Looking For The Long Ride

As I was driving to work the other day my mind seemed focused on the following thought—that each of us must come to terms with the choices we have made in life—the good, the bad and the ugly.

Many are the roads we have chosen to take and many are those we have not traveled. There have been lots of twists and turns that we didn’t anticipate, many forks that we have encountered—all eventually leading us to or depositing us into this very moment of our lives.

Last night at a small fellowship group I heard about the toilet paper principle for the first time. It goes something like this: The closer to the end of the roll it gets, the faster is seems to go.

Life is a lot like that—each day, week or month passes us by in its fine frenzy—hardly here before it’s spent and stowed away in our memory banks like a soft summer breeze.

I have more or less come to terms with where I am in life and how that relates to the choices I have made along the way—yet at the same time I am not fully satisfied with where I find myself in any given moment.

One of my favorite bible verses is found in Isaiah 30:15 and reads: In repentance and rest is your salvation, In quietness and trust is your strength.

What that verse speaks to me is that it is up to each of us to find the place of peace and contentment that exists when these principles are exercised. It is not enough to believe this verse is truth—the key is to allow it to wash over us and change us or the circumstance we find ourselves in. 

So, just because we have come to terms with our life up to this point, doesn’t mean that we won’t have more choices to make today and tomorrow and into the future. And that is exactly my point: even though I acknowledge the existence of a road map to help me find my way, I don’t always take it out of the glove box and use it for reference. 

And we all know how frustrating it can be when we have temporarily lost our way or missed our turn. Sometimes we tough it out and keep going full speed and hoping to find the proper route. Often we stop at the next service station in order to ask directions which will in turn get us back on the road and onto our next stop.

It seems to me that as we get older one of the best things we can do for our sanity is to accept where we are at and the various limitations that the aging process brings with it. We can’t multi-task as well as we once did—that boiling pot on the stove that you left for just a moment to get something else done will keep on boiling until the pot is burned or the soup is ruined. Sometimes it is hard enough to keep one plate spinning less alone the 3 or 4 we used to keep in the air all the time when we were younger.

And this line of thinking pre-supposes that we are in good health and still paying our bills in a timely fashion—that we have friends who care about us and children that are doing well on their own. If these conditions are different, the goal is the same but getting there may be a little more problematic.

Suffice it to say (and I use that phrase a lot) the shoes we are most familiar walking in are our own. I have worn out many a pair and hope to wear out many more over the next several years. Yet today my goal is not to walk that much, but to rest a while along the way and allow the quietness that I create give God the opportunity to increase my trust and calm my fears.

And that’s a good ride any day.

In the midst of all my angst about life’s questions and growing older, I took time out last night with my wife Sandi to attend a local charity wine tasting expo.

We hadn’t planned on going since it is a rather pricey affair and were getting ready to leave the house and grab some dinner at the Thai restaurant in downtown Boone, when Sandi’s cell phone rang. Several minutes later we had been given tickets to the wine tasting and needed to change from jeans to something more fitting an “expo” type event.

I guess that is the benefit of being an almost empty-nester older couple who ordinarily have no plans for Saturday evening—we are available for these last minute change of plans.

So, we got ready, drove into town and met the couple with the extra tickets. Once inside, we ditched our coats, showed our tickets and were given our wine glass to keep for the evening. As there were a possible 200 wines to taste and lots of fresh food from local gourmet restaurants to eat, we began our evening at one of the wine merchant tables and followed that first taste with a little shrimp and grits to go with it.

At this juncture I could say that we had a wonderful evening, ate some good food, drank responsibly and met a lot of people we’d not seen in quite some time. But that would be much to simple and almost miss the point of why I am telling this little story.

As we moved through the huge crowd during our more than two hour stay, I was struck by the odd thought that the only difference between this event and an extraordinary Halloween party was that people were dressed in different costumes. It was almost like 90210 come to life as groups of smiling happy people passed us with glasses raised and garments glowing. I was surrounded by people and I myself was a part of those surrounding others who had come to have a good time and for this very short moment in time, the rest of the world didn’t exist. In one sense I felt that we could hide behind our happiness as one would hide behind a costume at a Halloween party. In this crowd, one could be anyone that one wanted to be and I do believe that most chose to be happy, successful and full of hope.

