One year ago today, my doctor gave me some heavy news. If I didn’t make some positive changes quick, I was going to end up diabetic and at high risk for heart issues. I was a whisker away from pre-diabetic and my good/bad cholesterol mix was upside down. We talked a lot about the link between diabetes and early onset dimentia. I came away from that conversation with my head spinning. I knew I wasn’t healthy but I had always figured I had time to get it together. Always sometime in the future. Suddenly, I had no time to waste.
After that conversation, I became very focused on sugar. My choices became very simple. Sugar is hurting me. Don’t eat sugar. I trimmed most of the sugar and processed foods from my diet and got more active. I had a Fitbit and started paying attention to more than just my steps. I started tracking my calories intake/output. I had specific, measurable goals that I could monitor in realtime and make useful choices throughout the day. I started taking my breaks to walk at work and walked on my lunch break. It wasn’t hard. It just required consistency.
I’m no longer pre-diabetic and my cholesterol is mixed the right direction. I lost 40 pounds and feel good most days. I joined a running group and am pushing my mileage toward my first half marathon in November.
This isn’t just a humble brag. Everybody’s journey is different. Losing weight is easier for guys than girls. It has to do with metabolism, muscle mass and such. I’m not bragging. I just want to say that I’m proud of what I’ve done for myself this past year and that it wasn’t as difficult as I had told myself it would be. In fact, I succeeded because it became very, very simple. Avoid sugar. Drink water. Get active. Be consistent.
And that’s the takeaway: Keep it simple and be consistent. Every day do the thing that matters most. Whatever it is you want or need, it is right there for you. It is possible. Start now. Keep it simple. Do it everyday.
2016 was a brutal year. 2017 is unlikely to be kinder. I stopped writing for a while because the things about which I was writing no longer seemed very much to matter. I have taken the time to read and watch and listen. I have been seeking patterns inside the noise and confusion that has become my life.
I am working with groundlessness. I am working with uncertainty. I am working with fear. I need to write true things. I need to do things that matter. I have been working toward one goal: focus. I have not found it.
I don’t have any answers aside from this: we have all been swallowed by noise and confusion, but this noise and confusion is not our actual lives. We are still ourselves though our surroundings seem unfamiliar and our families and friends sometimes feel like strangers.
On New Year’s Day 2017, I am still making myself ready.
It has become for us a habit to wish one another a happy new year. I wish that for all of us, but happiness, it seems, is no longer enough. Happiness is not purpose. Happiness comes from purpose. It is a way of way of working and doing and being.
And so, my prayer.
I pray that all lives be enlarged by joy and love and gratitude. I pray enough courage to do the right things. I pray to continue gathering abundant happiness along the way. But, more than all of this, I pray to make a useful life. May my life, my words, my actions help soften the noise and reduce the confusion for someone else.
I am writing with joy. I am writing with love. I am writing with gratitude for you all.
“Show. Don’t tell” is the most common advice given to writers practicing their craft. It is essential advice but often difficult to practice. Words are easy. Telling is a shortcut to getting the idea across. But writing is about more than just getting the idea across. We need our reader to feel something, to have an experience that makes for them a lasting change.
“Show. Don’t tell” happens also to be excellent advice for life. It is becoming my directive for authentic, meaningful relationships.
I share my life with an incredible woman who doesn’t realize how incredible she is. We have known each other 25 years. That’s more than half our lives. In that time, you come to understand essential things about each other. You also develop shortcuts and habits in the way you see and tell each other things.
In 25 years, you say “I love you” a hundred thousand times, sometimes without thinking, sometimes as reflex. Sometimes “I love you” makes complicated things easier. Other times, instead of saying the thing you need to say, saying “I love you” lets you off the hook.
I love this person more today than I ever have, but I am trying to say “I love you” a little less. I am trying to put myself back on the hook. I am trying to find ways inside our life to show rather than tell. And when I do say those words, “I love you”, I want to know she understands exactly what I mean. I want her to have an experience that she can feel, some small thing that makes a lasting change.
