It Begins with the End

It's Sunday, it's quiet, and it's winter again.

Friday night it was fall still, a few flakes of new snow stuck around after last weeks attempt at getting us prepared for the upcoming season change, but the weather was still nice, in the 50's during the day, but with nightfall a front slipped in and we woke to a Saturday morning of Charlie Brown snow falling softly from above. Those big, wet, heavy white flakes slowly danced toward the ground like they always do for Linus and Charlie Brown in Schulz's Christmas classic cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas, that loveable story of the search for the true meaning of Christmas, amid the strings of lights and shiny aluminum trees and commercialism of 1965.

Its been 46 years since The Peanuts gang held their first Christmas school play, with Charlie Brown attempting to direct the story of Christmas, back when you could call things what they were, but the commercialism and showiness of Christmas light displays certainly hasn't subsided in the years since, though I wonder if Charlie Brown's search for the true meaning of Christmas has become less relevant to today's society.

In our attempts to not offend anyone who might believe something different, we seem to have forgotten what it is we ourselves actually believe. If we believe anything at all. And we certainly do not wear our opinions and beliefs as openly as we once did, and maybe that's not a bad thing, for as much as we might believe there's nothing wrong with proclaiming our faith, our freedom of speech legislation seems to also cover those who would proclaim their right to hate certain groups just as openly. I doubt our forefather's considered such radical thought when drafting those original laws.

I'll let you mull over what you believe and where that belief should live in your life - it's not my place to question it for you, merely mine to ask you to think about it and what it means to you, and how it affects your ability to live your life as fully and as completely as you would like in today's society.

What would you change? If you could, about the things in your life? You've had your days of Remembrance and before that (or after that for my American friends) your time of Thanksgiving and hopefully you used those times to reflect and ask questions of yourself about what it is that you are truly thankful for, and how your life today pays homage (if at all) to those you fought so bravely on your behalf, so you may sit in quiet contemplation today and examine your beliefs.

Would you change anything?

Maybe its merely a philosophical question, since you can't change anything that's happened already, but if you could, what would it be? Besides making summer vacation longer and work weeks shorter and staying thinner and keeping your hair... Are you happy with who you've become? Are you who you were meant to be? Do you even care? Can you do anything about it if you aren't happy with who and where you are?

I've been thinking about these things as I've been busy building the garage addition - I know, I know, I really need to update the other blog, I will this week I promise - and I've learned a few things about myself that I think are universal in their application to others as well. For starters the more you resist something, the more of that something you'll find in your life to resist - this is all a matter of focus, and what you focus on, you'll see, and since you can't be focussed on more than one or two things at a time, its imperative that you focus on those things that are important to you and those things which will bring you to where you'd like to be.

There's also the realization that you are where you are today based on your beliefs and your actions of the past. That should be obvious, but it's not at first. You only make decisions based on your attitudes and beliefs about situations and how those may possibly affect you in the future. Control your beliefs and attitudes and you control your actions and therefore you control your future.

As I stood outside and looked at the almost completed exterior of my renovation project, it struck me that none of this would have been here today if I hadn't first thought about it, and what it would look like, how the parts would fit together and in what order I'd have to complete the steps to get to where the project is today. And I certainly could not have completed it if I hadn't been focussed on each of those steps and the details along the way.

Imagine the alternative - you want a new garage but you have no plan in place when you order the materials - how would you know what to order? And what would the standard be for the carpenters to build toward, and check their progress against? They'd be lost. It would be like throwing all those materials in the air at once and hoping they'd land just so, and you'd have your garage.

And how would you know when to do which steps? And what steps are required anyway? You don't have a plan, you haven't thought about it at all, you just knew you wanted a garage...

Rarely do we get exactly what we want by complete, random chance. Life doesn't work that way.

What struck me most was the suddenly obvious parallel between this renovation project and my life, and your life too. We live our lives mostly by random chance, blindly following the way things have always been done, not really giving much thought to the process, living day by day. Days turn into weeks turn into years and suddenly you realize you are no where near where you though you'd be. How could this be? you ask. Where did we go wrong? We had such great plans, such grand visions!

No. You didn't, you didn't have plans or visions, you had dreams. Wonderful imaginary pictures of what you'd like; Fantastic images of Make-believe and Wishes; Hopes and Dreams. No one taught you how to use those Dreams and Wishes to create them in reality. You've always known how to do that, how to make something from nothing, you just never knew to do it where your life was concerned.

We can do anything we set our minds to - theres that focus idea again - we put men on the Moon. We can take seemingly unrelated objects and make something completely new and amazing out of them - step into the kitchen and open that cook book - bet you couldn't make a cake just by thinking about cake, could you? Believing you can do something is important or you'd never consider making a cake in the first place. But beliefs alone won't cut it.

No, you'd need first to think about that cake, what it would look like, what type of cake, what size etc. Then you'd have a plan - a recipe for that type and size of cake, and then you'd gather the ingredients and combine them in the proper quantities and in the right order and you'd bake it in an oven at the correct temperature for a predetermined length of time, and then you'd open that oven door and once it had cooled, you'd have your cake. Not by accident or random chance, but by actively creating what you wanted.

