Monday, July 2, 2012

On shifting lanes and holding on

I went home this weekend for the first time since I moved to Minneapolis last month.  Obviously, the main reason was to see friends and be with my family, but on my drive home I was struck with another craving that I had seemed to have been pushing down.

While what follows may seem off topic, I promise that A) it isn't and B) I'm going somewhere:

If you've never driven through the Great State of Wisconsin you need too.  If you have driven through Wisconsin but never at dusk, you need to do that too.  I left the Cities at about 4:00 on Friday night.  The air was about 90 degrees with what was probably 99% humidity, and I hit traffic leaving town.  It looked like it would be the worst drive in the history of the world, and as the ETA on my GPS climbed steadily while I was stuck on 94-E, I must say that I started to get a little antsy.  But after I crossed the border and headed southeast through the hills and fields of Wisconsin, everything changed.

I had finally left the "cabin traffic" of people heading north for the weekend for a getaway and had the road mostly to myself.  I was out of the city, so I rolled down the windows, opened the moonroof, cranked the music, and just absorbed the world around me.  The sun began to fall and the wheat glowed amber.  The hills were covered in long shadows, and the road slipped and snaked for miles ahead of me.  The wind blew warm in my face and for a beautiful few hours I was completely alone and completely in touch with the entire world.  It was in this moment, and here's where we connect back to the cliffhanger off paragraph 1, that I realized I missed going to church.  Albert Einstein once said, "My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe," meaning that the universe was designed so perfectly that there was no way that it could exist without an almighty power.  I had a similar experience on Friday, and I realized that I needed religious experiences in my life.  While adjusting to a new community and a new life, it had been easy to let slip for four weeks, but with the trip home I would be able to return and I was ecstatic.

My boy Al either praying or simply contemplating why he didn't do something more fun with his life than practice physics

The weekend came and went and Sunday morning rolled around and we went to church, where one of the readings was from the book of Wisdom, and went like this: 

Because God did not make death
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being,
and the creatures of the world are wholesome;
There is not a destructive drug among them
nor any domain of Hades on earth,
For righteousness is undying.
 
While I very much may be wrong in this interpretation, I heard this as telling me that even though things suck sometimes, they are not the work of God, and dammit if He isn't trying his hardest to try to swing the world in my favor.  He built the world to be good and it's not going to go down the tubes on his watch. 

So swing forward 3 hours and I'm back in the car headed north, back through beautiful Wisconsin, and I'm cranking New Radicals (who is, without a doubt, the best band to produce only one album ever) on the CD player in Mom's minivan (and no, it doesn't get any cooler than that).  New Radicals most popular, and second best song, is You Get What You Give, and while I've listened to it probably over 100 times, I've never really paid much attention to the lyrics.  Gregg Alexander starts out singing about the young and carefree life, but then hits us with, "but when the night is falling / and you cannot find a light. / If you feel your dream is dying / hold tight."  Fairly standard "don't give up" advice, right?  But it delves deeper.  He comes back with: 

God's flying in for your trial.
This whole damn world can fall apart,
You'll be okay, follow your heart.
You're in harm's way.
I'm right behind.

Pretty similar to the reading from Wisdom, right?
Always take advice from dudes in sweet pink hats
I could be the only one, in which case just stop reading, but it seems like all too often the whole damn world does fall apart, or at least it seems like that.  I get flustered and stressed and worried and I hole up and try to protect myself from the terrible things that will happen next.

But they never actually come.

And in these past three days I've been reminded of that once again.  The Earth is not a cold dead place, and in fact, it's quite the opposite.  Whenever something goes wrong, there's always something there that helps me to bounce back.  Sure, there's a hell of a lot of bad stuff going on out there, but that doesn't mean that it's going to ruin things for me.  If I hold on to what I value, if I don't give up, if I'm me, the goodness of the world will take care of me.  Things will shift from bumper to bumper city traffic to a beautiful drive through the countryside at dusk, and even though it doesn't mean that the ETA moves back to where it was and the bad things never happened, it doesn't mean that it's not an incredible experience.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

On taking control

In eighth and ninth grades, I wasn't quite sure who I was.  I was kind of rolling with the waves without really knowing how or where or when to take control of the tide, instead allowing myself to kind of drift along to the rhythm of the world.  Whenever I wasn't sure what was going on, it seemed like I would always revert back to one of the most potent lyrics I've ever heard.

"...And life barrels on like a runaway train..."

The world was on track, sure, but I wasn't quite sure where it was going, I wasn't quite sure if I'd make it there without derailing, and I wasn't sure if I even wanted to be on board, but I sure as hell knew that I was on that train.  That's about as far as I was comfortable reaching though.  I assumed that someone else would take the wheel.

Now, I've written about my love of the musical stylings of Ben Folds before, and I maintain that he's the Elton John/Billy Joel of our generation and is without a doubt a musical genius, but in this case he's wrong.

