).

And this is probably ok because banquettes and proms are nerve racking enough as it is.  Put a bunch of growing, changing, socially awkward people in a room and make them have conversation in a setting and context they are not normally accustomed to, and, well, awkward and embarrassing things can happen.  To others.  Not me that one time (only one?) my junior year.

Ok, ok.  Since you asked, I’ll tell you.  Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Every year in high school we had a number of scheduled banquettes and formal gatherings.  There was a Thanksgiving banquette.  The Christmas Banquette.  The Valentines banquette.  There was also Fall Fest, but that was different.  Less tuxedo’s and more over-alls.

This one particular banquette, I was in between girlfriends.  Which is not the same as being lonely and pathetic.  You can prove nothing.

As such, I was trying to decide what I was going to do.  Ask someone randomly or go stag?  Run the risk of awkwardness or sit at a table with other dudes, or be the third wheel to some other happy cuddly sickening couple and pretend I wasn’t all sad and lonely.  (Wow, that made me sound really pathetic.  You can prove nothing.)

I decided to be awesome and brave and chivalrous and ask some equally unattached female to “hang out and be losers together” or some other such romantic words.

So, I asked a girl I was on the gymnastics team with.  She was super nice and friendly.  A really cool person.  She was more on the quiet side, which is totally fine, except I was also a bit on the quiet side.  But I figured, it’s only one evening, we will get through it just fine.

And so we did.  I put on my finest tie and jacket that I borrowed from someone else, brought the prerequisite single rose and arrived to escort her to the grand shin dig.  She looked lovely.  Hair beautiful, dress amazing… girls do that whole “cleaning up” thing so much better than we guys do.

Everything was going just fine.  We weren’t dating, so there is always that unspoken question of “so… what is actually going to happen here…” but we just kept it friendly, chit chatted, I opened doors and offered my arm for walking and pulled out chairs.  I was trying very much to be a gentleman and make sure we both had a great time.

Completely unrelated…

Do you know what I hate?  Plastic forks.  They do nothing well.  Unless you are trying to eat thick mashed potatoes with them (and why would you when a spoon is better), they pretty much just break at the slightest provocation.

Sooo…

We had just finished our main course at the meal and the dessert was served.  It was something chocolatey with some strawberry in a sauce on top.  As I was delicately and deliberately eating with gentlemanly class like a real man (read: stabbing mindlessly at my dessert), my fork snapped in half.  The business end launched itself across the planet to God-knows-where, probably maiming some poor innocent person, and the handle I was still holding slammed down onto the edge of the super classy dessert sized paper plate, flipping it up into the air, causing my entire dessert to launch it’s up into this beautiful arc, and land ever so gracefully sticky side down on my dates dress.

Her look of shock was outshone only by my look of absolute horror.  It’s one of those things you can’t really take back, and when the entire table and maybe half the room saw it happen, it’s not something you immediately recover from.

To say that the rest of the evening was a bit awkward is an understatement.  She never got mad, but I could tell she wasn’t happy.  The tension was so thick you could never have cut it with a plastic fork.  Because they break!

I felt so bad.  I had really tried.  I had tried to be nice and friendly and considerate.  I was focussed on her.  Which was good.  But I wasn’t focussed on what I was doing.  Which, as it turned out, was bad.

But I hear you say, “sure, that’s embarrassing, but accidents happen and it’s just part of life.”

Agreed.  It’s true.  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the wrong thing happens.  The truth is, other than being slightly less attentive to my fork than I should have, I really didn’t do anything wrong.  Stuff happens, and it just happened to happen to me.

Perhaps that’s the point.  Even when you try, you don’t always succeed.  Ask any billionaire how they came to be billionaires and they will tell about the couple things they did right, and the hundreds of failures they had to learn from which got them there.

No matter how hard you try to be a better human, to be a more selfless, less vain and egotistical human, there are going to be failures and setbacks.  It doesn’t mean we don’t try.

And that’s the flip side.  Often, we don’t try because we expect the failure.  We know we can’t win them all, and maybe not even most of them, so why bother?  It’s so much easier to just float along with the crowd of whatever and not shake up the boat.  Why be better and draw the attention of others when you can just blend in to the mediocrity?