This is meant to be a message of hope. May you find it such. – rmb 12.3.14
Life will try to break your heart. You must allow it. Sometime soon, you will swallowed by confusion. You will be afraid and held captive by uncertainty and indecision. You will know pain and discomfort and disappointment. Your expectations will be dashed. Your plans will be subverted. Be brave. Be grateful. Move forward. Try to welcome the darkness if you can. There is strange, powerful beauty hiding in that darkness.
It will be painful, this heart breaking. It will hurt a lot. You will hear the sound of its splinters echo in your quietest times. Listen. Hear what it tells you. It has something essential to say.
Believe nothing. Expect nothing. Be grateful for the lesson you receive. If you can pay attention, it will tell you everything you need to know.
You cannot avoid pain. You were meant for it. Move toward it. Let it teach you and then let it go. Your heart is a muscle. Let it break. Then, let it rebuild. It will be a stronger, more resilient heart. It will be a patient, more loving heart. You will be tender. You will be more authentic. You will find love. You will give love. You will make a life worth living.
And if it kills you, so it goes. There are mysteries too many for us to comprehend.
So this is my prayer for you. This is my prayer for myself. May you let your heart get broken. And then, may you build your better self from the gathered pieces, knowing full well, your strength comes from healing. It can not come without first breaking.
At 40 years old, I have become the thing I use to fear and loathe the most. I have become the kind of person who uses the word “awesome”. After years of meticulous aversion, I have become a person who says “awesome” as part of an otherwise complete sentence. Worse, I have become a person who uses the word “awesome” as a complete sentence entirely unto itself. Lately, I find myself casually tossing the word around as in “Thanks. That would be awesome.” Or, “Wow! You are so awesome.” Or, “Nice work. Awesome job!”
The trouble with awesome is it often travels with an exclamation point which is the lowest, most debased form of punctuation. As a child of the ’80’s, awesome began as a mongrel, flabby adjective. I didn’t grow up in the Valley where everything was sweet, fresh and occasionally bitchin’. Awesomeness was everywhere. It was a way of showing vague appreciation or enthusiasm at arms length, without any commitment or ownership.
And then, sometime in the mid ’90’s church people adopted the awesomeness and spoke of God and God’s love and fellowship in the same tone they used to describe grandma’s mashed potatoes. All of it was awesome.
And this, I think, is the problem I have developed with awesomeness. We throw it around casually. We use the word sometimes ironically, sometimes with great sincerity and it is impossible to tell which is which. The word has become nondescript. It says and means exactly nothing. Everything we like or enjoy or approve of gets swallowed up by awesomeness and we no longer draw meaningful lines of comparison between an awesome book, an awesome piece of cake and an awesome haircut.
And here’s the problem. Awesome actually means “inspiringanoverwhelmingfeelingofreverence,admiration,orfear;causingorinducing awe”. (See for yourself.) True awesomeness involves sublimation of the self into a greater experience of being that negates one’s own distinction between self and other. I have never eaten mashed potatoes that were that kind of awesome. Have you?
For 40 years, I protected myself with a rigorous, grammatical hygiene. I sneered at the Awesomers. I mocked them behind their backs. I allowed myself to believe myself superior, impervious to their awesome banter, their overwhelming enthusiasm, reverence, admiration and fear. And then I became a father and then my daughter became a 7 year old in second grade and she brought the word into my house. She carried it under the firewall and propagated it in our conversation. For her and her friends, everything was awesome. I tried to explain to them that My Little Pony’s Princess Celestia was truly an inspiring and admirable character. That the story was well-told and the animation quite accomplished, but that none of them, having watched an episode of My Little Pony, had found themselves sublimated with terrible reverence and personality crippling appreciation. It was no matter to them.
It was, I can see now, only a matter of time. A simple feat of repetition. It would only take a hundred, maybe a thousand, perhaps ten thousand awesomes before I began to adopt this world view. And now, I find awesomeness salting my daily conversations. It is a thing I say when I agree with someone. It is a thing I say when a conversation comes to a close. It is a thing I say when there is nothing left to say.
I tell myself I am using the word ironically but I’m not that kind of hipster. I adopt the words I use with my entire heart. And if, the word awesome is too grandiose to apply to a bag of kettle-baked jalapeno potato chips, I no longer fault the word or the people like me who use it. I merely adjust my estimation of how well-baked and salted those chips are. How terrifyingly delicious and personality-smashing those potato chips can be.