About a week ago my best friend told me that a baseball team, Los Cardenales del Parque San Luis (St. Louis Park, MN Cardinals), full of Mexican guys from his workplace needed a few extra pitchers, and that we were the guys for the job.  I obviously agreed immediately, and was pumped until I realized what it would entail.  I'd have to join a team of 15 guys who I'd never met before, they all spoke Spanish, and I hadn't thrown to a batter in three years.  I was terrified.  I thought about backing out.  I already knew I would hate the entire thing.

Baseball is, without a doubt, my favorite thing in the entire world.  It's beautiful, it's poetic, and for years and years it was mine, from the backyard to the State Championship, I knew the game and it knew me and dammit if we didn't love each other, but I still couldn't pull it together enough to lace up the spikes.  The only reason I went to the field on Sunday was because I couldn't bear bailing on my buddy.  The train was running away and I was hiding in the caboose.

So I got to the field, was told I was the starting pitcher, didn't have any control during warmups, walked the first batter on four pitchers, and drilled a guy with the next pitch after that.  Not exactly the way to impress a new group of teammates.

I managed to get out of the inning, though, and Arturo, the manager, pulled me aside.  I couldn't really understand what he said other than, "settle down," and what must have been Spanish for, "How the hell did I get suckered into signing this kid up."

Something funny happens when everything goes wrong though; you realize that it can't get any worse.  I didn't get pulled, so I went back out for the second inning, fully confident that there was no way that I could pitch any worse than I had in the first, and I put down the other side 1-2-3.  My outing ended after 5 innings, with 8 strikeouts and only 2 walks (plus 2 hit batters, but who's counting?), and I didn't give up a run after the first.  And the only difference was my attitude.

Young William delivers for Los Cardenales del Parque San Luis
The train was still barreling down the same track as it always had been, but instead of hiding in the back and expecting the worst, I picked myself up and took the controls.  Instead of embarrassing myself I pitched my longest, and best statistical, outing since I was 14 years old.  Instead of letting my teammates down, I was getting fist bumps between innings and Modelos after the game.  Instead of seeing the train as a runaway I saw the train as my own, and even though it was flying down a track that I didn't know the destination of, I could see far enough ahead to get it there.

La cerveza oficial de Los Cardenales

There's never a way to stop the train.  It's moving and you're on it and there's nothing you can do about that.  What you can control is whether or not you want to take it in your hands.  After all, life can be a runaway and you can hide and you can wait and watch, but what does that give you?  There's not much to be personally proud of, nothing is your responsibility or your fault, there's nothing that you can look back on and say, "that scared the hell out of me but I did it anyway."

Life is going to take me someplace, but I want to be the one who gets me there.  I want to be in the engine, at the controls, and I want to be looking out the front window to see where I'm going and the sides to see where I am instead of out the back to see where I was.  We can't change what's coming to us, but we can change how we handle it, and it's a lot more fun to stare it down and steer into it than to it is to let it run away with you.

Monday, April 9, 2012

"New is always better"

I just finished through the 2011 season of How I Met Your Mother on Mom's Netflix account (in exchange for the password, I've corrupted her favorites with beauties such as Baseketball and rated everything I watch as 5 stars.  Fair trade).  Anyway, the last episode was the best one yet (and you can trust me on that because I never make blanket statements), mostly because it was centered around Barney's rule of "new is always better."

There are many exceptions to this rule, namely Notre Dame football teams, the Chicago Cubs, and lacrosse being the cool new sport, but in general it's pretty good.  It's easy to get stuck in a rut and think that everything used to be better, but it's only because that part of our lives was figured out.  It was easy.  We know how things would have happened.  We can always be perfect in hindsight.

But we'd also be accepting something that isn't our best.

I get made fun of for my overuse of "It's the best day ever," but I do think that it's something that should be taken seriously.  After all, yesterday is a sunk cost.  It still matters on the balance sheet, it can't be erased, but there's also nothing that you can do to change it, so there's nothing to do but take what you have and create the absolute best possible outcome, the best day that can be made.

Were there days that were absolutely amazing?  Were there periods of our lives that we thought that everything was completely figured out?  Were we kings of our worlds for brief periods of time?  Yes, yes, and yes.  But would we want to relive those days in a loop forever?  I say no.

It's easy to look back and see what didn't work and wish that it did, but the truth is that it didn't, for whatever reason, and even if we revisit it every once in a while, we shouldn't have to re-enact it.  What's through is through and what's done is done.  Today in church our minister used the phrase, "from history to mystery," while describing the Easter story.  I think that applies here too.  History is done and the future is a mystery, but just because it's a mystery doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken on.  There's a reason that things end.  There are new beginnings waiting, and these new beginnings are always better.