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I was reminded today why it is so important to have a plan, a long-range vision of the intention behind your actions.  Every action should be a step in a direction that is strategic yet fluid, moving towards your goals regardless of whether or not these change over time.

As I contemplated this, I was reminded of one of my favorite excerpts from “The Art of War.”  Not that I’m big into war stuff.  This one just speaks to strategy in general…which is important to warfare, or so I hear.

Anyway, it goes like this:

“Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively.  THey are like a great river that maintains its course ut adjusts its flow…they have form but are formless.  They are skilled in both planning and adapting and need not fear the result of a thousand battles; for they win in advance, defeating those that have already lost.”

Sun Tzu was the man.

About two or three weeks ago, I talked to a good friend of mine on the phone.  He called me from Hawaii.  Hawaii was a stopover on a much longer trip for him.  I hadn’t talked to him in nearly 4 years, and it was a gift to hear his voice on the other side of the wire.  We spoke for quite a bit, catching up and all that jazz.  We talked about life, about careers, about family…and about plans for the future.  Like I said, hearing his voice was an absolute gift.

I met him when I was in third grade.  That’s a long time ago.  He was a wild child…always has been, although he has been domesticated during the past few years.  He had a mullet back then.  Not just any mullet, mind you, but an early-80’s HEAVY METAL mullet.  We played soccer at recess.  He was really good.  He excelled as a goalie.  I remember his intensity and the way his long hair flapped in the wind as he ran.  He walked the line even back then.

Today, he is a Gunnery Sargent in the United States Marine Corps.  When I spoke to him a few weeks ago, he was headed to the Middle East.  He talked about “his guys,” the people who the USMC entrusted him to lead.  There was courage and there was passion in his voice.  He is proud of the men and women with whom he works. 

Today, he is somewhere in Afghanistan.  He is somewhere remote.  He is but one of many who will be making their way over there in the coming months.  When I sat down to eat dinner with my wife and my boys this evening, we went through our normal gratitude ritual.  When it was my turn, I could only think of my friend, on the other side of the planet, doing his part to make the world a better place.  Policies and politics aside, he does what he does because he believes the world will be better for it.  That is admirable, and it is noble. 

I thought about him, I thought about my father-in-law, I thought about friends and colleagues at work, and I thought about other friends from my youth who have all worn or still wear a uniform in service to my country, the United States of America.  I thought about them, and I was humbly proud of their sacrifices. 

Thank you…all of you…out there somewhere.

I am grateful for you.  I am grateful that you are still here with us.

There is something satisfying about tilling the Earth (or a very small portion of it) by hand.

I didn’t do that today, but there’s something satisfying about that.  Actually, I did that last weekend.

I’ve wanted to write this post for a weeks or so now, but the words just aren’t coming out right.  At some point, when there is something to say rattling around in your brain, you are just best served releasing it.  So, that’s what I’ll do.  Release it.

Most of the time, “communing with nature” conjures images of a cabin in the woods or a lone adventurer braving the tundra on their own or being stranded on a desert island with nothing but your wits, a UPS package, and a volleyball named “Wilson.”  For me, it’s usually something more mundane, like mowing the lawn or edging the yard of tilling the Earth by hand.

I think it partially comes down to a groove, a “zone,” if you will.  Maybe “flow;”  I’ve heard it called that before.  Whatever it is, it’s when I lose my thinking mind in the act of repetitive, demanding physical activity.  When my body and my thinking brain go into auto-pilot mode, my consciousness fires up.  I feel a connection to something outside of myself, and I go someplace…else.  It’s hard to explain, but there is no need to explain.  Just mentioning it should be enough; I haven’t met a person who hasn’t been there before.  In fact, most of us know precisely what it is, precisely what it feels like, and precisely how to get there.

That is where I go when I engage in the act of interacting with the Earth.  

I know; it sounds…goofy.  I have been called far worse things in my life.  And I know that not everyone believes that we, as humans, can easily connect ourselves to the greater Universe around us.  And I do mean the Universe.

