Bonsai - "Planted in a Container"

Yesterday Elias and Michelle gifted Tina, Tina's mom,  and me to a day at the PHS Philadelphia Flower Show. It was a beautiful gesture on their part, especially given the love that Tina and her mother have of horticulture. I did in fact find it a pleasure, and found a few things of special interest.

One was the Bonsai display. 

This tree was started a few years after I was born. So it's old.

 

I present it here as a symbol of my life.  I too, as the definition of Bonsai goes, was planted in a container.  That container has changed over my lifetime, starting with my family, then moving to college life, the Army, Philadelphia for a short season, and then to the community in which I now reside.

All along the way, just as this tree has been, I was pruned.  I was pruned by various people, various circumstances, various communities.  And now, as this tree is emblematic of the careful hands of a gardener, I represent 60 plus years of pruning and care by the people around me.

Each of those people pruned and shaped me a little differently.  Each took swipes at various parts of my being.

If I get the motivation, I may map out those caregivers in my life, and lay out the work they did.  It will take me a long time to do that, as it was a slow process, and is still happening daily.

Just as this tree has undergone slow transformation, hopefully for the better, I trust that I too have undergone a slow and meticulous transformation under the careful hands of my pruners. You may not care for the end result, which is fine, but it is the to-date result of people I appreciate.

Perhaps you will enjoy reading about my pruners and their work.  If so, keep an eye out.

Peace 

Change on the Rise

 

This past Friday marked the fifth week of a new job.

By new job, I mean totally new job.  After being self-employed since 1990, I accepted a position working under an employer… this at the age of 60 something as many of my fellow classmates slide into well deserved retirement. (For the record, I do plan to continue to do some small self-employed gigs on the side, if I have the energy).

I had been doing some soul searching about this for the past few years.  This Fall, circumstances pushed me to pursue the change wholeheartedly.  After applying to numerous positions which aligned with my skill set, just one presented itself, and I jumped on it.

The job involves working closely with a group of about 30 folks in my group.  My specific position involves serving a building of hundreds of others.

Looking back, I have probably always been interested in people, but when I was young I was insecure and inward looking. I was hesitant to reach out to build relationships, and wasn’t really sure how to go about that. Also, I tended to pour myself into just a few people, which interfered with the building of other relationships.

Now, here I am, plopped into this group of hundreds of people.  I could not have seen this being a good fit for me as a younger man.

Yet here I am, completely at ease in it. 

Our kids are grown, we are empty nesters, and I have been longing for something to devote my energy to (what little I have left, that is).

That sensation of being “at ease” means a lot to me. It reassures me that this was a good move, a natural progression. On top of that, I have been mentally challenged in a fresh way, specifically with learning new work-related things.

So you see… this is all much more than just a job, much more than a simple change in my work life. The work is just an avenue for something bigger… at least I choose to define it in those terms… otherwise it’s just a thing I do to make money. And I refuse to view it that way.

It has to be bigger than an income.  It has to be bigger than just for my own energy outlet.  It has to be for more than my own mental health.  It can’t just be for my own benefit. It should have an impact on Tina, my family, my coworkers, the folks I encounter daily, my friends, and who knows who else.

It’s a new job, yeah, but in ways, it’s an old thing for me.  It’s what I loved to do as a 10-year-old, sitting in my grandparent’s living room listening to my family discuss their lives.  It’s what I loved to do as a college student, learning about how people interact with each other.  It’s what I loved to do as a home improvement contractor, listening to what people needed done in their home, and then helping them towards that goal. It’s what I love to do as a friend, listening, and helping that friend in any way I can.

Only now it’s a different setting, with a whole new group of people.  Five weeks in, and I’m already attached.  I’m already invested.

Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to a set of just a few songs.  I call the set list “Not your ordinary songs of faith.”  Here are a few lines from just one.

Headed up, down the river
Oh, Lord, I feel the reveling
I feel a change on the rise

            - Avi Kaplan, “Change on the Rise”

The song expresses what I’ve been feeling… a change.  It’s a welcome change after a couple of years of fruitless efforts to figure out a path forward.