You got cake by thinking about cake - thinking about the final product, the end result: cake, and then acting on that thinking.

I've built a garage not by thinking about cake, but by thinking about building a garage and by working back from the completed garage in my mind and on paper back through the steps and stages of construction and design until I identified the first action to be taken towards the final outcome, then I proceeded forward through those steps...

I'll ask you again.
What would you change? If you could, about the things in your life?
Are you happy with who you've become? Are you who you were meant to be? Do you even care? Can you do anything about it if you aren't happy with who and where you are?
Where you are today is where you are thanks to the beliefs and focus of your past. But where you go from here is up to you. You can continue blindly following what got you to where you are today, or you can decide to plot a new course.

You can be the Actors in that school Christmas play of life, dancing and goofing off, or you can ask instead what is the true meaning of the play's theme and become the Director and with the end result in mind write the script that tells the story, your story, your life.

Deep down inside we're alot like that sad, scrawny little tree Charlie Brown finds in the tree lot. Compared to the bright, shiny, flashy trees surrounding it, we may not look like much, but with a careful hand (focus) and a guided heart (beliefs) our true potential can be revealed.

As Linus said while looking at the little tree, "I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love."

Passing Time

How are you?

It’s been awhile since I sat down and did this, write about things happening around here and how those things affect me or me them, and I find that I miss it, the reflection and pondering and trying to make sense of it all. That is usually what my early Sunday mornings were for, sitting quietly listening and thinking, a cup of coffee not too far away and random thoughts passing through me for consideration.

But of late I’ve been busy building the addition and haven’t taken the time I know I need for myself, the time we all need to slow life down to a more manageable pace so we can catch our collective breath and remember who we are and why we are here. I read a short piece the other morning from my email inbox, the weekly Prairie Home Companion email, that normally details the upcoming episode’s guests and location etc, but this week the show’s host and mainstay Garrison Keillor wrote a fitting tribute to his long time friend and sound effects genius, Tom Keith, who passed away suddenly this week at the age of 65 due to a heart attack.

It was the kind of piece you’d love to have written about you when your time finally comes, a matter of factly written take on the man’s professional life as known and shared with the show’s listeners – it didn’t delve into his personal or private side – and reading it you knew for certain that the man will be missed dearly.

Andy Rooney passed away this week as well, another man who will be missed; a familiar face who visited with us every week and offered up a view of his world for our entertainment and education. Pointed, caustic and witty, his opinions provoked many. Whether you agreed with his point of view or not wasn’t important so much as his point of view, expressed so obviously as only Mr. Rooney could, got you thinking.

Their passings this week got me thinking, since we all will pass along that way one day, perhaps better to think of these things while I’m still able, and not provide my family with a hurried, scrambled collection of thoughts on my deathbed – should I be so lucky to pass in that manner.

I’ve always had questions that no one ever had concrete answers for, call me a Devil’s Advocate if you wish, but I always saw a few sides to most stories, but being as stubborn as bull might not have allowed the second or third side of a story to change my mind once it was made up, but I’m a bit wiser now, perhaps, or maybe my experiences have coloured those shades of grey and those black and white absolutes with a bit more latitude.

Riddle me these:

Why are we here?
What’s our purpose?
Where are we going?
If God exists where did God come from?
If nothing lasts forever, then what does nothing eventually become? Something?
What if the colours of objects I see aren’t the way they really are? What if what I call blue is actually green to everyone else?
If energy is neither gained nor lost – where did all this energy originate in the first place, and where will it eventually end up?
Infinity doesn’t exist (Right, Buzz Lightyear?)– you can always add one more. And by that thinking there could never be a “first” anything; there had to be something before.

I could keep going. But there’s one question that I have that I know one day I will find out:
What happens when you die?

Of course that brings about a great deal of related questions: What happens to “me” when I die? Where does my “being part” go? Are we like flickering candles slowly burning down to the bottom of the wick, and then in that one very final, very last moment, a puff of smoke and we are no more? A flame extinguished of its own consummation? And does our being linger then slowly float away on the curling wisps of smoke, ever expanding?

It’s easier of course to believe in something, rather than question everything, but a life unquestioned is a pitiful excuse and squandered use of your time here. What’s your legacy going to be? What will ‘they’ say when you finally pass that way, when they stand up and say a few words about you, about how you lived, and what you did, and they kind of person they thought you were…

What do you want them to say?

Tom Keith and Andy Rooney left us this week, and both spoke nothing but the ‘truth’ as they saw (or heard it) Tom Keith entertained with an amazing ability to re-create sounds we all knew, through the use of some props but mostly with his body and unbelievable vocal skills, and Andy Rooney didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know or hadn’t thought ourselves, but he presented that truth in a manner that we will always remember.

Maybe that’s the answer to a lot of those questions I have (well, not ‘the’ answer but a compelling way to view those questions.) Maybe it’s not about why or what or when, but it all boils down to ‘how.’

How we spend our time, and how we live our lives, and how we express the ‘truths’ of our work, our beliefs, our ideas, and our creations; that’s what our legacy truly will be.

Not who we were, but how we were.

Ponder that the next time you meet somehow and they honesty ask you: “How are you?”