Time to Hold'em

Life can be a series of combination of events that can either put you in the right or wrong place at the right/wrong time.  We chsnges our normal route to a place we had been going for years.  It's a 3 hour trip that gets tweaked ever so often to cut a few minutes here or there.  Well we had only traveled  on this particular route a few times so I was still paying close attention to all the little intricies of the route.  My normal state of driving a familiar route is basically autopilot mode, which allows part of my brain to work through other issues of life and let's the car drive itself.  This was a new route requiring more attention.  We were riding along, I watching an oncoming car move into the turn lane, which would be no biggie.  A split section later, it clicks that there is no turn lane, but the car is traveling in my lane, which gives me a few options.  I have time for this to register so I exit the road as safety and as quickly as possible.  Luckily there is low grass to my right and I was not traveling the interstate speed that I had been a few minutes earlier.  There was no thinking involved at this point only instincts.  The car passes and some where along the way the other driver realizes he is in my lane and moves back over.  Four important people in my life were all in the car with me.

Events like this find the brakes for you, and will cause you to evaluate your entire spot in the universe.  A Pandora's box of questions get opened.  There were so many events that happened to line all this up the way it happened.  The outcome, luckily was a reset of the clock, a refocus on my whole existence.  I am thankful that it did not end in bend sheet metal and broken flesh.  It was one of those moments of clarity and chaos mixed together, both edges of the sword visible at the same time. On one side , you have sheer luck and chance, and on the other side divine intervention.  A balance of a nest miss on the roulette wheel, and a miraculous point of reflection.  It was just luck vs.  a small detail in a grander plan, both ending in a counting of chips and blessings.

A Major Purchase

There is a major theme to 2012.  It's been the year of the major purchase.  There have been a couple of cool trips, and a few new toys, but one major purchase.  It's been year of buying into the fact that you can make dreams a reality.  My wife and I have two daughters, one who just turned 7 and one who will soon be 12.  I realized sometime last year that one is old enough to do more adventurous things with and one will soon pretend I don't exist.  So this is the prime time in the sense of doing things as a family.  I am trying to find a way to the brakes on this part of our lives.  It started in the house of mouse, where you were told you were where dreams come true.  It was hard not to by into the message.  Who would not want to believe, that all you had to do was dream it and it would become reality?  If you can find a way to turn down the skeptimism and allow yourself to believe, that turns out to be the key.  My past statements included: expect the worse, and hope for the best and you want be disappointed.  That strategy helps dull the sting of an October playoff  series loss, but is not one that is brimming with the power of optimism.  Anyway I must have gotten pixie dust on my feet in Florida, because I started believing the hype and drinking the Mouse Kool-aid.  Dreams can come true.
I have  this life long quest for the voice or role model of a male influence.  This partially stems from the fact that my life has been and continues to be filled with influence of women.  I made deal with my oldest daughter  when her sibling was due to be born at any moment, that if it was a girl I would get a dog to help even the score.  Someone pointed out that said dog would probably be female too.  I never ollected on that bet, because for one thing my daughter had a fear of dogs, and my fear it would be yet another player on the other team. This is a long complicated story, that can wait for another day.  The point is the search for this voice landed me on The Opie and Anthony Radio show.  One day the day the guest was Matt Paxton, one of the cleaning specialist off the TV show Hoarders, here is yet another male voice.  I then began following his podcast: 5 Decisions Away, the theme of which is we are just 5 Decisions away from having everything in life we want or from pooping in a bucket and being homeless.  I mixed this message along with the Mouse-aid, and it began sinking in.  Matt talks about just chasing after your dreams and going all in on your dreams.  If you believe in your dreams then you will adjust them and make them fit.  We start out believing our lives are going to be linear, meaning we are going from point to point, step by step, in a straight line just liked we envision.  Reality teaches us pretty quickly this straight line is actually pretty broken and nonlinear at all.  We can either except this crooked path and run its course or we can grab the wheel and steer toward our goals.  Here's where the 5 decisions come in.  We can go for our dreams or follow lifes steam and end up out of focus and lost.  Matt also shares  an appreciation of The Avett Brothers, which helped sell me on his message as well.  One of there lyrics says: "Decide what to be and go be it.".   This is but one example of the kind of theme shared in their music and Matt's message, and both of these match the positively of the Mouse-aid.
This common theme of positivity and the family being in its wheelhouse, to use a baseball analogy, led me to believe dreams can come true.  If you throw all you have into them and never give up, you will eventually wear down the negativity and you will be victorious.   I have seen this happen, and have bought into this philosophy.  Most importantly I have now vowed to sell this to those around me.  Can you imagine the power of  a 7 or 12 year old that thoroughly believes they can do whatever they target their energy upon?  I guess the key part of the equation is the target itself, and equally important is the belief it can become reality.  The key of selecting the target also lies within the understanding of yourself.  I hope they can grasp the power of this message, while they have a majority of their path in front of them and not midway through their journey.  I guess my new dream is to become a world class salesman.