Not that any of this is fake—the contrary is true. It’s like that old Beatles song that says, “everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey”. Knowing this and the fact that everyone has a story to tell, it is amazing to see a large group of people projecting part of the image of who they really are for you and me to see. Not that we are like this all the time, thus the Halloween costume party analogy. There are certain situations when we feel safe to let other people see pieces of us that are normally held back in the everyday, work-a-day world.

At this point I have probably lost myself and you as well. All of this might just be a part of my imagination or my skewed vision of some sort of hyper-real reality buzz. None the less, last night, I would have been quite happy to set up a booth in the corner of that grand ballroom and with glass in hand, listen to every story that each person had to tell and only left as the clock struck twelve and Cinderella left the building.

If the shoe fits, wear it. Enjoy your ride!

The past couple of days have floated by as if I was in a dream, dreaming I was in a dream. In other words my mind’s metal activity has been on overdrive after receiving a post card from my high school reunion team inviting me to our 45th get-together.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 45 years since I graduated from high school. I was reminded of this fact last week upon receiving a post card from the committee planing the big high school reunion next July in Port Huron, Michigan.

Not all that unusual perhaps except for the fact that I really never graduated in 1967 but a year later after taking night school to make up for the credits I was missing after having dropped out—a few months before the big date—to travel the world and find the me I thought had gone missing.

When I would hear tales of friends high school reunions I would often wonder whether the guys and girls from my alma mater had ever gotten together and planned a tenth or a twentieth get together. It seems I had fallen off the radar and for all intents and purposes, that was just fine with me. What would there be to talk about anyway. Would I be honest—whatever that means—and let it all hang out or would I just sort of blend in and enjoy the blast from the past ride remembering the good times over a beer or two.

Anyway, the post card led me to a website that had been set up to gather us all together again. I logged in and quickly searched for a few names that I remembered and was shocked to find my youthful best friend listed under the classmates who had since departed. Under Mike’s name and picture was no additional information other than the fact that he was dead.

And if the truth be known, I’d not given any of that much thought during the past few decades of family, work and the rest of what I would call enjoying what each day has to offer. Sandi and I have been married for 33 years, have four great kids and two fantastic granddaughters with another on the way. We’ve had our mountain tops and valleys and lots of living in the spaces in between. There have been some trying times—times of heartbreak and times of pure joy. We have spent our fair share of time in emergency rooms and doctors offices and have seen dear friends get divorced. On the other side we have lived long enough to spend quality time with our kids in their own homes for Christmases, Thanksgivings and many, many trips to our favorite beach hangouts.

I can’t say for sure why I am so moved—if that is the right word—by the fact of my friends demise. I guess I have always thought about those people as having had a good life just like  the one that I am currently living. Not about things that take us from life, but about things that give us life.

I don’t remember ever meeting Mike, just that he was always there in some way. As kids I would either be at his house or he would be at mine—although that is not really reality either. His family life was much simpler than mine—I did everything I could do to get away from my house and his parents seemed to be of the sort that welcomed any and all to theirs. As most kids did, we had sleep overs where we would sneak out after dark and wander the streets looking for something interesting to do. Mind you, this was before pot and coke and crack—we just thought it was a big deal to be out and about without our parents knowing what we were up to. We’d walk to town and hang out at the “White Castle” and I guess pretend that we were grownup—nobody wanted to be a kid during the late fifties and early sixties.

We had our bikes and paper routes and ball teams and bowling on Saturday afternoons. We had pocket money and that was all that really mattered.

I think that by the time high school rolled around I was part of one crowd and Mike was a part of another and so our paths didn’t meet as much except during the long summers at the local lake side beach which was just a few block away from both our houses.

His parents finally divorced and I don’t remember much about us after that time. I was somewhat college bound and Mike worked in a beer and wine store that had a great deli. I made new friends and moved away and that is all that I can say about that.

I have always had a semi-philosophical attitude about all that Post Huron stuff. As Bob Dylan said, “We were both just one to many mornings and a thousand miles behind”. That is until today. Today I found out that Mike is gone and I guess with that information a part of me has disappeared as well. Granted, it’s a part that only exists in my shaky memory of those days but none the less real in a semi-surrealist sort of way.

I was thinking today that seeing someone live out something in a movie seems much more real than actually having that same type of experience in “real-life”. Our lives don’t have a moderator or a sound track moving us from one event to the next and explaining the complexities in between. We live and then we reminisce about what we have lived. It is an abstract sort of awareness of time and space as if we were never really a part of what we experienced. Been there/done that doesn’t do our lives justice.

