Johnny Cash is singing his cover of If You Could Read My Mind and I am working hard at silencing the noise inside my head.
There is a mile long mental ‘to-do’ list that is has far too many empty check boxes and there is little doubt it will probably grow before it shrinks.
My children want to know how I can be so focused on the same old stuff and I laugh.
“Dad, you are not being reasonable.”
They are right, I am not reasonable about some stuff. I gave up reason and sanity for Lent, which is a pretty neat trick for a Jewish kid.
My role during this moment in time is to get some things done and that is not going to happen by being passive.
Now is a time for action and a refusal to just accept what is fed to me. It is time to fight the inertia of the human condition and make things happen.
You don’t move the needle or make substantial changes without taking risk.
Our comfort zone is the equivalent of a frenemy. There are days when it helps us and days when it hurts.
There are moments when the kids look at me and I see them wondering if their father has lost it.
Sometimes I tell them how I remember thinking my parents were nuts too but they don’t really appreciate or believe me.
Can’t totally blame them because some of the changes and things that are coming aren’t fleshed out enough for them to see how much work is going to be involved.
Since we don’t have more specific details there hasn’t been a need to get into all of the possibilities of what could or could not happen.
There is a certain amount of excitement tied into all this.
Because you know that in a short time you are going to make some big changes but you have to let things develop so that you know just how many and how big they are going to be.
Life Is An Adventure
The music moves to a clip of The Soup Dragons singing I’M Free and I am taken back to a moment in college.
I can see myself standing around a fire pit with a bunch of the guys, beers in hand, the million stars above symbolizing the million dreams of youth.
That kid isn’t any happier than I am now but he is far more relaxed. No responsibilities and no idea about how very different life would be than he sometimes imagined it.
I am fairly certain if you magically allowed the present version of myself to speak to the younger one that kid would ignore the advice of the old guy.
He knew better.
Which reminds me, if I get a chance to go back I’ll give myself a boot to the ass just because.
How To Make Things Happen
That is the conversation I would have with him if I could.
It would be direct and focused upon doing a few things that I passed upon, not from the position of regret as much as just because.
Just because I hear that whisper in the back of my head to sit some people down and have the conversations we haven’t had.
The whisper that pushes me to do some things that I haven’t done yet because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed and life doesn’t always go as we think it should.
That is not me selling fear. It is me talking sense.
It is me saying that the different paths we sometimes find ourselves on don’t have to be bad or worse than what we had expected or thought.
They might be better, you don’t know unless you try and these days that is a big part of what moves me.
I have some ideas about what could be and I want more than suspicion. I want confirmation and you don’t get it without trying.
So I am here to make things happen.
Change! We all long for it and it happens at a variety of paces and we must not compare ourselves along this journey……. That was a reminder to myself. I’m trying to make things happen too and the progress seems dismal – to me, at least.
To me it often feels like it is too fast or too slow. I wish for the mythical middle ground.
I agree. I wish there was a formula to make it happen. But then that’s the beauty of life, isn’t it?
It does lend itself to making life a little more interesting.