Acclimate

Watching the winter Olympics has reminded me of a number of things.  To begin with, it has reminded me that although I have not done so since the last winter Olympics, I really like to ski.  For me personally, skiing takes such a tremendous amount of focus, such an intense merging of physical and mental energy, everything else in the world just momentarily disappears.  All I could ever do while skiing is just ski. 

And then I would fall, almost always with intense momentum, into the snow.  Which brings us to our next paragraph.

The Sochi Olympics have also reminded me that I am a very bad skier.  These athletes have swooped down icy mountains all week with greater dexterity than I would have walking down a small flight of stairs after practicing all day. As if that isn’t enough, they have often performed these heroics atop less-than-ideal terrain.   As I watched the slalom racers, for example, swishing left and right through the gates, I wanted to shout, “Yeah!  You did it!  You did not kill yourself!  Awesome job not dying!”  Instead, the announcers have the audacity to smugly mutter things like, “Oh, she will not be happy with that performance.  She is a full tenth of second behind her best time.”  Time?  She just skied down a sheet of ice without breaking her head off!  That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life!

Finally, I am reminded that the difference between success and failure, regardless of how one might define either, can often be summarized by one verb:  acclimate.  As we have heard from numerous Olympic announcers and some of the athletes themselves, the conditions in Sochi have been less than ideal.  Rain and snow and a combination of both have complicated downhill tracks that are quite complicated in the first place.  The Olympians, particularly those competing outside, have had to acclimate to these conditions in order to succeed.

In fact, it might be argued that one reason snowboarding hero Shuan White did not earn a gold medal last week was because he did not acclimate in time to the less-than-ideal terrain in the half-pipe.  Granted, his immensely talented competition also had much to do with his 4^th place finish, but the conditions certainly played their part.

Although they did not come close to medaling, the Jamaican bobsled team perhaps represents the opposite end of this spectrum.  Folks, I have been to Jamaica, and I did not see any snow.  The only ice I saw was in my drink.  Yet, there the Jamaicans were, earning their 29^th place finish, sliding down an icy track ridiculously fast. 

After their final race, a particularly astute television reporter interviewed the two members of the Jamaican bobsleigh team, Winston Watts and Marvin Dixon.  He began to question them about all the obstacles they had to overcome to make it to the Sochi Olympics for the first time in twelve years, and Watts cut him off almost curtly.  Paraphrasing, he basically said, “Listen, we are from Jamaica.  Our whole lives have been a struggle.  We see an obstacle and we find a way to overcome that obstacle.” 

Shaun White lost his half-pipe Olympic bid.  He could have pouted, as is often the custom for many professional athletes.  He could have made excuses.  He did neither.  He smiled his giant smiled and congratulated the victors.  He acclimated to the moment and demonstrated graceful sportsmanship.

A friend of mine has made the comment that he could not control the weather, but he could control whether or not he had a snowmobile.  Many Americans have had to acclimate to a winter that has provided more snowmobiling opportunities than normal.  Who knows, a few more winters like this and we may all be much better skiiers.

Pop Flies

This week we celebrate my daughter’s fifth birthday.  I will spare the reader all the clichés such events often inspire, such as “where did the time go?” and “boy, they sure do grow up fast.”  However, as far as I can tell, a week ago she was gumming a cheeseburger in a high chair like a ravenous dinosaur, yesterday she was toddling around the coffee table in pigtails scooting her toy train around a figure eight wooden railroad track, and today she will blow out five candles atop a little mermaid cake.

A half-decade has galloped past in a flurry of pink ponies ,“horsies,” and unicorns, and I have adored every single step.  Or, at least, those I wish to remember.

I was thirty-three years old when she was born, and so a lot of the dumb in my life had been removed, quite painfully on occasion, that could have kept me from being the father she deserved.  Parenting, of course, has been one interesting lesson after another, but perhaps the most important thing I have come to understand is that quality time is no substitute for quantity.  In fact, after parenting for five years, I don’t know if there really is any such thing as quality time in the first place.  I’m starting to think that quality time is a myth made up by busy people to justify busy schedules. 

I did not learn this lesson on fatherhood from a parenting manual or even from my own experience.  I inherited it, almost like DNA, as my own dad was very present.  Always.  When he came home in the summer after driving a tractor all day long, he would still play catch with us, no matter if his back hurt or not.  He helped coach our little league team, and I cannot remember a single basketball game he did not attend, even after the one when I shot at the wrong basket.

I could go on for pages, and if it was Father’s Day perhaps I would.  The point is, I have spent an enormous amount of time in my basement these last few years playing pirates, not because finding the pretend treasure was the most urgent thing on my agenda, but because it was the most important. 

This week also marks another milestone in my family’s history, one that is less celebratory, at least for those of us still living.  My aunt Jeannie died a few days before my daughter was born.  She was anxious to meet her new niece but in the end went home to God before having that chance.  Needless to say, that week was intense.  My father watched his sister leave this world two days before welcoming his first grandchild in to it.  I watched the sunrise through a delivery room window and watched it set through a funeral chapel vestibule.

Three years before she passed, Jeannie wrote a letter to me for my thirtieth birthday.  She never gave it to me, and instead it remained in a notebook.  This letter was just recently discovered, though, now some eight years after it was written, and given to me posthumously.