In the end I guess I will leave it to the poets to explain to me what took place on that day in time. In the meantime, I will go on enjoying my wife, kids, grand-kids, etc. all the while reminding myself that not everyone has it as good as I have.

Enjoy the ride.

Several years ago I worked as a newsman/photographer for a twice weekly local newspaper called the Jefferson Times. As a writer it was my job to fill up the paper with items of local and regional interest. I also authored a column entitled “Just Common” which was a collection place for all those random thoughts and ideas that popped up between whatever else it was I did.

One aspect of the job I remember clearly was that I was always creating opening sentences in my head to describe the stories I was working on. My theory was (and still is) that if you have the lead sentence then the rest of the story will build itself around it.

Just the other day I found myself creating lead sentences for potential blog entries. I was thinking about a movie I just viewed called “Manufactured Landscapes” which I thought was a movie about photography when I placed it in my Netflix queue.

The documentary is about photographer Edward Burtynsky and records his travels around certain parts of the world observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. In a nutshell, his photography shows how China’s economy has rapidly expanded in order to produce the products America and other countries think they need. To this end, massive cities have been built around this manufacturing ideal, which in turn employ millions of people who sit around all day and night building cell phones, Ipads, computer chips and the like.

In order to get the products delivered, large ocean going ships are built and container cities are formed where products are stored before being shipped out. And then, in an ironic twist, these ships, when they have served their purpose, are dumped on the shores of Bangladesh and like cities to be taken apart, piece by piece, by the unemployed locals of all ages. As you can imagine, taking apart freighters is not a Betty-Crocker-clean type of job. This type of work would not be allowed in the United States mainly because of the toxic substances found aboard these ships.

So, what I thought was going to be an artistic adventure, turned out to be a “Mother Jones” on steroids type of event. That is not to say that I might not watch it one more time before turning it in—I am sometimes a glutton for punishment.

In other news and in closing: another sentence that I was working on in my head revolved around a trip I took to Africa several years ago. One of the people I traveled with, an ex-marine and frequent visitor to Africa, had a great camera and encouraged me to use it to take pictures to chronicle our trip. He said that if I saw a picture, just say the word and he would stop in order to facilitate my fancy. Only as things turned out, he began to get more and more irritated every time I would mention a picture opportunity. When I called him on this his reply was, “Everything is a picture to you!”

And that my friends is really the way things are. There are endless possibilities in living everyday. However, I don’t think that being consumers is what life is all about. As I grow older I am beginning to see beyond the Matrix and into the nature of real life. As the economic storm continues it is our job to embrace change and position ourselves for what the Creator of the universe has in store not simply go about each day as business as usual.

As much as I mostly enjoy the life I find myself in this day, I know there is a lot more to understand and live out in the days to come.

Enjoy your ride!

I really can’t believe that it has been almost six months since I posted my last blog rambling.

About a week ago I began a blog posting about the expectations we have towards friends and aquaintances in our lives. After working on it for over an hour, I went to another tab in my internet browser and lost the whole story. I was pretty bummed at the time and thought perhaps it was a topic that I was not supposed to broach. At the time I felt as though it was perhaps one of the most coherent things I had written in quite some time.

A couple of days later, I came home and with pen and ink on paper tried to sum up the gist of that thought process and what follows is the substance of that endeavour.

Each day presents itself to us with an attached list of expectations a mile long and two miles wide. Among this list is a line item in how we expect to be treated by those significant people we work and spend our leisure time with. When these people don’t meet or exceed our perceived expectations, we are presented with an opportunity to be offended by them. This offense is called “The Bait of Satan” by Christian lecturer John Bevere. If we take the bait, the offense will produce fruit that is rotten even before it ripens. And the scale of offense shifts according to the person in question—since we have low expectations of a sinner and or street person, if they spit in our face we are not so much offended as we are able to rationalize the action. If a minister doesn’t visit us in our time of need however, because we “expected” more, we can easily be offended by this action.

Bevere says that we can “take” the offense and all its ugly ramifications or let it go in forgiveness with the latter choice leading to a healthy life and the former leading us into sin and bitterness towards the offender.

In my mind expectation/offense and personal affirmation/validation are connected in a molecular way.

