Of Inconveniences Rightly Considered...

Thinkers have made much of adventure in the histories of man, nearly always winding the greatest of tales along the paths cut by Odysseus, Washington and their like. It is often said that the history books are written by the winners, usually in ink brought back from foreign lands reached by roads of the most glorious enterprise. This sort of adventure was universally to some greater end; whether it was to reclaim a conquered land, a stolen bride or the unalienable rights of man, the victory speeches of these adventurers never included the line “Just because I could” That, my friends, is entirely a product of the 20^th century.

Modern adventurers; wealthy, aristocratic brigands trekking the earth on corporate sponsored trips to climb the unclimbable and swim the unswimable, are a bastardization of the term typical of what we have become in the last hundred years—lazy. Adventure today is thought of more in cable TV terms: that which can be lived by someone else reality-show fashion to be viewed at our leisure. What this pre-packaged definition disregards is the true prevalence of adventure in our lives. G.K. Chesterton opined that “an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” Truthfully, the real adventure in life comes not from seeking high places or deep oceans, but from the imperfections of life itself. The experiences of the lesser endowed of wealth but greater of spirit, cast forth with only the clothes on their back in search of something needed, not coveted. They seek no glory, only their due. Often, the most honest payment they expect is the knowledge that the right thing was done through their part in a job that should have been routine, but fate cast as anything but.

Tolkien writes in The Lord of the Rings, “Remember what Bilbo used to say: ‘It’s a dangerous business going out your door’”. Few among us realize that we are cutting our own path and the most ordinary of stops along the way can lead to a bad end. A hard reminder of this came last Sunday with the news of the mid-air collision of two medical helicopters in Arizona. 2008 has already been a very deadly year for the air medical industry only at its midpoint; each report of disaster reminding us of the fragile nature of even the stoutest among us. But it should also serve to remind us that our story is waiting outside and there is no use hiding indoors hoping it will go away. Fate is patient and demanding, and when she desires our participation she will fling open the doors and seize us into our greatest day. Helen Keller wrote that “avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.” Translated: none of us will get out alive, so you may as well live.

We should never seek to glorify those fallen in pursuit of life; their achievements speak more loudly than any fruitless words of ours. Rather, we should embrace the spirit that pours from their stories, drink it up and use it to refresh our own waning sense of adventure. So many times we get out of bed lonely or despaired, only hoping to get through the day when, all around us lives the chance to make the day…that day, remembered through us.

So far this year, sixteen people have died in air medical crashes, putting 2008 on pace to surpass a very grisly record. This should give us in the business pause to consider how to reverse this trend and augment our own personal vigilance. But it should also empower us to live—to step out of our door and see where we are swept off to.

Later in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes “But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And, if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten” Artificial adventurers are barely remembered after their photo is taken atop the peak they paid to climb; but the folks in the tales that really matter, they endure in ways that don’t allow us to forget.

Please visit the condolence book for the victims of the recent crash and read updated news here.

Speaking of adventures I won’t forget, my wife and I found out this week that we’re going to be parents…of twins. Words truly cannot express the emotions I’m feeling at this news, and I thank everyone for your congratulations and well-wishes. Check back here weekly for updates about the coming 100% increase in the occupancy of our home.

Of a lesser variety of adventure, I’ll be starting my new job this week. While the recent tragedies have made me think hard about my chosen path, I’m very excited at the prospect of this new beginning. I will be posting much about this as well, so stay tuned.

Do good things with the week to come, learn something new and be safe.

All These Years

How long is a year, really? Logically speaking, the question answers itself. A year is a year. 365 days, 52 weeks, a trip around the sun; a year. But a year measured in life passes very differently for each of us. As example, newlyweds may describe their first year as a blur of new sex; while a couple ten years past nuptials will see each of those years marked with more enduring and less volatile tides. Or, a year in prison measured against one spent in luxury will stretch a thousand times past, each miserable day a year of its own.