The letter is thoughtful, loving and funny.  Jeannie was thoughtful, loving and funny.  Towards the end of the letter she offers some advice.  “Don’t ever not so something because you don’t have time.”

At first glance the suggestion seems odd, almost cryptic, coming from her.  Jeannie was not a busybody.  She was not prone to filling her calendar with one task or social event after another.  The point she was making, I decided, after mulling it over in my mind, was not that we should fill our days with events.  I think her point was that we should not use time, or the supposed lack thereof, as an excuse. 

Translation:  if something is important enough to you, you will make time to do it.  If it isn’t, then you won’t.  Because in the end, we don’t really have any control over time anyway.  We only have control over our actions that take place within that time.

Thus, if we don’t read to our children, for example, it is not because we do not have time to read to our children. It is because reading to our children is not important enough for us to gather them around, sit in a chair, and open a book.  Unfortunately, that is a lesson not lost on anyone, regardless of how young they are.  Playing pirates tomorrow is a bad idea when the princess needs rescuing today.

The good news, though, since we do not have any control over time anyway, is that we can stop worrying about it.  The good news, since we can control our actions, is that we can start putting important things first and the supposedly urgent stuff second.  Not everyone has had good examples in their life from their past, but everyone can incite action that improves their future.

Some final words on time, written thousands of years ago in Psalm 90, asks God to “teach us to number our days.”  Again, at first glance, this might seem odd.  After all, how can we number our days if we don’t know how many of them we have?  That reality, though, is the point.  We do not know how many days we have, but we do know that they are limited.  A day will come when our days will end, just as they will end for everyone we know.  The actions we take within those days become our life stories.
           
I don’t know how many more days I have left to spend with my daughter, or my son, or with anyone
else.  I do know that someday those days will end, like a pop fly on the edge of its arc, and between
now and then I plan on playing a lot of catch.

 

Bean Ball

Getting hit by a pitch is not the worst thing in the world.  It is not even the worst thing in baseball.  Granted, this is coming from a guy who has not played organized baseball since high school, but just look at the film.  Even getting hit by a major league fastball is rarely enough to take a player out of the game.  More often than not, the hitter winces, probably swears, and trots down to first.  The batter takes one for the team.  Such is the nature of the game.

Taking one for the team, in fact, is often seen as heroic.  The batter gets a welt, but the team gets a person on base.  The hitter will nurse a bruise, but the team may very well win the game because of that involuntary sacrifice.

In recent months, the Affordable Care Act has hit millions of American families in the arm.  Despite assurance to the contrary, health insurance premiums are going up while health insurance benefits are going down.  My family took a bean ball as well.  We winced, said some choice words, and trotted down to first.  We will readjust the budget and learn to live with less.  

Like millions of Americans, we took one for the team.  Such is the nature of the game.

This past year, the Illinois legislature hit public employees, teachers included, in the gut.  The retirement age at which to receive pension benefits is going up while the benefits themselves are going down. Because my wife and I are both teachers and are therefore ineligible to receive or pass on social security benefits to our children, we took the bean ball twice.  As before, we winced, we muttered, we trotted down to first.  We will readjust our IRAs and learn to live with less. 

Like tens of thousands of other Illinois teachers and public employees, we took one for the team.  Such is the nature of the game.

Before continuing, I want to point out that I was a history major in college.  This may seem like an irrelevant aside, but having studied history means I have a tendency to take the long view on things.  So, I know that neither the Affordable Care Act nor this pension nonsense is the worst thing in American history.  It isn’t even the worst thing in Illinois history. I know that in the grand scheme of things, being required to work a few more years than anticipated or paying higher insurance premiums is not the same kind of sacrifice as say, being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, struggling through the Great Depression, or trying to escape slavery.  2014 is not exactly the worst year to be alive.   

Thus, it’s important to understand that I am not against personal sacrifice.  I am well aware that Illinois is in dire financial straits and something profound needs done in order to make sure that we don’t someday live in a state called North Kentucky. 

It just seems to me that if you are so far behind in the score that your offensive strategy is to have people lean into a pitch and get smacked, shouldn’t everyone get the chance to be a hero?  If we have reached the point in the idea bucket where all that is left is taking money away from one small group of people who has earned it, so that that money can be managed and spent by a much smaller group of people who clearly do not know how to do either, then let’s go all in.  Let’s all walk up to the plate like a bunch of crazy people and get hit in the head.

After all, look at the score.  We’re billions of dollars behind.  Time for shared sacrifices, right?  If we’re all in this together, why weren’t pension benefits cut for all public servants?  In fact, if we’re all in this together, why stop at pension benefits at all?  Wouldn’t it make more sense, if you’re trying to bridge the gap between what you owe and what you have, to trim the fat from all your expenses across the board?  

It would, probably, at least financially, but it certainly would not make any sense at all politically, and thus comes the rub.  A pitcher who hits one batter has thrown a wild pitch.  A pitcher that hits them all gets thrown out of the game.

Thus, it isn’t so much that I’m against taking one for the team.   It’s just that I would feel much better about it if I knew the guys throwing at me knew how to pitch.