Communing with the Earth is easy.  Communing with Nature itself is a little more complicated, but it’s still relatively easy.  Go to Yellowstone.  That’s about as easy as it gets.  But communing with the Universe…that seems a little harder.  I don’t know what that looks like for other people, of course, but I know what it looks like for me.  And I know that the door to that starts with my hands in the soil…figuratively and literally.

And where does this lead?  I don’t know exactly.  All I know is that I don’t go there with enough frequency.  When I do, though, it’s totally exhilarating, totally cleansing.  And when I arrive at that apex, I find myself subliming into something that reaches farther out into the Vastness than even I can comprehend at this juncture in my existence.  But I know enough to know that I have been recharged,

Sometimes you just have to let people be who they are going to be.  Just let them deal with the uncertainty at work in the way that works for them.  Short of homicide and the like, of course.  What I mean is that it doesn’t hurt to accept the idiosyncrasies of the people you work with, to embrace them and the individual in question as precisely who they are meant to be.  

Someone at work recently said that at the beginning of their leadership career, the linchpin of their philosophy of leadership was to treat other people the way that she wanted to be treated.  She also said that was her first big mistake.  What she and most leaders learn very quickly is that treating everyone else the way you want to be treated might work for 25% of the people with whom you have contact.  The other 75% have a totally different view of life.

That’s the essence of what I observed today.  It was a great reminder of what I already know and practice: be accepting and allow others to navigate the world in their own, unique way.  Guide when you can; when you can’t, just show that you care.  Let people work through the rough spots.  Be there should they need you.  When they do, practice listening instead of talking, and practice coaching over managing.

In a nutshell, be human.  If there is one skill to be develop above all others, it is the art of being human.  Sure, learning business stuff is great.  Learning technology stuff is great, too.  Maybe a little financial wizardry would be helpful.  Some marketing genius won’t hurt.  But all that other stuff will eventually matter little if humanity is forgotten.  

Unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of humanity left at the door.  Right next to the smokers.

 There’s this spot that I drive through every day.  It’s a very old, not-so-graceful on-ramp from one interstate to another.  A lot of traffic merges onto the off-ramp, goes through a toll booth, merges into one lane, merges into one lane with another road, then finally spills out onto the other interstate which is pretty much always chock-full-o-traffic during rush hour.  This is just how it goes…every day.  

It doesn’t take much to disrupt the flow of traffic.  A slow truck will kill the experience for dozens of cars behind it.  A slow merger will send ripples back up the ramp and onto the first highway as well as down the second highway.  It’s just messy, and a disruption makes it messier.  

Today, the disruption was substantial.  Even my “shortcut” didn’t work out for me.  As I sat in a merger’s parking lot, a police car buzzed by.  A few minutes later, an ambulance followed.  At times like that, a few minute delay during my commute just doesn’t seem like as big a deal.  I inched my car forward for a few more minutes until the cause of the delay came into view.  An SUV apparently slammed into the back of another vehicle.  The driver’s door was open.  Nobody was inside.  The airbag had deployed.  The rest of the car was empty.  

The other vehicle barely had a scratch.  It was a large moving van; not the semi-kind, but the kind you rent from U-Haul.  The driver didn’t look phased.  He just looked pissed.

At 5:00 PM on any given weekday afternoon, the traffic in this area flows at about 15 miles per hour or so.  So, that means that the guy in the SUV slammed into the back of the truck with enough force to crunch hood back towards the windshield and under the rear of the truck.  He slammed into the back of the truck with enough force to deploy the airbag.  He slammed into the back of the truck with enough force to require an ambulance.  Since he wasn’t standing around near the accident, I take it he was in the back of said ambulance.

So, I wonder what on Earth it was that he was doing that caused him to ram the truck at a speed that was obviously greater than 15 miles per hour.  Hopefully, it was really important.  You just never know.  It’s not my place to judge.  However…it did get me thinking.  What if he was simply on the phone?  Or maybe he was juggling his BlackBerry and the wheel.  Maybe he fell asleep.  There are a thousand ways to become distracted on the road, and all of them are potentially dangerous.

All of them are potentially fatal.

