more normal than not

I sit at my computer, typing a blog that no one except my family knows about, listening to a presentation on Youtube about living the non-virtual life.

How ironic.

That’s the way our lives go now…the computer and “connectedness” is something we take for granted these days.  It’s become integral to our lives somehow.

The talk I’m listening to is one given by Tom Brokaw and Yvon Chouinard.

Brokaw just asked Chouinard if he’d “ever put his hands on a keyboard”…the answer was no…but then he said that his friend Tom McGuane says that “behind every Luddite there’s a woman with a computer”.

We know that there’s a big world out there…we can see it on the television.

I’m pretty connected these days…computer, cellphone, satellite tv…if there’s a way to get more connected I don’t know about it yet.  I do know how to set a dvd player clock to get it to quit blinking…but my daughter laughs at me because I don’t really know how to use my new cellphone.

We went out to roam around a little yesterday…hit a couple of thrift stores…ate some Indian food…went to a bookstore or two…went to REI.  I saw a couple of books about “nature deficit disorder”….wow.  Crazy, but too true….we don’t get outside to play like we used to.

There’s a natural order and need that we are bypassing now…with strange results.  “Nature Deficit Disorder”…that we even need to come up with a descriptive term like that is pretty crazy.  We need to be outside.

It’s an easy row to hoe to go from the car to the couch…get home and plop down, maybe after doing a few chores…just plop down and turn on the television and maybe…like we did last night….watch a movie about guys dying on the Eiger, freezing to death out in the harsh and unforgiving natural world.

Like I said before…here I sit, drinking my coffee and moving my fingers around on a bunch of buttons on a piece of plastic.  It doesn’t get much more disconnected to the world outside than that…but… wait a second…I did get a fire going in the wood stove…split some kindling….got it all going, fed the cat, looked at the moon….so I guess I still had a connection to it all if it was only in passing.

I guess I’m golden.

One of the things that this talk is making me feel is that success allows you to choose to not be connected.

At the far other end of the scale, you can be a Luddite because you can’t afford the connectivity.

Unless you get the government to give you a cellphone…Assurance wireless, I think the program is called.  How about that?  The government will give you a cellphone like it’s a priority that you’re connected.  (I think it’s so they can track everybody…but that’s just paranoia talking).

Dirt on our hands…breeze on our cheeks…a hawk overhead…there is something good that we’re given that doesn’t cost us anything more expensive than waking up and getting outside.

Maybe I’ll give it a shot when I finish typing this blog.

We had one of our “ice storm scares” yesterday.

I hate going to work in the morning with the parking lot just beginning to ice up, each drop that falls from the sky coating the windshield…knowing that after a couple of hours of casing our day’s delivery and prepping to start the driving part of the day, it could be a lot worse.

I didn’t end up having all that bad a day.

I had a bunch of “wake me up moments”….moments when the car just didn’t feel right…when the back end slid just a little, or it took a little too long to stop.  That can be kind of terrifying when you’re expecting the “big slide”…but it really wasn’t all that bad when all was said and done and I was finished and back at home.

I think that the thing about the kind of ice we had yesterday was that it was never so thick that you could count on it.  It never got to the point where it was predictable…just to the point where it was expected that something might happen.

That makes for a day of angst…driving around with the fatalistic “lets just see what happens” mindset.

So you creep around the curves, gear down and drive slow on the big downhills (the downhills never seemed so long and so steep before)…and concentrate on what you’re doing.

Concentrating wears me out.

One thing that is kind of nice about the bad weather is that when they say that it’s not safe to be driving, for the most part people stay off the roads.

It makes for a quiet day of driving.

I had some great theological thoughts…deep, deep, deep thoughts…about not seeing trouble until it was sliding you off the mountain.  Now I can’t really remember the gist of those plans.

The reality of it is that black ice is a pain in the rear.

Just spooky enough to get your attention…dangerous because you don’t know when and where it will show up.

Give me some fluffy snow next time…I’ll believe that when I see it.

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

It’s funny how we measure our lives.

Until you go to your high school reunion and some friend from the fringes guilds the lily and tells you that he started a software company, or she tells you she’s the queen of the world, or he tells you that the inauguration ceremony is going to be televised (“and you should really watch it!…oh, you don’t have cable?  Nevermind…”)…until that happens, you’re just as happy as a clam because you got the chimney leak fixed and the house warm.

Who knew there was something missing from a pretty good, simple life?

I think that Winston Churchill also had a great quote (among many) about never giving up.

There are so many times that we don’t have to give up…because we never start.  It’s a safe way to avoid failure.

New thoughts about what we should be can be real mood busters.

I’m not thinking we should rest on our laurels (what the heck is a “laurel”?) and never try anything new or never reach for anything better…it’s just that I wonder if we don’t miss something pretty great if we feel like we turned down the “wrong fork in the road”…and now all we can think about is the fork.

We don’t see what we’ve left behind…and we don’t see what positive outcomes could be down either road the fork provides. It’s like we were sleep walking, but in our mind we’re sitting somewhere far back down the road…crying at the crossroads.

We visited a college yesterday.

It was a college that was a couple of hours away…high up in the mountains, beautiful campus…looked like it might be a good option.

It looked like it might be a “good fork”.

I’m not sure when we began thinking that college was supposed to be some kind of ultimate fulcrum….like if you didn’t launch yourself into the stratosphere with the right college choice and the right job following the completion of your studies and the right choice of spouse and the right…you were pretty much done.

What a lot of pressure for somebody working on figuring out how to get through their young life in the moment.

I hear people say things like, “I know a bunch of people who know some kids who went to college and they never amounted to NOTHIN’!  COLLEGE IS A WASTE!!!”.

Makes me think they need to get to know a broader range of people.

It’s kind of like the people who say, “I read a book in High School.  I’m done with reading”.  To say “completion of your studies” is a sad thing…”I’m done with the collegin’…what a waste of time that was …can’t get no job or nothin’ “.

I think our young student is curious about a lot of things… school and non-school related.

That’s a good thing.  It’s a hopeful thing to see a child have an open attitude about the world.

I want to make good decisions….I want to make decisions that make things better and easier for my family.  I don’t know that I’m always really good at doing that.

A friend’s parent told me, “You could do anything” when I was getting set to go to college for the first time.  It was pretty great to hear…I trusted my friend’s father…he wasn’t a flatterer and if he had confidence in me, it was something that I took seriously.

I ended up doing a little of just about everything.  He did say “you could do everything”, didn’t he?

I guess that you live your life.  Your life.  Some of it’s going to be right, some not right…but you keep walkin’…keep trying…and hopefully the percentage of right to “not right” ends up on the positive side.

I guess that “nest pushing” is part of the whole plan, too.

You just have to try and figure out the softest place you can find for a landing spot….and then try not to look amazed and relieved when it turns out that they could fly after all.