Yet, the question remains. How long is the year? For most, the answer comes the morning after you went to bed as a 12 year-old and woke at 50. It is when waiting to live your life that life happens and, if you aren’t careful, passes by you. Each year passed towards the unknown end of your days is shorter through no fault of the sun’s, but of wasted life itself. Unheeded advice, untasted fruit and experiences untaken and left on the table all chip away from the robust flesh of living, leaving only brittle bones. The old are fond of saying that youth is wasted on the young, not because they begrudge the youth of time, but rather because they have so little to lose besides another day of life they are no longer willing to waste.

In your years, you can do much or little…such is the prerogative of each. But what you do must be measured against all the others in your life and reconciled with what you hoped to do. Each year is its own debt paid; for, whatever you do with it, you’ve traded that time in your life for it and can never get it back.

I’ve wasted much in my life. Money, love, effort…and precious time. I have awoke from a dreamless sleep of many years months to find that they were gone and I was left with nothing to show but trinkets and crumbs. Lamenting lost time is as useless as losing the time itself, but it is the curse of Eden to regret, and I have certainly done my share. The past year; however, has not been wasted in the least.

The past year has been marked by growth and change; both my own and that at least partially influenced by my counsel. So much has happened; things begun, things finished and those delicious things that live and grow still at its end. Mostly though, it’s been about things accomplished. I’ve rarely….no, never had a year in which I felt like I got so much done. Looking back, I wish for other things, projects, to be completed, but that is more than balanced by what I did finish. Of course, none of this happened in a vacuum, so I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge what I did through others or those who embraced my visions and carried them to fruition. They are the true measure of my year, and I will always hold them special and sacred.

Stephen King writes in Eyes of the Dragon, “I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.” So, true as it is that I’ve written the ending to a happy and fruitful chapter in my story, it is pleasing to know that this one will never truly end. Good works endure, good memories fade without vanishing, and the love of friends only multiplies with years beyond the forge.

So, how long is a year? If lived well, it can last your whole life.

Many people on both sides of the fence would gasp in horror at the mention of Tim Russert and George Carlin in the same breath, but at a time when we mark the passing of these iconic personalities within weeks of one another, I have to smile at what Heaven must be like today. While they held rather different audiences in daylight, Russert and Carlin both made careers from asking really hard questions that the unwashed didn’t even know they wanted answered until put before us. They took no prisoners, took no bullshit and absolutely refused to take no for an answer…at least not without one more try. Pop culture and politics is forever changed with their passing, and I miss them already for their wisdom and the rarity of their type.

Do good things with the week to come, learn something new and be safe.

Has anyone seen my friend George?

While George Carlin’s most famous routine was about the seven words you couldn’t say on television, his enduring legacy was for inverting the language we used every day. He insisted that we get in the plane, not on it. He wondered if flight attendants were speaking English. And, he declared that the planet is fine, it’s the people who are…well, insert one the forbidden words here.

George Carlin died on Sunday at the age of 71 as probably the most influential and revered comic of the 20^th century. From his first appearances on the Ed Sullivan show, during what he called “eight or nine years of what essentially were the extended 1950’s” he gave his audience no choice but to listen, if for no other reason than to wonder what he would say next. After growing a beard and a reputation for squashing taboo for sport, Carlin landed in such historic places as the first episode of Saturday Night Live (1975) and the United States Supreme Court. Such was the pioneer he was…by his own admission finding the lines just to deliberately cross them; over and over again.

Carlin’s art, and it is art, was weaving a coarse quilt of anti-bullshit so tightly that none could penetrate, even that which we generate from the inside. No one was safe: eight presidents, the media, athletes and Tippy the farting dog were all favorite targets of maybe this last of pure situational comics. See, George didn’t need a funny story to make you laugh. He instead held that which you held sacred and without humor up to his light and spun it until you snorted in spite of yourself.

In his later years, George turned more cynical and less funny, progressing to a point that some would call just plain angry. But he never lost the edge that separated real from pure mockery, and his knack was spreading that as wide as possible to cultivate the obscure humor in what to the untrained and unanointed looked like just dirt.

His career spanned five decades and included 11 feature films and three bestselling books in addition to his countless albums, discs and TV specials. He will be most remembered; however for his riotous stage shows which usually sold all their seats, but left people on the floor in tears.