It’s easy to do.  It doesn’t take much effort to blend in.  And most of the time there are few obvious penalties to blending in, even if there are also few obvious benefits.  

Why write our own story when we can just cost along and let the story write itself?

Back to high school, there was this one day when a couple of the guys in my class got into this huge argument.  It got so bad that they decided they were going to throw down.  So they and the crowd around them, me included, all crammed into this one room to watch it happen.  A bunch of people standing around watching two kids beat each other bloody.

And we were all hyped up to see an actual fight.  Most of us had never actually seen real people get into a fight before.  What was that going to be like?   Would there be kung-fu goodies?  Would it be super lame?

It started with lots of pushing and the occasional jab and clumsy grazing of fist to head or arm or whatever.  It was completely lame, but we were all gawking just the same.  

As we were standing around just letting it happen, one of our other classmates barged into the room.  This guy shoved his way through the onlookers, and got in-between the combatants.  He shoved one against the wall with his forearm and held the other one away with a handful of shirt.  After he did so, he did something strange.  He looked around the room at each one of us.  He looked everyone one of us in the eye and asked what was wrong with us?  Why did we just let this happen?  Why didn’t a single one of us even try to stop it?

I’ve done a lot of embarrassing things in my life.  But that moment remains one of my most shameful moments ever.  It should have been me to stop that fight.  Or any of the other people there.  But if not them, it should have been me.  I should have tried.  I shouldn’t have just followed along like some apathetic zombie.  I should have stepped up and tried to make things different.

There is a quote that goes something like this.  “All that is need for evil to thrive is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”

The world is what it is because most of us don’t really try.  We complain a lot about what it is, and then proceed to do nothing about it.  The same is true about ourselves.  We complain about our problems and failings and fears, and then proceed to do nothing about it.  We just float along doing what we’ve always done, or some variation of it, but ultimate make no real change.

But what if?  What if you actually tried?  What if you tried a different way?

        What if you did something new?

Lesson 10 - Soft Like Concrete

Over the last couple chapters or all of them, the idea of self comparisons with others has repeatedly poked it’s head into the discussion.  At one or more points, the idea of our egos being to blame has also been suggested.

Not to suggest an overly simplistic question that I’m sure all of you have a correct answer to, but, what does that really mean?  And why is that bad?  And why have i just turned one question into three?

It’s a compulsion.  Sorry.

Let me ask a different question.  Is there a difference between having an identity and being completely self focused?  Or, how about this one.  Is there a difference between personal growth and maturity, and having to be better and win and all cost?

When the questions are asked like that, the answer seems obvious.  But when the question hasn’t been specifically delineated and we are left to assess our own life without the question and answer check list, it can get pretty muddy.

And muddy is icky.  I really don’t like mud.  I know it’s only wet dirt.  But dry dirt brushes off relatively easy.  Wet dirt sticks and stains and gets in the cracks of everything.  It’s slippery and dangerous even.  Mud is only funny when someone who isn’t me slips and falls into it face first.  It’s never funny when I fall on my face, no matter how much everyone else maybe laughing.

This is because falling hurts.  So said Commander Obvious.  Remember when you were a kid and you would fall in the grass playing tag or football or whatever other things we did in the grass?  There was this window in our age range somewhere between 8 and 18 where falling down didn’t really hurt that bad.  We might get a small bruise or a scrape, but otherwise we pretty much got right back up and continued doing whatever we were doing with joy and glee.

But before and after that, it was a big deal.  Before the age of 8ish, we would hit the ground and cry like a baby.  After the teenage years, we would hit the ground and pretend like it didn’t hurt like, something… painful and hurty (shut-up, i’m not an english major.)  But during that golden range of resilience, we had to do something pretty stupid before we really suffered for it and it almost always had something to do with trying upstage someone else in some macho alpha dog beat our chests as we hurdle the fence in my neighbor’s back yard and caught my shoe lace on the way over but managed to catch myself with my liver.  Or, you know, something else like that which didn’t happen to me when I was 10 or so.