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, that sensation of feeling a change on the rise must be a little like the story of Christmas.

In that story, about the time of the birth of Jesus, there were a few people who were alerted to his birth, including the men referred to as the “Three Wise Men”, or “The Three Kings”.  Then there were the shepherds who were told of his birth.  Of course Mary and Joseph had been told who he was. After his birth, other’s were alerted about who he was, and who he would become.

All these folks had some understanding of what had happened, although it would have been limited. But I can’t help but think they sensed a change on the rise.  It must have filled them with a hope for something good to come like they hadn’t had in the past.

That hope, that sense of a change coming, of something good in the making, is the feeling I’ve had these past five weeks.  That hope, that sense of something good in our world, is what we often experience around the Christmas Season.  We are often more generous, more forgiving, more optimistic, and more loving towards each other.  It happens whether we celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, or simply as a season of giving and being together with family and friends.

We can make it whatever we choose –  just another holiday, or a time to experience that new hope.  We can quietly ponder on working towards influencing our world, even changing it, just as we celebrate a small child coming into this world and turning it upside down.

We can be part of a change on the rise.

 

 

A Case for Optimism

 

A friend recently commented about a longing for something to be optimistic about.

That comment brought me back to my center. She was right.  Many of us teeter on the edge of trying to be optimistic and positive to being a realist and seeing things in all their ugliness.  I think she was saying “How about more of the optimism and less of the ugly”.  I agree.

In order to find optimism, it’s helpful for me to set goals that are realistic.  Realistic goals make achieving them more likely.  To use a life example I’ve written about extensively, I set health goals that are realistic for me, not for a 22 year old young man.

So what are my realistic goals about the coming election?  I’m going to lay out my personal aspirations.  If you find anything there you can grab, then do it.

I believe that there will be some awesome opportunities regardless of who our next president is. 

Either scenario (my preferred candidate wins, or the other candidate wins) will provide a wealth of valuable situations.  This is where the friend I mentioned brought me back to my center.  One of my gifts lies in speaking to the idea of reconciliation between opposing positions. The root of that is multifaceted.  Part of it is my personality, part of it is a love for reconciliation based out of my faith, and part of it has to do with my firm stance right in the middle of the political spectrum. Not everyone finds themselves either with my personality (thankfully) or in the middle of that spectrum.  I’m fully aware of that, but being there makes me especially prone to seeing the prospect of future opportunities and a reason to be optimistic.

I’m optimistic that in my small world - the world of my neighbors, my friends, my family, my co-workers, my acquaintances - we will work together through whatever the new administration brings, regardless of who that is.  We will do that with civility, with kindness, with understanding.

There will be plenty of these opportunities.  It won’t be easy, but easy doesn’t promote growth, challenge does. What does easy look like?  It looks like whatever we tend to fall into that we’ve always done. It looks like regurgitating tired old talking points.  It looks like talking past each other with our opinions, and not listening to each other’s point of view.  It looks like the things we have done that got us here. Easy looks like focusing on our differences.

What does hard look like?  Hard involves giving each other the room to have a different opinion, without attaching a character judgement based on that opinion. Hard involves trying to find the things we CAN agree on. Hard involves a focus on the things we have in common.

Can progress be made, or am I just naïve?  I’ve discussed attempts to curtail the effects of aging.  Guess what?  I’m pretty sure there are ways I am physically stronger than I was at 22.  And also guess what?  I fight stiffness and occasional pain in my lower back every single day of my life, and I will never progress the way a 22 year old would even with twice the effort. Are my attempts to curtail aging misguided and naïve?  I will age, regardless of my efforts, but there is something I can do.  I can refuse to age without a fight. That fight, without a doubt, is worth the effort.

It's no different with our thinking.  We can let age take its course, and very naturally take the easy path. We can refuse to adjust, refuse to question our conclusions, refuse to admit that just maybe we don’t always hold the perfect position or understand our foes perfectly. 

Or, we can do the hard work of fighting against our own natural tendencies.