Life as we know it and have experienced it is neither as good or as bad as we think it is or remember it being.

We have our successes and failures in terms of a life that is linear in nature. In other words it follows a straight time-line.

The idea at hand is putting into practice what we have learned about expectations and our need to be validated or affirmed by others.

In the original article I juxtaposed this thought (being affirmed by others) with what we know God thinks about us and how we can take that knowledge to the bank and deposit it and make withdrawals against that account when needed. In other words God affirms that we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

Yet, my life, and I would suggest most of our lives have been lived with the expectation of affirmation and validation from our co-workers, friends and/or significant others up to an including our spouses and parents. Life has definitely taken its twists and turns and in many ways has not turned out the way we might have expected or envisioned it.

If we are currently more satisfied with our lives than less, it would suggest to me a success in coming to terms with the substance of our days. And that the peace we feel is a result of putting life’s lessons into practice. Yet even when we understand the principals of growth in a specific area, we are often hard pressed to say that we are always successful when it comes to applying these principles to situations that arise on a daily basis.

Our need for affirmation and validation is a case in point. Everybody likes to have a pat on the back from time to time and to hear that we are special or have done a good job. The list is endless. The need to be accepted is universal and basic to our human nature. However, as we have lived out our years, the need for “external” validation/approval should have lessened or significantly diminished. As we have found, expecting affirmation from others often results in disappointment when we don’t get from these people what it is we think we need to feel accepted and therefore good about ourselves.

When our expectations in this regard are not met, perhaps even squashed, we experience disappointment with our lives which can and often does, lead to our being offended by these self-same people. In other words, when we don’t get what we feel we need or expect form others, maybe even being wounded by them in the process of relationship, we can become offended, which when unchecked or dealt with can lead to anger and hatred. This is the bait of Satan in full bloom.

It would seem to me at this point that a successful life journey would produce a person who doesn’t need the approval of others in order to feel whole and at peace with themselves.

Having said all of this, I am not sure if this will ever be fully realized in my life or yours. What I can say is this: the energy we put towards allowing ourselves to be affirmed by God is well worth the effort—it works even if we only gain ground in this area an inch or two at a time.

“A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.” Donald Miller, from “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”.

Having just read the aforementioned book I am now prone to wild swings of the imagination in how we can edit our own lives into a story that seems a little more purposeful and productive in a creative and beneficial way.

Not that our lives are like a well written novel or movie where every scene has been written for maximum impact and plot development—where everything seems to finally come together within the last few pages or frames upon the screen.  Charles R. Swindoll, in his famous quote about our attitudes when faced with circumstances beyond our control wrote, “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it … we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

The older I get the more I begin to understand that if we aim for nothing, that’s what we will get. This being true, then why not aim high instead of low, far instead of near, towards the impossible instead of the merely doable. Instead of settling into a routine of just making it through the day why don’t we begin to live a better story—one that brings adventure back into our lives and excitement into our daily existence.

I myself have found it much to easy to spend my evenings checking my e-mails and Facebook feeds, watching television and otherwise biding my minutes and hours until bedtime. During the reading of Miller’s book, I was reminded of a time, early in my marriage with Sandi, where we both looked forward to those long winter hours when we could sit and read, listen to music, do crafty things together and then head to bed with the satisfaction that comes from a well-rested soul. I can’t remember much more about those times we shared before we started having kids other than the fact that it took a lot of time to stoke the wood fire and we really enjoyed our time together. I guess I should have written it down. I am short on facts but long on feelings.

As I log this post into cyberspace, I am reminded of the many stories in the Bible that have shaped the way I/we look at life and the circumstances that we are sometimes dumped headfirst into—situations we have no control over. One of my favorites is when Joseph ended up in jail because he fled from the sexual advances of his master’s wife. To our modern minds, his story sucked big time for several years until we are brought to the end where his position and preparation in Egypt brought his family out of famine and into feasting.

I have often wondered what his attitude was during all that happened to him after being sold as a slave by his brothers. I guess the answer lies in the fact that in one of the final scenes we are shown he told his brothers that what they had meant for harm, God had meant for good. No doubt he had several years to think about his answer.

Anyway, like it or not, we are consciously or unconsciously living out our stories.

In my story I realize that I am lucky (if such luck exists) to be alive. Last night I had a dream that reminded me of a real life event that happened when I was a young teenager. All I can remember of the dream is that as I was waking, I saw myself floating down a rapidly flowing river and the person floating next to me had just popped to the surface with a big smile on his face.