It is, I find, at 40, much easier to adjust my perceptions and experiences of the world than to bother reaching for the right word that says precisely what is needed. Much better not to persist in the fight against bloviation and rhetorical sclerosis.
And I am so much happier now that everything and everyone is awesome all the time. I no longer trouble myself remembering all those other pesky adjectives that once intimated lesser shades of goodness.
Everything is awesome now, and I am grateful it only took me 40 years to figure it out and embrace the language of absolute perfection.
My six year old daughter heard somewhere that the Chinese have an ancient tradition of placing an orange in a tree as a way of making a wish. If the orange stays in the tree overnight, the wish will be granted. If the orange falls out from the tree, the wish will not come to pass.
I haven’t yet taken the time to research this to figure out what she’s talking about. I don’t want to know. I think the idea is perfectly beautiful and, of course, perfectly doomed to fail.
She has a stuffed dog she calls Mudge. My daughter, my wife, Mudge and I live in a house with four real, honest-to-gosh dogs. We feed them, groom them, pet them and generally love them. You probably know where this is going.
My daughter decided that she wanted Mudge to be a real dog so that Mudge could have real dog experiences. She wanted Mudge to eat when fed, to wag when groomed, and to bask in the pleasantness that comes with being generally loved.
Her plan was simple. She put an orange in a tree. This morning as we left for school, she locked Mudge in her room. “If Mudge becomes a real dog while we are gone, I don’t want him getting lost or getting scared by the other dogs.” Very practical. She is a planner like her mother.
After school, she was in a rush to get home and check on the orange. I explained that she might want to dial back her expectations a little bit and that I had never known or heard of a stuffed animal coming to life for any reason but particularly not from placing an orange in a tree.
“We’ll have to see,” she told me, which was not really fair. That’s usually my line.
When we pulled into the driveway, I could already see the outcome of her hopes. The orange had fallen out of the tree.
“Oh man,” she said, genuinely disappointed. There was such sweetness in that voice and a little bit of disbelief. “I thought it would work. Let’s go inside.”
We got inside, greeted by four enthusiastically happy dogs. “Come on. Let’s check,” she said. “Just to be sure.”
She strode down the hall, opened her bedroom door a bit and peered inside. “Mudge?”
She listened for an answer. Hearing none, she opened the door completely and walked to her bed where Mudge lay exactly as she had left him.
She shrugged. She nodded. “We’ll try again in the Spring,” she told me.
“Sure.” I nodded.
My daughter will have her heart broken a hundred thousand times. The world can be mean and petty. Sometimes there isn’t enough magic in it. I know how she feels.
And yet, there is something inside of us, all three of us, that does not die with the disappointment. We will try again in the spring. These are the words of someone who is relentlessly optimistic. My daughter, myself, my family. It is the way we choose to live our life.
Sometimes you hope for things that are never going to happen.
Sometimes you make plans for the impossible.
Sometimes you put an orange up in a tree because someone told you that the Chinese did the exact same thing thousands of years ago. Maybe they. Maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. If it doesn’t work, we can try again next spring.
There is someone in your life you cannot help. It may be a parent or a spouse, a child or a grandparent. You may love them with your whole heart, and they do not reciprocate. You may treat them with kindness which they repay with selfish demands. These people are never happy.
These people will take everything you can give and then ask why you never offer what they need.
They will eat the full meal of your generosity and complain that it is not enough. It is never enough.
These people will never admit fault but are quick to relish every small disappointment.
These people will kill you. Don’t let them.
Do the small kindnesses where you are able. Do the things that are needed and let that be enough. Speak with patience. Know when to hold your chair and when to leave the room.
Recognize that you cannot change people or make people happy or bring people into the light against their will. Recognize that some people choose to stay inside their own darkness.
Be kind to yourself and generous with your spirit, but recognize that you cannot rescue these people.
There is someone in your life you cannot help. Do not let them pull you into darkness. If you must love them, love them, but do not let them take your light.