It’s always funny to everyone else.  And it’s always funny when it’s someone else.  But when I land on my face, it’s never funny to me.

By the way, have you ever actually done that?  Landed relatively squarely on your face?  

When I was roughly somethingteen years old, me and two other friends who’s names will remain unspoken conspired to build two of the gnarliest(it was the end of the 80’s, beginning of the 90’s... we said stupid words like that.  You are lucky I didn’t say they were “rad”.) launch ramps for jumping our bikes and skateboards that had ever been conceived of by pubescent testosterone sacks with more bravado than brains.  I mean, it’s what you do when you out grow planks of wood set at angle on fireplace logs for the sake of launching ones bicycle into the stratosphere.

After collecting all the rickety and half rotted wood we could find, we shed some skin and collected some splinters as our feat of engineering came together.  When all was said and done, we had built two almost quarter-pipe launch ramps that stood around four and half feet high at the point of full take off.

We were the envy of our block.  All the “ladies” loved us.  The little kids wanted to be us.  And why not?  We were “manly men” and all that.  Daredevils of awesome awesomeness.  

But we weren’t stupid(he barely said with a straight face.)  We started off slow.  We put them back to back for “safety” purposes.  This way, we could start off by riding up one and across the top of both and then down the other side.  Eventually one of us, I honestly don’t remember who, managed to actually get some air.  He made it almost across the flat space in between the two ramps before landing.  

He almost crashed, but saved it at the last second.  Which was good, not because he didn’t die, but because we had learned something.  When you land on a steep landing ramp, you must come down nose first or else the bike will just flip out from under you as you try to ride the back tire down the ramp.

This was new to us.  Previously we had done all our jumping on to flat surfaces which require you to either land level or slightly on the back tire to keep from crashing through the handle bars and into the pavement in some spectacularly crunchy fashion.

So, armed with this new information, the next guy did the same thing, except a little faster.  But instead of a shaky landing, he nosed over as he came down and completed a beautiful rockstar landing.

Well, now we were all stoked.  We had seen it with our own eyes.  It could be done.  Soon, all three of us were jumping from one ramp to the other with the grace and ease of ballerinas.  In fact, we got so good at it, we started to get a little bored.  Which is when one of us decided we should put some space between the ramps.  Not a lot, just a little to make the distance greater.

That almost ended badly.  We didn’t know how much faster to go for sure, and with space in between, you didn’t want to come up short.  Which is exactly what the first guy did.  Fortunately, again, he didn’t crash.  But he did have to step off when he landed on top and caught one tire in the gap.

But no harm, no foul.  We simply just solved the issue.  We found a piece of plywood to put across the gap.  From there, we just kept at it till we had mastered that distance.  At which point we would widen the distance between ramps and do it again.

We continued to do this until we had put the length of a full sheet of plywood (read:  eight feet) between the two ramps.  This does not include the distance of the top of each ramp which was a couple feet each.  That piece of plywood was just barely crossing the gap.

Did that phase us?  Not even a little.  At this point we had learned to judge the speed and distance and were launching ourselves into the sky with such skill that even Evil Knievel would have been proud.

At this point you might be asking yourself, “So... where were their parents during all this stupidity?”

My answer is “Yes.  Yes...”

Back to the story.  Because our skill had become so great we started going faster and faster with the intention of going higher and higher.  And it was working.  Every time one of us would go, the next one would start farther away to get more speed before hitting the ramp and attaining higher altitudes than previously thought possibly.  But more importantly, higher altitudes than the friend who had gone before us.  

Now, it was no longer about beating the ramp.  It was about beating the other guy.  We had to be the one who did the jump that the other guys couldn’t beat.

Historically, even though I was the tallest of this group of friends, I wasn’t necessarily the fastest or most daredevilish.  But I had decided that this time, I wasn’t going to blink first.  I was going to keep pushing till they backed off.

Why I decided that starting toward the ramp from three houses away was a good idea I will never know.  One detail that we had all over looked was that, in our quest to attain higher jumps, we were also attaining greater distances.  You can’t do one without doing the other.  But because our gains had been so small and we were still landing safely on the landing ramp, we hadn’t noticed the gains had been there.