We’ve talked before about “Doing Hard Stuff”.  Folks, that’s our life.  And we are about to get even more opportunities to do that exercise.  I don’t mean to simply frame our situation in a clever way. I’m saying “hard” is good for us.  “Hard” makes us grow. “Hard” separates those who are willing to progress from those who aren’t. We haven’t done “hard” very well in the past.  Just maybe we can do “hard” differently.  Maybe we can do it better.

Optimism.  We aren’t talking about a world where things are better in terms of our definition of “good”.  We’re talking about the opportunity to be changed, to grow, to be involuntarily placed in situations that will force us to decide who we are, what we represent, and whether, as an increasingly diverse people, if we can forge a better path forward.

Embracing “hard” isn’t natural for most of us.  I say let’s walk towards it, with enthusiasm, and with optimism, even if it results in nothing more than our own individual growth. We can’t control the response we receive, but we sure as heck can decide what we will do.

The Value of Work... From a Different Perspective

Chapter 91424

 

We had been discussing an issue involving my work, which I don’t care to share in the interest of not wanting it all out there.  Something about my responses must have seemed out of the ordinary. The friend asked a simple question: 

“Besides work, how are you? I mean I feel you are not OK; I might be wrong.”

It was a perceptive observation.  I wondered how they knew.

The following day, to be transparent as well as to lay out the thoughts going through my head, I jotted down and shared 15 points to elaborate on that conversation.  The last three were these:

12) I don’t know that I’m “sad”. I am burdened, preoccupied, in deep contemplation. As a result, I become less talkative, less free to relax. Being in a happy relaxed state makes me talkative. I am not feeling happy and relaxed.

14) These are ugly American problems.

15) The fact they are even “problems” in my mind is annoying to me.

The friend responded to a few of the items on my treatise, which led to this comment:

“I am talking about your rewards as well. You are Brent the human who should and cannot not be selfish, you are not Jesus."

To which I responded:

“Thanks for clarifying I am not Jesus.”

And then the friend gave me this treasure of a summation of what I stand for:

My generation doesn’t know enough about the “process”… The process of reading a book and coming to a conclusion. We have Instagram and YouTube summarizing the book that gives us the final conclusion. We don’t know the process of cooking a nice meal, we either buy fast food, or when we cook, we buy ready cut vegetables, ready to boil pasta, mix them together and eat in 10 minutes. We don’t know the process of fixing a shirt, we send it to someone to fix it for five dollars or actually we just drop it off and buy a new one. We don’t know even how to process our thoughts and feelings. We also drink cola with food to digest the food faster. We don’t appreciate the concept of a process.

Why am I saying this? The kind of work that you do is rare and weird for someone like me. You take care of the measuring, the materials, the design, the layers, the planning, step by step, and then achieve the final result.

Why am I saying this? Because people like you forget the value of their work.

Why am I also saying this? Because when you engage me to choose what color to put in your kids’ play yard, it is super useful for me…to remember the details and small choices of life.

In a nutshell, whatever you do in the coming year, it should be documented somewhere, and shared with people like me, to (help me) remember that there are difficulties in the things I take for granted, and to remember that life is all about making small changes/decisions every single point of the day.

People like you….  nobody knows them because they live the life instead of talking about it.

Whatever happens during the year, let’s start documenting the small projects, that’s called simply... life.

In other words, all the “ugly Americans” problems that you just described are not digestible all at once. Let them be digested slowly, and let’s let the process work itself out.

Let’s keep reflecting.

What is the value of my work? Remember when you told me that you spend time with elderly people feeling lonely? How would anyone in my stupid shallow generation go to this point of life?

Impossible.

We need your help, I mean it.

We forgot how to live a normal life.

It’s a super fast crazy world, and a project you have that takes a week or two, could help us to remember that behind our two crazy weeks, there is life happening, naturally, slowly.

I think you get the conclusion of my long speech.

 Needless to say, I was touched.  I responded with the appropriate expression of appreciation:

It’s a beautiful speech and I appreciate it so much.

The conclusion is that I am an old slow man.

Doing Hard Stuff

There are plenty of hard things we do out of necessity.  Making a living is hard.  Raising kids is hard.  Managing health care is excruciatingly hard.  And then there are hard things we do which fall into another category.  We choose them. That particular thing is a choice.