Distraction can be a devastating thing.  On the road and behind the wheel, it can mean something as innocuous as a minor fender bender or something as tragic as a traffic-related death.  But off the road and in the more private corners of our lives, distraction can be just as innocuous or just as tragic.  Tragic, like a dream unfulfilled.  Tragic, like unrealized potential.  Tragic, like a chance not taken.  Tragic, like a love unspoken.

In our lives, distraction keeps us from making the most of every moment of every day.  Distraction keeps us from living consciously.  The struggle is to keep our hearts, souls, and minds present and in the moment.  It would be a shame to ram into the back of a truck.

In college, they taught me that siblings have different personalities partly because of genetic predispositions and partly because of the fact that their parents approach the art of parenting differently.  Since I was 20 and without children, I believed them.  With over another 17 years of life, a wife, and two children as additional seasoning to my life, I see very clearly that they left out a third variable.

I had this revelation a few years ago that older siblings pretty much undermine a good deal of the foundation that parents try to lay down.  I found myself spending an awful lot of time undoing the stuff my older child was doing to my younger.  The name-calling, the sibling torture, the shoving, the whispered threats…all the stuff those of us with siblings remember so fondly…these are all things that corrupt all the great, textbook parenting that I was trying to do.  I would become infuriated.  In one of those bouts of fury, I came up with my theory that siblings are different not only because of genetics and my parenting but because older siblings co-parent their younger siblings.  The problem is that they don’t read the same books that I read.  

I ran with that theory for quite some time.  It gave me some solace when my little one wasn’t behaving quite like I wanted.  I’d just point a mental finger at my oldest and think, “This is your doing!  I never would have trained him to act this way.”  Sad, really, but that’s how my brain was working.  It took me some time to really get the story straight.

You see, my anger was fed by one very misguided idea: that it is possible and desirable to control your children.  In addition, I allowed myself to believe that both of my children were acting independently of my own behavior.  Therefore, I was somehow absolved of responsibility.  Silly, really, but that’s how my brain was working.  

When I cracked the code, I literally had to laugh at myself.  What I realized was this: my oldest was not co-parenting my youngest, he was simply being a sibling.  He could no more parent his brother than I could parent my own parents.  But what he could do was use his wits to influence his brother, both learning and teaching valuable social skills in the process.  When I was able to see that fact clearly, I was also able to see my own hubris, my own ego at work.  Here I was, thinking that as parent I could play God and shape the outcome of things.  In the process, I failed to embrace the complex, interconnected network of relationships and influences that build the parent-child/child-sibling mesh.  I failed to see something beautiful at work.

Today, I do embrace how this all works together.  In doing so, I can appreciate and more fully enjoy my role as father. I can appreciate and enjoy the influence my two children have on each other.  That’s not to say that I don’t have my “meltdown moments” or that I don’t have to step in and undo some of the damage these two frustrating little people inflict on each other.  All that still applies.  However, as a general rule, embracing the process allows me to be a conscious part of the process, and I think that works out best for everyone involved.  

Parenting is as much about helping your children grow up as it is about growing up yourself.  

Sometimes I read something that is so moving to me that I cannot really put into words what I am feeling.  So, why try?  Here is the passage that moved me today:

“Moving from teaching university students to living with mentally handicapped people was, for me at least, a step toward the platform where the father embraces his kneeling son.  It is the place of light, the place of truth, the place of love.  It is the place where I so much want to be, but am so fearful of being.  It is the place where I will receive all I desire, all that I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but it is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to.  It is the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it.  It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding.  It is the place of surrender and complete trust.” 

From “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Henri J. M. Nouwen.  The father and son, the platform, the light, all refer to a a painting by Rembrandt depicting a pivotal scene in the story about a son who returns home after squandering his father’s fortune.  The father receives his younger son back with open arms and a joyous heart.

 I had a great conversation today with someone at work about doing the right thing.  Sometimes, it sucks doing the right thing when you feel like you are the only one doing the right thing.  When there is evidence all around you that people are motivated primarily by what suits them rather than the greater good, it’s hard to even bother doing what’s right.  But, after much conversation, I shared with him the one reason to keep on keeping on: 

IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO?  

It is that much more important to fight to do what is right, what makes sense, when it appears that you are alone in your conviction.  Even if you are the only one, then you are the only one.  Doesn’t that make your stand that much more powerful, that much more necessary?  Besides, don’t fall prey to your own ego:

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE?