During my teen years I lived in Port Huron, Michigan where the very, very wide Lake Huron funneled into the quarter mile wide Saint Clair River. It was at this juncture that the Blue Water Bridge crossed from Port Huron into Sarnia, Ontario. Suffice it to say, all this water coming into a very confined space created a very rapid current. And even though it was supposedly off limits, we would jump into the water at this point and float the several miles to Marysville, where one of my friends mothers would pick us up. It was a lot of fun and none of us ever thought of the fact that we could easily drown or be sucked into a freighters wake. To this day I am not sure what we told these innocent mothers that we were doing.

There are certainly other stories I could tell at this point which would demonstrate my “lucky to be alive” statement.

I guess the real point is none of us know how many more months or years we have left to live out whatever story we are currently living. If we have the ability to “edit” the story we are in, what would these edits look like. We can certainly begin to look at our circumstances with a different attitude as Chuck Swindoll would attest.

I know that somewhere in what I have said, there is a balance to be had. Or as Mark Twain put it, “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all”.

And that is my ride today…hope yours is going well and your bike is well oiled.

This past Valentines Day weekend Sandi and I visited our kids who live in Cary, NC to have dinner with them in celebration of Sandi’s 60th birthday. It is only a 2 1/2 hour drive from Boone and is a welcome change in our daily routine. We affectionately call it “getting off the mountain”. Boone is not a backwoods town by any means since it is home to the ever growing Appalachian State University. But it is a lot more rural than it is urban—and that’s not a bad thing—just a bit boring sometimes. As you know, I like my Barnes and Noble’s and the plethora of used book stores and thrift shops that seem to thrive in larger communities.

One thing about Cary that I really, really like is the availability of walking trails and wilderness areas that are in and around the Cary area. There is even a walking/biking trail that runs from where our daughter Jessika lives right past where our son Joseph resides. It then rambles on for several miles past his house and the fancy park/play area that adjoins it.

Suffice it to say that there is a lot to do when we go for a visit.

But that is not what started this thought process in the first place—rather is was the two long walks Sandi and I took while we were there and the resulting peace of mind these walks seemed to provide.

I remember when Sandi and I first meet 34 years ago walking was one of the activities that seemed to keep our relationship fresh and in order. We’d walk through neighborhoods and wilderness areas with about the same amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. Of course walking provides a backdrop for conversation and is actually a fine way to stay in shape—mentally as well as physically.

After we moved to North Carolina in 1978 and before our children were born, we almost lived in the woods that surrounded our house. The two or three hundred acres we lived in the middle of had been logged years before and the logging trails that wove throughout the woods were a treasure trove of adventure. As we were mostly self-employed, we had plenty of time for adventure walks on a once or twice daily basis. We had our favorite walks but often would tackle new trails that we would pass by. You would not be far off in saying that these walks were almost artistic in their impact on our lives. We’d always return home in better shape mentally than when we had begun—as art is therapeutic, so were our walking adventures.

We would often find rocks and shells and pieces of nature that when brought home would pictorially adorn the walls and shelves of our mountain home.

But life does take it’s twists and turns and even though Sandi and I still take walks almost every evening in good weather, these walks are mostly around our neighborhood and the paved roads that run a  mile or two this way and that. We still live in what would be considered the country, but our normal walks are not close to the time we spent last weekend in the middle of a several hundred acre park where the only sounds you heard were the leaves rustling, the birds chirping and your feet scuffing the well worn trails.

I have come to conclude that these types of walks allow time for your mind to clear itself of cobwebs and any idle thoughts of impatience, dissatisfaction and/or low self-esteem that we seem to deal with in our hectic day to day existence. In other words, these types of walks bring rest to our wandering souls and help us become re-charged and energized. Our creative juices can begin to run again. Nature walks simply seem to wash the palette of our minds clean—ready to accept another days thoughts and images.

Why we don’t do more of it, one can only wonder.

Anyway, on the road trip back to Boone, I caught myself being challenged creatively and was actually excited about the prospect of what the next few days might present. I had been filled up by being emptied out—seems the oxymoron.

Nevertheless, I will continue to walk and talk with my wife and encourage you to do the same—with whoever is available in your life. Spring is coming and the possibilities are somewhat endless. And that’s as good as it gets.