First, a plea.  Hear me out and trust me that I’ll take you somewhere. I wish I could tell you this in reverse order, giving you the end first, but I can’t.

Let’s just get this out of the way first:  I am an amateur in the area of weight training. I moved from being a life-long runner to weight training partly because I grew tired of my doctor advising that I find another form of activity.

I enjoyed distance running because I am not particularly skilled or competitive.  While running can involve both of those aspects, it doesn’t have to.  You can just decide how many days you want to run, decide on a distance for that run, and maybe choose a particular pace.

Enter weight training.  It’s a whole other beast. So many decisions… how many days to work out, which exercises to do, how many repetitions for each exercise, how much weight to use for those exercises, and when to increase weight. Then there’s proper technique for each of those exercises, as poor technique makes the lift less effective, or you end up injured.

While distance running can indeed be technical, weight training, at least the way I go about the two, is much more so. That was part of what attracted me to it the further I got.  That is what kept me in it when the results were less than ideal.

I started weight training from a terribly weak position. Part of that is my body type – ectomorph – which means I’m naturally tall and thin (at least thin in my younger days) and my body resists gaining muscle. The other part is something I learned from studying about weight training.  Your body adapts to what you ask it to do.  I had asked my body to run long distances since I was about 21 years of age.  The effect of that is your body figures out how to run in the most efficient way.  Subsequently, you drop muscle you don’t need for that activity.  Running was really the only type of training I did, apart from a little biking.  As I got older, I began to feel the effects of all those years of running.

I started weight training slowly, with just a few exercises, and added new ones over time.  I sought a lot of advice, and still do.  In no time at all, I began to bulk up.

Wrong.  I did not bulk up, even a tiny bit, even after two years. Two years into it, I realized that the word bulky would never be a word used to describe my physique.

I did, however, very slowly get stronger. I know that for a fact because I document my workouts on a spreadsheet, in an OCD type of way.  After all those years of using spreadsheets for various record keeping tasks, I found the perfect use for them.

So where does this fit into the idea of doing difficult things?  We’re getting there, and you don’t have to do resistance training to get it.

An interesting thing happens when you weight train, or really when you train in any physical way – you become hypersensitive to what your body is telling you.  You want to avoid injury. Early on I received warnings about being careful with specific areas, especially the shoulders.  I also entered into the process naturally cautious about my lower back, which had always been a source of soreness.

Weight training naturally produces some soreness which isn’t unusual or unhealthy.  Occasionally though, the discomfort can be related to damage that isn’t healthy.  The trick is to know when that is happening and know what to do when it does. 

A balance has to be struck. If you don’t push hard enough, there is no gain, no growth.  If you push too hard, there’s a risk of injury, and a regression of growth.

This brings me to the other aspect of weight training that I find so attractive.  I see it as a reflection of the challenges of life.

It took me a long time to wrap my head around the concept that challenges and difficult situations are good for us. As a child, I probably viewed those things as a nuisance to either avoid or to get through. I failed to understand their necessity, and their benefit. As I grew older, I slowly began to catch on.  Was I slower than normal?  I don’t know. 

Some difficulties come our way, beyond our control.  They end up being beneficial, but we would never volunteer to enter into them.

There are other difficult situations we enter into voluntarily.  We make the choice. Sometimes you see this behavior early on in a person's life. That wasn’t me.

When we make that decision to intentionally put ourselves in a difficult, stressful, challenging position, we set ourselves up for growth.  However, just like any physical training, we must strike a balance between the right amount of stress, and too much stress.

That balance is the trick.  Parents are often good at helping their children keep things in balance, but mistakes can be made in either direction.  Parents can be overprotective and prevent their children from being challenged.  On the other hand, they can be hesitant to protect their children from over committing.

Once we are out from under the wings of our parents, these decisions are left up to us.  We either determine to do it all on our own, or we draft others to continue to advise us to remain in balance. The concept of maturity and independence often inhibits that process.

And there’s the rub.  We eventually come to understand that a continual progression involves understanding the necessity of challenges to promote our own growth.  At the same time, we are taught that independence and maturity are qualities we should aspire to achieve. We attempt to combine the two ideas, and to decide for ourselves where that balance lies between enough challenge and too much challenge.

