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.

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.

"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.

Stars

Since I was about 4 or 5, there have been stars on the ceiling of my bedroom.  Little, glow-in-the-dark circles that I looked up into thousands of times.  I've looked up through tears, I've looked up when I was too excited to sleep, I've looked up when I was scared, I've looked up during love, I've looked up during heartbreak.  I've looked up after Cub Scout meetings, after snow ball fights, after bike rides, after days at the lake, after baseball games, after playing in the yard, after fights, after injuries, after surgery, after the greatest days of my life.  I've probably looked at those stars, that "sky," more than just about anything in my life.

I can still remember the day that they went up, or at least the process.  True to form, my mother decided that if we were going to mark up my ceiling, it was going to be a learning experience, so she cut a scale replica of a little section of the solar system (with the big dipper right above my head) out of a huge piece of paper, taped it to my ceiling, and painstakingly filled in the holes with the glowing paint.  When I say scale, I mean everything too.  Star sizes, angles, directions, distances, they were all taken care of.  The only part I played in it was to hand up the sticky tack when she put the initial piece of paper up. 

I only have three more nights of sleeping under the stars.  Three more nights in this wonderful old house before we move.  I told a friend the other night that it feels like I'm being forced to walk away from my childhood, like the little boy that I grew up as will always be in this house, and I'll be forced to watch from the outside and reminisce.

Sure there will be reminiscing.  As the new house is only a few blocks away I'll inevitably drive by the old one.  I'll think of the summer nights and winter days in that yard.  I'll think of the dinners that I ate.  The walks home from the bus stop and piano lessons.  Parking the car in the driveway after a hard practice.  I'll think of carving pumpkins on the driveway.  I'll think of birthday parties and Christmases and coming home from vacations.  I'll think of pets and I'll think of relationships and friends.  I'll think of how my best days and my worst days all ended up under those stars.

The thing is, though, memories don't exist anywhere except for within us.  Will I be reminded of my childhood when I drive by that house?  Of course.  Will I remember what happened as happening inside of that house?  Yes.  Will I always love that house?  Without a doubt.  But can those memories live on without that house?  Yes, that will happen too.

Memories are what we make of them.  Memories are inside of us.  Memories will live on with or without the corresponding information intact.  Places disappear, experiences are once in a lifetime, but memories tell us how we came to be what we now are.  Nobody's seen anything that's looked like that little boy for years, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't exist.  He's still inside.

He's still inside and so is the dad that always managed to blow huge leads in the bottom of the last inning in the back yard.  So is the mom who made sure that I learned everything that I possibly could in every area that I possibly could, and was able to trick me into enjoying every second of it.  So is the older brother who taught me how to hate losing and how to love the feeling of victory, but also ensured that I knew the joy of playing the game.  So is the younger brother who would listen to my stupid ideas and go along with them without caring whether we looked like idiots.  So are the grandmas and grandpas and uncles and aunts and cousins and friends.

Pretty soon I won't be able to sleep under my stars anymore, but that doesn't mean that I never did, and it doesn't mean that they aren't still with me.  Just because I can't see the people that I love all the time doesn't mean they aren't there, and just because I can never re-live a moment that has already passed doesn't mean it never was.  They're all there, and just like stars, they follow me.  They're distant and sometimes the clouds pass over them, but they're always up there.  They never leave, no matter where I go, and no matter where I call home.  My best days and my worst days always end up under those same stars.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

This summer, I plowed my way through four seasons of Friday Night Lights on Netflix in about a month.  (I'll give you time to wonder about whether I have any friends whatsoever and how I could sit in front of the tube for that long, and rate my loserhood on a scale from Scotty Smalls in the first part of Sandlot to Steve Urkel.  Good?  Good!)  By doing this, I introduced myself to a group of characters that immediately joined my Court of Fictional Friends alongside Howard Roark, Calvin, Hobbes, Roy Hobbs, Matthias from Redwall, Mufasa, Woody and Andy, and Moonlight Graham.  The most important was Coach Eric Taylor, who led his teams into battle (and an uncanny amount of last-second wins), with his mantra of, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."
There's nothing sneaky about this phrase.  It can be interpreted pretty easily.  The coach is just telling the boys that being strong people is more important than being a strong football team.  That they can't lose if they are upstanding individuals.

That's fine and good, but I'd like to break it down a little bit more.

Full hearts.  If you would have told me to have a full heart five years ago, I'm not sure I would have thought that was possible.  How can you have a full heart?  Aren't there always more things to love?  Can you really fill that container up?  I now believe that I was on the right track, but I was picturing the container wrong.  There's no finite amount of space to fill up - no box or bag or bucket that can eventually be 100% full.  Instead, I'd like to reference a lecture that I received in one of my first classes at Notre Dame, a theology seminar.  The professor compared the concept of "knowing God" to that of walking backwards out of a funnel.