My grandmother celebrates 87 years today. She lives alone, drives her car and is learning to check Facebook on her Android tablet. The walls of her house are filled from floor to ceiling with framed family photographs. Her shelves are stacked with pictures, four frames deep. She is lovely, generous and kind. Many of the things I know that are worth knowing I have learned from my grandmother.
I never knew my grandfather. My mother’s father died one month before I was born. My grandmother has filled the years that followed by loving her family enough for both of them.
My grandmother finished her formal education at 8th grade. There was nothing beyond that available to her. She enjoyed school so much she took 8th grade twice.
My grandmother is a news and politics junky. Back in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton days she was a keen follower of public policy, celebrating the success of both parties. When politics turns nasty, she loses her taste for it and cultivates an expertise in the national weather.
When her sight was better, my grandmother was a voracious reader, preferring political and celebrity biography. She has never developed an appreciation for fiction.
When I was 10 years old, I often spent the night with my grandmother. She had cable. That’s how I found out about MTV.
When spending the night, we often had dinner together at Krystal. She never had much money and she enjoyed buying those dozen tiny, little hamburgers. It was always a low-cost feast.
When I was a kid, she was always giving me the last dollar out of her wallet. I took those dollars, never realizing she was giving her last one.
She used to carry Certs with her everywhere. She offered me one every time there was a lull in conversation or we were waiting for something to happen.
My grandmother is the kind of person with whom it is easy to share good news. She was one of the first people my wife and I told when we got engaged and again when expecting our daughter.
She doesn’t have much and has never asked for much. She surrounds herself with the love of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She gives more generously than her means and never speaks unkindly of anyone. She forgives quickly and celebrates every little success. She always expects the best of everyone and is seldom disappointed.
She worries too much and hates to be a burden on anyone. She lives simply and maintains a stubborn sense of self-reliance.
I am grateful to her in ways I cannot find words to describe. And so I will leave this to say, my grandmother is a phenomenally kind, generous, loving person. She has suffered loss and then seen years of increase. She holds the world together with worry and attention. I hope you are reading this and thinking of someone in your life like this. If you are, you understand what it means to be loved and appreciated beyond all limits and reason. You understand the spirit of generosity.
Jazz is life: improvised, rhythmic, always leaning forward. There is mad, crazy logic to jazz, patterns hiding in the stitchery to constantly surprise the attentive ear. Jazz is a sermon without words. Jazz is the gut punch. Jazz is the handshake. Jazz is the casual stroll and the jazz is the feverish race. Jazz is a conversation. Jazz is the leap from the cliff. Jazz is friendship. Jazz is contemplation. Jazz is the bordello, and jazz is the church. Jazz is life.
Jazz found me when I was 26. It spoke the language I was trying to express in my best writing. It was the sound of my inner ambition, the voice of that feeling that moves me inside. Two things happened when I was 26. I heard Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue for the first time and then heard Dave Brubeck’s song Blue Rondo a la Turk. No looking back.
Blue Rondo is a ferocious, playful bundle of nerves, constantly moving. Urgent at times and then slow and swaying. There is so much discipline and control in the quartet yet the song feels completely new and reinvented with every listen.
Dave Brubeck is a great introduction to jazz. Melodic piano. Strong, rhythmic riffs. Tenderness, sincerity, curiosity and lots and lots of playfulness.
I sat front row when Brubeck played at Knoxville’s Tennessee Theatre on February 2, 2003. He would have been 82 years old at the time. He tottered out on stage, shuffling toward the piano, looking very much like someone’s great-grandfather lost in confusion. The crowd was silent as Brubeck staggered to the piano and took his bench. Then, a few tentative keys followed by a few random chords. I was worried that I was witnessing what happens in the years after a great career has ended. He sat with eyes closed, like he was lost in some thought that did not include us or the band. And then he leaned forward, on his face a wry, amused smile and then the gorgeous music began to pour from piano. He was screwing with us. Working against our expectation. And he was terrific – strong, inventive and clear.
As much as I enjoyed watching Brubeck, it was almost more fun watching his bandmates. He kept surprising them with twists and riffs that kept them on their toes. There was no room for laziness. There was nothing routine. They played the Brubeck catalog – old and new, but they played it fun and fresh, like they were making it up for the first time.