Slapped by Reality

I can't find the brakes, most of the time, but I occasionally can take foo off the gas. Two are my favorite ways to do this are playing in the ocean, and watching movies. I am happy to say that I have passed my love of the ocean down to my daughters, and I guess in return most of the movies I have seen in theaters in recent years have been under a Disney or Pixar banner. I will accept that trade. My daughters are growing up faster everyday, another reason to find the brakes, so I have learned to enjoy their movies. The fact that the people at Disney put in the occasional adult humor helps deaden the blow somewhat. Anyway to reel this back in, movies especially those in a theatre are a good escape from reality. I can't imagine going to see a movie with my daughters and watching a tragedy unfold like that in Coloroda. An attack on the symbol of American capitalism is hard to grasp, but I understand the target. This movie attack is harder to wrap my head around. These were just people there to enjoy an escape from reality, instead they get slapped in the face with the cruelest reality of all. On a bus trip with my family, my oldest daughter found a copy of the last Batman movie on my IPod. She watched it to past the time. I had told her there was another Batman movie coming out soon, maybe we could go see it. She quoted the Joker a couple times. I thought I had a new movie buddy. So this could have been me and my daughter at some random theatre. I asked her over the weekend whether she wanted to see it, to gauge her opinion, she said no she was good. I decided not to push the issue, and take my foot off the gas. I am passionate about a lot of things, but being a father is at the top of the list. I wouldn't want to do something to jeopardize that, just like anyone sitting in that theatre didn't expect to either.

Bursting with Ambition

I guess if you don't have goals to work toward, and nowhere to get in life then life will go pretty slow. Then you would just be floating on the lake with no direction at all. That would be like riding a moped through life, going slow and in the way of people trying to get somewhere. Going too slow seems worse than going to fast. Ad hard as it is to find the brakes and slow down, people don't usually find a burst of ambition and speed up. The moped only goes so fast. Somewhere along the way in my management training, we had a class on balancing the wheel of life. If you keep all your priorities in balance the wheel will roll a lot smoother, if not it becomes lopsided and the ride is rough. I become too focused on one thing or set of things and let others suffer. Sometimes we have to find the brakes, slow down enjoy the moment and recharge.

Asterisk Voyage

Maybe all this perceived speed comes from being driven toward goals. I have to put this analogy down to get past it. You are on a lake in a boat, there is a rope stretched from side to side. The only way you can get across is to pull hand over hand. This goal becomes your passion. The more you pull, the more momementum you gain, and the faster you go. If you become focused on a goal and and put all your energy into achieving it, time will go by rather quickly. The problem is life is full of such goals, goals at home, with the kids, etc. So instead of it being a linear vitage across the lake, a more accurate image may be a spider web or asterik. As deadlines and goals approach, time moves at the same rate. The more atcipation around a goal, the more energy around a deadline, the more the clock moves as well. The more we focus on getting across the lake, the more we loose along the way. You can't enjoy the lake, if you are focused on getting across it. When I was out of work post surgery, I couldn't do a lot of pulling on the rope. I was pretty much dead in the water. But I got to slow down and enjoy the view for a moment anyway. I also started this project. Even though, it just rambles along, I am able to get these ideas out of my head. When I was a small child, Christmas was the crossing of the lake, everything revolved around Christmas. It always seemed so far away, so far across the lake. Now I work retail, and Christmas arrives in August. Everyday now has deadlines, and I end up like a waterbug, bouncing across the lake from point to point.

The Horizon

I am still obsessed with the preceived speed of life, and how to slow it down. Like driving a car, the gas pedal is the skinny one, but easy to find. The brake pedal is the wide one, big enough to jump on with both feet. But yet it is still hard to find the brakes. We have deadline after deadline to meet, so we keep our eye on the next hurdle. There is a long straight stretch on my way to work. If you focus on a spot on the horizon, movement doesn't really register. You pick another spot closer in, and you start to notice a faster change. You look at the road in front of you and the dotted line goes flying by you. In all three cases you are traveling the same speed, but with three totally different perceptions. If we are engaged with life's tug of war match, and constanly pulling on the rope, then of course the next hurdle is going to come at you faster. If the hurdle comes faster, then life moves faster. I recently spent week out of work recovering from surgery. During that week, I had to let go of the rope. The hurdles stop coming. I could look up at the horizon, at least for a moment. At that time I didn't find the brakes, they found me. Ever so often, they have a tendency to that.

Intro

We spend far too much time speeding our lives up. Sometimes we need to find the brakes. Sometimes the brakes have a way of finding us instead. Newspapers and the evening news are now obsolete. If it happened two minutes ago, I want to know about it now. We are missing far too much living in between those blurps. You look up from your phone, and your kids are grown, and your parents have aged, but you know have the box score of the Toledo Mudhens right under your index finger. Sometimes you have to try to find the brakes.