You start in the spout, and from that point it looks like there's a pretty clear path out.  There isn't much to the sides and you can more or less narrow everything down into a fairly well-defined, uncomplicated track.  The light at the end of the tunnel is narrow.  God is limited.

However, there's a point in time when everything clicks and you realize that God can't be that limited.  That's the transition from the spout to the bowl of the funnel.  From that point on, every step you take forwards makes the area surrounding you a little wider; the closer you get to understanding God, the more there is to understand.  This paradigm means that the funnel can never end, as every time that you do take that step and you do understand, there's that much more that's uncovered and still has to be learned.

I believe that the same type of analogy is true of the heart.  The more that we love, the more ability we have to love.  The more full the heart gets, the wider the "container" gets.  The more love we give, the more ability to love we have.

The only way to be able to do that, however, is with clear eyes.

I believe that one of the worst feelings in the world is regret.  Pain goes away, sorrow clears up, anger dissipates, but regretting something can never be undone.  What-ifs and I-wishes and could've-beens keep us awake far longer than I-miss-hers and screw-hims.  Wouldn't you rather strike out with the bases loaded than let it be completely out of your control?  If you have an open jumper at the end of the game would you really want to pass it to a teammate just to avoid the pain of missing?

Clear eyes means no regrets.  Clear eyes means looking at someone and being able to tell them that there's nothing more you could do, nothing you would rather have done, and that you're proud of yourself.  Clear eyes means that you don't have to look back at the past, but that you can see the present and the future without obstruction.  And to me, clear eyes means one more thing:

Without clear eyes, it's hard to really see what's going on.  It's easy to make judgments about people, about places, about situations.  It's easy to think that you're always right.  It's easy to overlook things. 

Clear eyes means being able to see the world with an open mind.  Clear eyes means being willing to understand people for who they are without blindly trying to classify them.  Clear eyes means wanting to know and understand the world around you, the people who live in it, and the things that happen in it.

If we can look back without regrets, if we can see the past for what it was and the present for what it is, and if we can allow ourselves to see the unknown as it comes instead of assuming what it will be, if we can fill our hearts, and continue to fill them, if we can approach the world with a loving heart instead of a bitter one, I really don't think that it's possible to lose.

!

Two nights ago, I was told by someone I know that life is a question mark, that you can never be sure what's going to happen next, that it's one big mystery.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh...

I'll give her that you can never be totally sure of anything, but at the same time, she's making it sound like Mario Kart, where you get hit by lightning or tracked down by a turtle shell at least once every 60 seconds.  Now, I don't know all that much about what's going on with her, but I can honestly say that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Milwaukee, apparently

There are unknowns.  There are lots of unknowns.  In fact, there are very few knowns, and that's even if you count high probability assumptions, such as surviving the morning drive to work.  These things are scary, some are terrifying, some make us stay awake at night, some make us doubt ourselves, and some seem insurmountable.  In no way am I saying that there aren't question marks in life, but that doesn't automatically make life a question mark.  We give out question marks when we run out of our own options, either when we don't have any ideas left or when we don't care enough to find out by ourselves.  Is that really what we want to reduce life to?

Let's pretend that

Clay Matthews

is chasing you down.

What do you do?  Well, you, you scared little ball carrier you, have options.
1. Stand still
2. Run at him
3. Try to avoid him
That's pretty much it.  Now, there's a great chance that by doing any of these three things you're going to get clobbered, but at least in the second two you are in control of your own destiny.  If you try to avoid him, you have a chance to get away.  If you run at him and initiate contact, you have some control of where the hit's happening.  If you stand there and leave it up to him, they'll have to peel you out of the Frozen Tundra.

This isn't something that a positive attitude can solve.  This is something that only effort and passion and hope can solve. 

"Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

A positive attitude wasn't going to get Andy DuFresne out of Shawshank.  A positive attitude won't save your teeth if Clay Matthews is running at you.  A positive attitude only works when coupled with hope, which my dictionary defines as "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen."  Key word there?  Expectation.



If we wait to see what the scary things are going to do to us, even if we have the best of attitudes, they will inevitably do something other than what we want, and while it may never result in us face-down in the Lambeau Field turf, it could cause other things that are just as bad emotionally, if not physically.  On the other hand, if we take that fear and channel it, and decide that we're going to do something about it and keep it in our own hands, we can do absolutely no worse, and a lot of the time we can do a lot better.  If we expect to come out ahead and we act like it, if we expect to break out of that prison and do something about it, if we expect to juke out that linebacker and start making some moves, there's a chance that we will, but if we sit around and wait to get hit by the scary unknown, the best case will never happen.  Clay Matthews doesn't miss tackles.  Shawshank doesn't let guys out because they feel bad for them.

