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Winter’s Here!
December 15, 2009 – 9:04 am
Whether you look like this:
… or this:
… it’s great when winter finally arrives, for good, and we’ve got the house weatherproofed and the oil in the snowblower changed and the summer clothes swapped out in the front-hall closet, and you can get outside and start enjoying yourself!
Had a close-to-epic day skiing on Sunday, and used the opportunity to skip watching my favorite NFL get trounced, at the same time. All that, after spending Saturday night ushering at the local (and locally cherished) annual performance of Handel’s Messiah.
Say what you will– that shoveling snow gets harder each year, that the bumps on Aspen Mountain get bigger and tighter, or that the news seems even less pleasant than last year (as always)– it’s hard not to really appreciate how much fun wintertime can be, once you’ve gotten re-acclimated.
Even if your best friend just wants to spend the day indoors.
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Thoughts, on the morning commute.
September 5, 2009 – 8:00 am
It’s been two weeks since I inserted a brief note about some disappointments one of the kids was having to deal with. In that short time, they’ve basically managed to fade into the cosmic background noise. (As in: I can’t even remember what they were, exactly.) And that’s as it should be:
Remember: There may indeed be an end of the world, but it doesn’t have to be today. Today, as Ernie Banks used to say: “Let’s play two!”
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I’m constantly reminded of how little we really need to keep up with the news. A.k.a.: The Ephemeral.
Have you read the news stories about all these (supposedly tons of) parents who are upset that the President of the United States will be taking time from his busy schedule to address our nation’s schoolchildren?
On the one hand, it seems completely idiotic that anyone would object to a role-model adult calmly advising a child on the importance of a good education. (Unless you’d prefer your child to grow up suspicious of thought. Always a possibility.)
And on the other hand, why should anybody else even care? Don’t we all have better things to do?
If not, you can come over and paint my fence.
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On Disappointment
August 20, 2009 – 9:41 am
I was going to write about disappointments, and how we deal with them. This was specifically brought on by a series of unfortunate things that seemed to be besieging one of the kids.
But then, a curious thing happened:
I procrastinated. Put off posting anything.
And surprise! A week later, all the stuff she’d been crying about now seems like “old news.” Not that the disappointment/worry/sadness has completely evaporated, but that the demands of today make all those things recede into the background a bit. Cuz new stuff is always popping up. Good and bad stuff.
So sometimes, the best solution is to do nothing…
Just keep living.
What we don’t want, then, is constant sadness in our faces. And it’d be nice if we didn’t have the cosmic background radiation equivalent of bad news/worries, either. But maybe all that background “noise” is just part of being alive, and being connected.
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Back in the Saddle
July 18, 2009 – 10:14 am
Well, it’s been a while since I got any work done on the new book, 8001 B.C. One thing after another, it seemed. Oh well. Life goes on. Maybe all the stuff that happened in the interim will have reinvigorated me, or at least made me feel grateful that I’ve finally got time once again to get to some writing.
So please check back in a few days for more of (at least) Chapter Two.
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School Finals
May 28, 2009 – 2:01 pm
Well, once again, it’s high-school finals week at our house. The seniors graduated last weekend, but for the rest of the kids…
As you can see, even the animals feel the need for some last-minute cramming.
There’s always a lesson to be learned, here, of course: If you just took it one step at a time, never skipped class, paid attention, and all that, in the end everything would work out all right. Well, it’d better.
But you have to wonder: Is all of life nothing but an endless succession of “final exams?” Then what the heck makes them so final?
A guy like Parmenides never had to worry about whether he was gonna “pass” a given test. Actually, the way he looked at it, he was the guy giving the tests! He wasn’t losing sleep over whether he was gonna succeed. It was up to the material world to impress him.
Of course, he didn’t have to ace that job interview with Merrill Lynch. Or Citibank. Or Chrysler. (All of whom probably aren’t hiring too much, these days.) He didn’t have a cell-phone bill to pay. Or have to worry about the hard-drive in his laptop imploding.
So he probably never had to pull an all-nighter. Lucky him.
Except for: He’s dead.
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Flying under the radar
May 14, 2009 – 2:45 pm
I don’t know whether it’s just me, or whether everyone’s sorta holding their breath over which way the economy is going to bend.
There’s good news, there’s bad news, and then there’s economic news. Which means, basically, that it’s really only statistics. Which any given individual can interpret any which way he wants. Ergo: not very satisfying.
But what we’re all obviously noticing is: Life goes on! And if we have any brains, we realize that the economic news is never the most important news in our lives. Family, friends, goals, dreams… All of these things is far more important than whether IBM’s stock price took a dip this afternoon.
As John Bogle reminds us in his new book, Enough, there’s a huge difference between the price of something and its value. My children may not have a price, but they definitely have a value! My health might not always come cheap, but keeping it in good running order is priceless. And my good relations with loved ones… that value should never be questioned.
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What Would Life Be…
April 27, 2009 – 1:10 pm
What would life be…
… without hurdles?
Now check out this girl. She could’ve chosen to run a race on flat ground. But no. She decided that hurdles would be more of a challenge.
I had a business partner once, who used to joke with me that all the hassles and inconveniences and disappointments encountered in our simply trying to survive, sometimes, would “build character.”
And I used to reply, “I’ve already got plenty of character already, thank you.”
But that’s the way life is. Like it or not, you’re constantly faced with situations you’ve simply got to “deal with.” “Overcome.” Obstacles in your way that you’ve gotta leapfrog. Whether you need more challenges or not.
So maybe you’d choose low hurdles over high hurdles, but usually you don’t get asked. You just get to deal with whatever’s thrown up in your way.
So be it. If you’re fine with yourself, you’ll be fine with the challenge.
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Realize
April 20, 2009 – 9:42 am
As it says in my book (chapter 3, page 26):
“If your life sucks, and if the prospects for your children aren’t any better… If you’ve never in your life eaten til your stomach was full, and you don’t know anybody else who ever has, either… If you can’t understand why ‘bad people’ prosper while good people like you suffer…
“… you need a reason to hope. You need something to hope in, to hope for…”
If you’re lucky, you wake up in the morning and realize how lucky you are.
So you’ve got problems. So you’ve been hurt.
Take an inventory of everything you’ve got. (I’m not talking about wealth, or possessions, though a roof over your head is great.)
You’ve got:
your health.
your intelligence.
your wisdom (which isn’t the same).
your experience (which tells you: you’ll be okay, if you choose to be.)
your loved ones (who’ll help, if you need it, and if you ask.)
your environment (which must be okay, or else you wouldn’t be living there. Or: maybe you should move. In which case, you have the ability to do that: uproot, change venues, change attitudes.)
your options (which are, probably, myriad, whether you acknowledge it or not. And which many other people don’t have.)
So just get off your duff, and get moving. So you’ve been hurt? You’re still breathing. You’ve still got “the stuff of life” in you. You’ve still got a life ahead, whatever you decide to make of it.
You don’t think that’s some sort of blessing?
If you were religious, you should be getting down on your knees…
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