You aren’t.  The world is filled with people on a personal quest to do the right thing.  There are billions of them…trillions.  There are more people out there who want to do the right thing than there are people who don’t.  You just have to find them.

My parents taught me not to lie.  I did anyways.  As I grew up, I learned the damage a lie can do.  I learned that telling the truth not only felt better but WAS better.  Then, I learned about “white lies,” and the world became a little less clear.  I coped, moved on, grew up a little more.  As I grew to adulthood, I learned that the space between a lie and a white lie was really, really grey.  In college, I learned that there were shades, levels, and degrees of white, black, and grey depending on socio-economic status, celebrity, political clout, tenure, and a whole host of other variables.  

At some point, I learned that all lies tarnish.  I learned that all lies dirty our hands.  I learned that there is no such thing as a white lie; there is only the consequences of telling the truth or telling the lie.  We make choices.  And one of those choices is to lie or tell the truth.  Rather than confront the truth, some times we avoid it.  We avoid the truth, spin it, twist it, and present it in a way that preserves our mental position.  In that process, it ceases to be the truth.  It’s not called a lie.  It’s not called anything because it isn’t really there.  What would you call the absence of truth without a lie?  I think omission fits.  

It’s one thing to not address a thing by not bringing it up.  It the other party doesn’t bring it up, we leave it at that.  It’s another thing to answer a direct question by leaving out a bit of truth.  Again, not a lie; it’s just an incomplete answer.  Apparently, that’s OK.  It must be because I see it all the time.  I’d still call it omission.

Apparently, omitting isn’t lying.

With a few last gulps of cayenne-pepper-infused lemonade, my time with the Master Cleanse comes to an end.

When I was in Alaska, I felt small.  I felt really, really small.  There is one moment in particular that remains vivid to this day.  I was standing next to a window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.  The glass was spotless.  I was high up on a ship.  In fact it might have been the second highest level.  I was in a bathrobe, just having experienced my first Shiatsu massage.  My body felt wonderful…electric, supple, relaxed.  I walked up to the window, and looked down.  Stories below me, water rushed by the side of the boat.  Waves rippled out in an every growing arc from the place where water and metal met.  The boat, despite its massive size, seemed to glide over the glass-like surface of the ocean.  There was hardly a wave.  We were passing through the heart of Glacier Bay National Park.

The water was an intense, deep blue.  It was almost black.  It lacked that greenish quality that the open ocean elsewhere seems to have.  Here, everything was blue.  We hadn’t ventured far enough into the park to see glaciers yet.  Instead, the coast was rocky and snow-capped.  We were close to shore.  In fact, we were far closer than I ever would have expected.  It surprised me.  There was no shoreline of which to speak.  Instead, water lapped at sheer rock cliffs.  The face of the cliffs extended upward a dozen feet or so.  Snow and ice covered much of the tops.  Then I realized that our proximity to the coast was an illusion.  The cliffs were far.  They weren’t just a dozen feet tall.  They must have been dozens of feet tall.  Dozens.  A hundred feet.  More.  It was a smaller boat that had come into view and exposed the illusion of proximity.  I understood then that I was in a place that was on a totally different scale than anywhere else I had ever been in my life.  For the first time in my life, I can say that I truly understood how small we all are on the face of this vast, magnificent Earth.  

I stood there for a good ten minutes or more.  I just stared.  I watched water slide by underneath and the cliffs rise and fall, undulating as we ventured deeper inland.  Nobody knocked on the door.  There was no music playing.  Faintly, I could hear the world outside.  I put my hand up to the window, and cold emanated from the glass.  I stood in almost complete silence.  I trembled, not from cold but from awe.  Awe and reverence.  I stood there for a very long time.

My body is small.  My body is seemingly meaningless.  But it is mine.  It is the only one I have.  I do not think there are any others just like it on this Earth.  It is a vehicle for my soul, and my soul is joyful, indeed, to be its passenger.  I will continue to move about this Earth, relishing every moment I am granted.  

A ten-day detox may seem trivial, but it has reminded me of my place in this Universe…and just how precious this spot is to me.