Time To...

 

“Stay behind the hog.”

Of all the advice given to me from my father, this phrase - offered to me one summer at the Fayette County Fair - turned out to be unexpectedly useful.

But first, some context.

Back in the day my brother and I showed 4H hogs at the Fayette County Fair. We bought piglets from the Durbins and raised them until they were ready to show. Jack Durbin also had a set of sons about our age, and the four of us were later joined by the Schaub brothers and other Sefton Township youth to make up the Sefton Clovers. We were a very 1980s crew, accustomed to vague expectations and unsupervised afternoons, and the stories that percolate from those summers, (many of them mostly true) could fill a book.

But today we have just one column, so let's focus.

As I remember it, showing hogs was relatively simple. We kept them in their pen until it was about time to show, then we moved them to the cleaning stall outside the barn. Once showered off and preened for display, we shuttled them to the show ring. Mostly the hog did what it was supposed to do, which was to walk around so the judge could get a good look at it while we followed and watched where we stepped.

The one thing a young 4Her wanted to avoid, however, was getting in between the judge and the pig. There should always be a clean line of sight between the judge and the animal, because it wasn’t about us. It’s about what we were showing - the hog.

It wasn’t until years later I realized this concept was useful even outside a show ring, because too often in life, I have absolutely gotten in the way of myself. My pride and bad habits - sometimes just my hesitation to turn the pages on chapters already read - have often kept me from living life as designed.

In my younger years, for example, I had a tendency to take things much too personally.

I’ve learned over time - mostly - to let other people just be people; to let them be rude, or distracted, or whatever. I’ve learned to “let the hog be,” so to speak, and just focus on where I was walking so I don’t have to clean off MY shoes at the end of the day.

More recently, I’ve also allowed nostalgia to get in the way of good parenting.

Parents and children seem to live in parallel universes, existing next to each other but operating at different “speeds.” Because of the nature of relativity, one year for us is quite small, but for kids it’s a huge - and sometimes cataclysmic- passage of time. A half decade goes by and kids are different humans altogether, living in the same house with the same name but in different bodies with different minds. Thus, an activity that might seem quaint and delightful for us - the elders taking the long view - will seem remarkably stupid to them, although we were sure it was them (surely just a week ago, right?) who had begged to go see the Christmas lights, for example, or walk on the TREC trail, or just sit in the same room with us at the same time and watch the same movie for the dozenth time.

What happened?

Nothing happened, but also everything, and as the “adults in the room,” we will do ourselves a favor by letting them be them. As we learn from the book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for everything under the sun, and trying to reap when it’s actually time to sow is one of the clumsiest ways of getting in our own way.

Reminiscing on my own childhood, I’ve come to appreciate how good dad was at knowing what time it was. Reflecting on his passing five years ago this spring, (and all the parenting I’ve attempted in the half-decade since) I’ve come to realize how patient he was, allowing us to become who we were - dumb mistakes and all - instead of constantly corralling us towards his own prerogatives. I’m sure he often parented with Ecclesiastes in mind, whether it was time for dinner or time for bed; whether it was planting season or harvest, or baseball season, or time to get the hogs loaded up and shuttled off to fair.

Copper

Ten years ago I earned my Uncertified Life Coaching credentials. As such, I was given the opportunity (and privilege) of helping folks from countless places live their lives to the mediumest. For an entire decade I have helped pretend people - just like you! - navigate modern dilemmas, from online squabbles to pet mishaps to unsatisfactory election results. Through it all, though, one message has stayed the same: I am not a real life coach.

It says that in the name.

And just last month I turned fifty, which means my non-credentials have been rounded up to “Copper.” This upgrade gives me even more gravitas. This upgrade gives me access to an entire new decade of life experience, and so, with that in mind, let’s begin an exciting new season of answering pretend questions!

Question One: “Help! I think my country is lurching toward civil war and also the regular kind of war. At the same time! Is this normal?”

            Answer: While it’s certainly not recommended to simultaneously flex your territorial ambitions while fermenting domestic unrest, you’d be surprised at just how often that does happen. Just as a rude neighbor might want to“borrow” your mineral rights while also forgetting to put the toilet seat up in his own bathroom, those same thuggish impulses can manifest themselves on the world stage. In other words, it’s not at all surprising that your country is courting both a literal civil war and potential international conflicts.  Good luck!

Question: “Wait...WHAT?!  Uh, hold on. So, like, what am I supposed to do, though? I’m not a lawmaker, I’m not a big-time donor, I’m not even an internet celebrity. I’m just a person. I’ve never lived in a country slouching toward self-destructive authoritarianism. I thought this stuff just happened in different countries. How should I respond?”

Answer: Puh-lease. Lots of people live through authoritarian regimes and do just fine, especially if they “vote” the right way. Even if your country doesn’t pretend to have real elections, anymore, though, you can still do all right for yourself if you just parrot whatever the party wants you to say. And if that doesn't jive with your moral compass, there are ways to casually resist and avoid prison.

For a while.

Here is a list of things you can do to “fight-the-fight,” so to speak, and also help you sleep at night:

(The following list has been redacted)

Question Three: “I think the ice-maker in my fridge is on the fritz, but I would rather ignore it. Any advice?”

Answer: You should probably get that fixed. Physics reminds us that everything - eventually - falls apart. Whatever appliance you have in your home, left to its own devices it will eventually break and flood your kitchen. I know this from experience, and so the sooner you take care of this the better.

Speaking of “broken appliances,” this actually reminds me of something I should have mentioned earlier. For the gentleman whining about the corrosion of the entire world order from earlier in this column, I now have some questions for you:

Did the country you’re referencing allow special interests to hijack its lawmaking body?

 Did the same country allow states to gerrymander districts so grotesquely that only the loudest (and often dumbest) and most extreme candidates get elected?

And did this country (considering the previously two mentioned realities), give its lawmakers almost guaranteed job security by not requiring term-limits?

If you can say “yes” to those three “broken appliances,” then you shouldn’t be surprised your kitchen is flooded. You basically left the water running yourself.

Mixing metaphors now, we should consider that dictators usually don’t kick open our front door and start rearranging the furniture. Dictators are usually invited in by someone in the house who is so disgusted with the way the house is functioning that they believe it when he says he’s just an interior designer. Sycophants will continue to believe it when he says he’s only burning the furniture to keep warm, and many of them will even hand him the matches.

In closing, I’m going to break a rule of column writing and segue abruptly from flippant analogy and move closer to something less vague.

            In his quest to “get” Greenland, our leader is about to undo an alliance that has kept the world relatively stable for over 75 years. It could be argued that everyone alive today is alive because NATO functioned as a deterrent to Soviet aggression and potential nuclear conflict.

Yes, we do need to bolster our military presence in the region to act as a new deterrent against Russia and China, but we don’t need to act like gangsters to do it.

These are our allies. After the Soviet threat collapsed, these are nations who joined us in our wars against terrorism, and these are nations who continue to stand against the return of Russian aggression. Threatening these nations with even more tariffs, whining about "getting snubbed" for the Nobel Peace Prize, should not be permissible. If we break this alliance now, it will take decades to heal, and by then it will likely be too late.

This is not a partisan issue, and no amount of protesting is going to help. Only those who bought this appliance - twice - can fix it. Only they can tell their leaders, “Look, we didn’t vote for this part. Not this. Stop this.”
            For the sake of America first and every other nation on earth, tell your leaders to stop this before it’s too late.