We need to be bold, we need to expect excellence in the hopes that we will only fall as low as success, and we need to live life as an exclamation point, not a question mark.  Exclamation points accomplish their purpose!  Aren't question marks just waiting to get eliminated?

Seeing the game from a new field

Whenever I tell people that I played baseball growing up, the first question most people ask is, "What position?"  Simple question, simple answer, right?  Ehhh...

The problem is that I didn't really have a position.  Since 2002, when I was 11 and when kids really start getting locked into positions, I've been all over the place.  Quick look: 2002 - SS for the Keystone Display Braves, 3B/1B for the Crystal Lake American Little League All-Stars.  2003 - SS for the Keystone Expos, 1B/C for CLALL.  2004 - 3B for the CL Cyclones.  2005 - 2B for the Cyclones.  2006 - RF for Crystal Lake Central, 2B for the Cyclones, 2007 - CF for CLC, 2B for the Cyclones.  2008 - RF for CLC, 2009 - LF for CLC.  For those of you scoring at home, that's 6-5-3-6-3-2-5-4-9-4-8-4-9-7.

Now, every time I moved, the coach would always say, "it's great that you can play so many positions," which I'm pretty sure was only the first half of a sentence that should have ended with, "because you sure as hell don't excel at any of them."

Young William not excelling in right field in 2008

So when I answer the question I always tell people that I moved around a lot, which is true, but also leaves me without a true identity and makes me sound like a tee ball player, ("Mom!  I got to play six positions and we got juice boxes!") but I also take a lot of pride in it.  Why?  Because when circumstances changed, I was able to adjust in order to change with them.

One of the toughest things to do in the real world is to keep an open mind about things.  It's much easier to entrench yourself in an opinion, a mindset, and an identity, and never give in to the concept that maybe, possibly, there are better options out there.  Humans, it seems, are proud beings, stubborn beings, and defensive beings, which combines into the perfect storm of closed-mindedness.  Why think when we can react?  Why even bother listening to other people's opinions when we could ignore them and pound our own even deeper into our brains.

Truth is, nobody is absolutely, 100% correct about everything.  Nobody knows how to solve every problem that's out there, nobody knows who God is, nobody knows how to completely stop Aaron Rodgers, nobody has written the best novel of all time, nobody has painted the best picture of all time, nobody knows why Tiger Woods betrayed Elin Steve Williams, nobody knows the meaning of life, nobody knows who Jack the Ripper was, nobody knows why LeBron James is such a gigantic douche, nobody knows how I Can't Believe It's Not Butter can't be at least a little bit butter, and nobody knows how they get so much cheese into a Cheez-It.  There are millions of theories on every topic, but not one is absolutely accepted by everyone because they're not facts.

So why do people insist that they do?

I know, I know.  Proud, stubborn, defensive.  But what do we gain from that?  It's hard to put aside our personal pride sometimes, but when things change, be it in ourselves, the people we're interacting with, or our surroundings, if we stay stagnant we're going to become irrelevant.  If I'm playing second and a better second baseman comes along, I won't play if I insist on being a second baseman.  I'll get moved to the bench, and eventually get cut.  But I can still play the game if I'm willing to move elsewhere.  A "position change" doesn't have to be a total shift in mindset, it just means that we can be willing to adjust our perspective based on additional information.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't hold onto our opinions about things.  Just because somebody disagrees doesn't mean that we should automatically change to agree with them.  I just think that we should be open-minded enough to know that, chances are, our opinion isn't the strongest or best one out there.  There are probably other things to consider, and it's okay to consider them.  It's okay to believe that there might be better options out there than the one we have.

[Note from Mom]:  "You should tie this into evolution.  The most adaptable, not the strongest, are the ones who survive."

Brilliant woman, brilliant statement.  And she's right.  Dinosaurs, if you take the extreme example, were much more powerful than apes.  A dinosaur could tear an ape to pieces.  But they couldn't adjust to shifts in the climate, so they disappeared.  They stuck to their cold-blooded, flesh-tearing guns and it didn't work, while apes were able to survive and turn into baseball players because they didn't have any one method of survival.  I'm sure that their lifestyle pre-Ice Age was much different than the one they chose during the Ice Age, and they lived to tell the tale.  The dinosaurs didn't adjust, got put on the bench, and then the Great Coach in the Sky decided that they ran out of innings.