Fortunately I figured it out.

Unfortunately I didn’t figure it out till I was already in the air.

I hit that ramp at near lights-peed.  That’s the speed you can attain from three whole houses away.  Everyone knows this.  It’s scientific bicycle fact.  And at such speed, time weirdness and relativity goodies occur.  For example, while in the air at such great height and speed, I had time to look around, smile at the small crowd of local onlookers, pose for the nonexistent camera’s, consider whether the cute girl was going to want to go out behind the bushes with me because I was now going to be super awesome, and I even had time to consider what might transpire there should she make the suggestion.

It was at that moment I decided it must be time to land.  Nosing the bike over into proper landing position, I was struck by the fact that the landing ramp looked awfully flat suddenly.  Then I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t looking at the landing ramp and instead was looking at the pavement past the landing ramp as my relativistic speeds had propelled me well beyond the entire ramp.

If I hadn’t already nosed over, I might have pulled it off.  Maybe.  Instead, I hit the ground nose first with force of a tactical nuke.

My front rim bent in half to something that resembled a hard taco shell.

My front forks crack and bent at expensive angles.

My gooseneck, the thing that holds the handle bars to the stearing hub, snapped clean off as my body plowed through the handle bars and into the not-nearly-as-soft-as-it-looks concrete.

The handle bars themselves, however, were completely unscathed, so, that was nice.

I, on the other hand, was much less unscathed.  You see, as I pointed out, this was right around the turn of the 80’s into the 90’s.  This meant that safety gear included a tank top, shortish shorts, and no helmet.  I don’t even think I had socks on.

After my bicycle exploded into it’s various components, as I said, I continued right on into the pavement, and then after bouncing a couple times, continued to slide the entire distance of a two car driveway width.  I know this because I had such a great vantage point of where I was about to land, before I landed, and I remember very clearly, unfortunately, the entire tumble and slide and noted very specifically where I finally was able to pull myself to my feet.

There was a lot of skin missing on one side of my body.  Fortunately it was contained to the space between the top of my head and my feet.  Right leg, right arm, bits of my face and head, all nicely rashed.  Palms nicely raw, right knee very open and bleeding.

After I realized I wasn’t dead, I dragged myself to my feet, saw the carnage of my bike, then started feeling the carnage to my body, and did what any other self respecting teenage man-boy would do.

I cried all the way home.  Which, fortunately, was just across the street.

Amazingly, nothing was broken.  In fact, I don’t even have any scars from it.  If I hadn’t somehow managed to roll as I grenaded the earth I’d probably be dead from head trauma.

I had huge scabbing scars for weeks, though.  But not on my face, thank goodness.  I was much to pretty to handle that well.

I had no bike.  So I couldn’t jump anymore till I put one back together from a borrowed frame and left over parts.

But you know what?  I was totally fine with that because I had done it.  I had beat them both.  No one out did that jump.  It doesn’t matter that I hadn’t landed it.  I had done it.  I wasn’t embarrassed about biting it so hard.  I was hardcore and had just poked the bear and walked away from it.

At least, that’s how I felt till I finally had a bike again.  I went back to the ramp, rode up at approach speed, and panicked.  I tried again and panicked again.  The best I was ever able to manage was to simply ride over the top of it.

I couldn’t do it.  I had lost my nerve.  I was scared to death.

That’s when the embarrassment set in.  I was out there, in front of my peers, and I didn’t have the courage to do it anymore.  I may have crashed hard when I hit the pavement, but I hadn’t fallen till that very second.  That pain hurt worse than any bruise ever had.

My ego wanted me to win.  To be the best.  To beat them.  To show them who the man really was.

My ego wanted to be seen so badly that it caused me to not think at all about the consequences of my actions.  It made me feel invincible so that I would keep at it.

        The ego wants to survive at all costs.  That’s why it has to die before it pushes us into a fall that we can’t ever recover from.  It’s the “not recovering” that matters here.  If we don’t recover, the fall happens to completion and as we know it’s not the fall that hurts.  It’s the sudden impact with the concrete at the bottom that ruins our day.