George Carlin lamented on stage in 1973 “Jeez, I hope I don’t die. By the way, you’re all going to die. Didn’t mean to remind you, but it is on your schedule” He went further to speculate on the afterlife, saying dying “should be sorta fun..the next big adventure. We’re going to find out where we’re gonna go” I am certain George is somewhere surrounded by people who cannot stop laughing.

For seven words you can and will say anywhere from now on, try these:

George, we are going to miss you.

BENDING THE LIGHT

Webster’s defines a prism as “a medium that distorts, slants or colors whatever is viewed through it.” Anyone who has ever held one knows that ordinary white light passed through a prism will break into the individual colors of the spectrum. Depending on how you hold it in the light, the color bands will be wide or narrow, fuzzy or distinct. At more acute angles to the source, the colors are crisper, more defined. But hold it obtusely and the lines of transitions become blurred.

Perspective is like the colors from a prism—the closer you are to a problem, the clearer and more narrow the lines of thought issuing towards the solution. But each step away makes it less defined; more subtle and open to interpretation. Or misinterpretation. Or freaking out.

There is no entry in Webster’s for “freaking out”, as much as our culture does it. We freak out about love (Does she want me?). About money (Is this enough?). About work (Am I good enough?). About the unknown. My definition of freaking out is the complete loss of rational thought about a single event based on a single, often skewed perspective. Whatever it’s about, it is usually groundless, almost always unwarranted and doesn’t make anything any better. Unless, of course, it helps you find perspective.

High handed as I may sound, I am not immune to the occasional bout of freak out. Lately, I’ve worried if I’m really good enough to do the things I’ve been entrusted to do, or if I’ll even make it far enough to prove that I am. Seems like the times when you least need a horror story about an experience you’re preparing to have, someone sends you theirs. Recently, I heard a story about someone else’s journey through the place I’m getting ready to go that made Freddy Kruger sound like the Easter Bunny. I took from this tale the knowledge that the totality of my dream rests on a knife’s edge and is beyond my control. Well, when the story was over, the freak out began. It seemed that the culmination of my career could be undone with the wrong word or a single failed test, and I slowly began losing it. I was in the process of unraveling to my newest friend when she quite forcefully said “Stop it.” Her tone was enough to give me pause, and she continued.

She told me a story of a friend of hers who had a dream not unlike mine with the same sort of conditional testing before he was allowed to begin. During this quest, she said, it was found that he had a serious medical problem for which the solution was life-changing surgery. Here I am convinced that the worst possible thing would be to not get my job, and this poor guy went for weeks wondering if he would even survive.

That’s where I got it, and the bent light was straight once again.

Our lives are driven, governed even, by a succession of triumphs and failures; the triumphs fleeting and the failures potentially devastating. As we move closer to the sources of our happiness, the lines between success and defeat become sharp as the knife on whose blade our illusions of that happiness rest. But, moving away, far enough away to see the big picture, we can appreciate the subtleties or our achievement enough to appreciate the degrees of accomplishment where true joy lives. Often, whatever is as bad as you can imagine in this moment was only the front door to someone else’s walk through hell, yet they survived, and so will you.

By the way, the guy—my unexpected source of perspective—did just fine. He’s gone on to live a wonderful life full of good friends and family. As was his desire, his destiny, and his life.

Too many times we distort our own light, trying to filter it too narrowly through skewed notions of what our happiness is. It is only when we step back and allow the lines between joy and despair to fade that in the spaces between we find where life is really lived.

A bittersweet week comes before me. I have three more days at work before I take about 10 days off in preparation for starting the new job. On the one hand, I’m so excited (and anxious) about the adventure I’m looking forward to, but I really do hate leaving where I am. It’s not fear of the unknown or some weird reverse of the “grass-is-greener” adage at all, but really…I’m just going to miss what I am doing and the people I work with. We’ve done so much good together in the past year that walking away now almost feels like leaving a story incomplete.

After the last goodbye on Wednesday, I’m headed to the beach for a few days to do nothing. At least, that’s my plan. Really looking forward to a little downtime before beginning the next chapter.

Do good things with the week to come, learn something new and be safe.