That struggle, in a physical way, is illustrated for me every day I weight train.  Whether I want to or not, I am constantly given feedback of where I stand, of how the training is affecting me.  Every day I must choose to make adjustments.

Since, as I said, I’m an amateur, it is easy for me to seek help when I need it. Yes, perhaps as I learn more, I may need less assistance, but if you do even a little amount of research about the sport, you understand that there is always someone who understands it better.

I think we are tempted to think that at some age, we understand most of what there is to understand.  That is the intuitive approach to the situation: given enough time, we will understand everything. That, without a doubt, sounds like a dangerous place to be.

Since, as I mentioned, I have a certain body type.  Along with that, I’m well into the age where our bodies don’t want to progress and become stronger.  The result is that I am a prime candidate for working hard and seeing very slow, often minimal, results. But that’s o.k., because to use an old cliché, it builds character. It’s hard.  Doing hard stuff builds character.  Wait, what?  Come on Brent, you’re talking about a physical activity.  It’s physical.

Humph.  I beg to differ. Hard stuff is hard stuff, period. Why do we encourage our kids to get involved in extracurricular activities in school?  What lasting impact do years of ballet lessons or little league or playing an instrument have?  They are transformative,  I say.  They teach kids to learn to do difficult things in life.  Should we stop doing those things as adults?  Heck no.

And call me an idiot, but I need to be reminded that much of what we do in life is not about seeing immediate results.  We do the thing because it’s our calling, it’s the right thing to do.  The results may not be for us to see. This is perhaps one of the greatest benefits I get from weight training – I am reminded every day that I live the way I do, I do the things I do, I hold the beliefs I do… because it’s the right thing to do… not because I’m rewarded by results. 

At what age do we stop doing difficult things?  At what age does learning from doing difficult things cease? 

Well, not at 63.

So my challenge to you is to do hard stuff.  It doesn’t have to be physical.  It just has to be a challenge. Do something different, something new, something outside of your comfort zone. And then, don’t stop because you don’t see the results you crave.  Continue because it’s right.

Visiting Margaret

 

It’s typical for college students to do a career related job prior to graduating, so around the fall of 1981 I searched for such a position for the following summer to put on my resume and add to my life experience.  I was about to finish my bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice, and although I had no real intention in going into law enforcement, I got hired to work as a summer police officer in a small sleepy beach town close to home. The position filled two roles – it was paid, and it filled a requirement for a “field experience” for my degree.

I credit Margaret Patten with helping me secure that position, along with May Felerski who was the town clerk.  Both women had known my parents, and no doubt those friendships aided in the process.  Margaret was also very good friends with the chief of police, Randall Foskey.

The summer went by interestingly enough, but that’s not the point of this story.  The point is Margaret.

Margaret lived alone in a small modest house in town.  I stopped by almost every shift to say hello.  During those visits, she would give me a cold drink and sometimes dinner.  But mostly she shared her life story with me.  I can’t recall the exact details, but Margaret had either become part of a city gang (the location escapes my memory) for the purpose of sharing her faith, or she had found her faith while part of the gang.  She even had a tattoo on her upper arm to indicate her dedication to this gang, which she wore proudly.

Coincidentally, I took a college class with a professor who did her doctoral studies on gang behavior, and had joined a gang as part of her studies. Looking back now, I don’t know why the thought of discussing Margaret with this professor never occurred to me.

At the time, I didn’t have a clue what Margaret was doing. I didn’t understand her motivation, or her interest in having me stop by.  I just thought she was an old lady who enjoyed company.

It’s only now that I get it.  Margaret was discipling me.  She was attempting to pour what she had learned about life into my life.  As with many things I experienced as a youth, I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. I didn’t even have the sense to ask her good questions. What I did do right was to listen.

I lost touch with Margaret after that summer.  She passed without me affirming to her that she had impacted my life, that her efforts were in fact noticed.

So I say it now…. I understand what you were doing Margaret.  You did so much more than simply add my life experience. Thank you.