Seeing Dave Brubeck in concert confirmed what I knew from hearing his recorded music. Jazz is my kind of music because it is about invention and the urge always and forever to make something completely new.
Dave Brubeck died on Wednesday, December 5, 2012, one day shy of his 92 birthday. His music brings me so much joy. I hope you already know and enjoy his work. If not, give a listen to one of his most important, interesting compositions, “Take Five”:
If you like that, you’ve got to hear “Blue Rondo a la Turk”, the song that started it all for me.
My Prius ran out of gas today, and I got stuck on the side of the road. Let’s put aside the too obvious irony of a hybrid running out of fossil fuel for a moment. This post isn’t about irony. This post is about embarrassment.
This was pretty much the most embarrassing thing that has happened to me in a long time. Embarrassing because my wife, daughter and friend were all trapped in the car with me. Embarrassing because I had just intentionally driven past a gas station a few minutes earlier. Embarrassing because the Add Fuel message had been coming up on the dash display for the past two days.
I love my 2007 Prius. It gets 45 to 48 miles per gallon, drives great and is very comfortable. I also love my Prius because the dash display provides real-time analytics. I’m a sucker for charts, bar graphs and real-time data calculation. While driving, my Prius shows a bar graph of the average estimated fuel consumption. This is a bar that escalates up to 100 MPG from 0 MPG. The more you coast, the more the electric motor carries the car and the lower the fuel consumption, which means higher gas mileage. Every five minutes a new plot point appears on the elapsed drive time chart that shows the average gas consumption over the life of the trip. At the bottom of these lovely graphs, is a real-time numeric average of miles per gallon over the life of the trip or the tank of gas. I generally set this to reflect the average fuel consumption for the current tank of gas. Like I said, 45 to 48 miles per gallon.
When I fill up, I zero the gas mileage calculation and also the odometer reading for Trip A. I reserve Trip B for mileage between oil changes. The 2007 Prius has an 11.9 gallon gas tank.
Generally when I start the car on a low tank of gas, the Add Fuel message appears and then disappears. This occurred on Friday. I didn’t worry about it right away because I can drive many miles on just a little gas. No worries.
When my gas indicator gets low, I do a little math. I glance at the average gas mileage for the current tank of gas, then multiply by 10. Then, I add the average gas mileage to that number to get the number of miles I should get from an 11 gallon tank. I subtract the miles showing on the odometer from the estimated miles for 11 gallons of gas to figure my zone of safety.
Today, when I passed the gas station on the way into town, I estimated an additional 15 miles before getting close to Actual Empty. I thought I would do my town a favor and give them the sales tax on my fuel purchase.
My car slowed down, sputtered and stopped about five miles past the last gas station. I was completely baffled. My math was good. I should have had at least another 10 miles or more before needing to fill up. Math doesn’t matter when you are stuck on the side of road. Or maybe math matters more than you care to admit when you are stuck on the side of the road. In either case, I called my mom-in-law to stop by the house to get the gas can, then deliver the mercy gallon we needed to get to the gas station.
Rather than wait on the side of the road, my friend and I decided to push the car to a parking lot not far away. As often happens, while pushing the car, a couple of other guys stopped by to help push. We got the car to the parking lot easily enough. The guys offered a spare gallon of gas from their emergency tank but we already had help coming so we declined.
They laughed a little about pushing the hybrid, climbed into their big, fuel-thirsty pickup and drove off.
My mom-in-law showed up pretty quick, we gassed up and drove to the gas station for a complete fill. No harm done and no real danger.
Also, my five-year-old daughter enjoys the opportunity to lecture me about the importance of paying attention to the messages on my car display:
Finally, I can see that the major lesson here is one of choosing where to place your attention. I was, after all, paying very close attention to the graphs, charts and numbers on my dash and was using an overly complex, sophisticated system to determine when I needed to refuel. Math is powerful, but when your car display tells you to Add Fuel, it isn’t time to argue. Best to keep some things simple. Sometimes, you should just receive the message, say thank you and fill up.
Ubiquitous. Quotidian. 