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In-Between Days
There are times when our days feel like they are all the same. Moments move past our consciousness without leaving an impression, one blending deftly into the next. They pale in comparison to the glamour of birthdays, death days, or the days a truth is revealed and changes you forever. Yet it is the in-between days that bind our lives together like a humble cement. It is on these days that we are afforded the time to practice, rest, and wait. We practice new skills, test our theories, and hone our existing talents. In-between days are made for rough drafts, sloppy copies, and trial runs. They give us time to rest. A moment to catch our breath…relax, exhale, and sit back. Resting…
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Must-Do List
Over the weekend, a friend of mine mentioned that he had sat out a recent company fire drill by slipping into the men’s room as the rest of his peers paraded out. He worked email on his laptop until they returned. He’s retiring and, as a short-timer, just didn’t feel like participating in what was probably his 50th career fire drill. In high school, we called it senioritis; symptoms included laziness, fashion negligence, and a generally dismissive attitude. This time of year seems to awaken this mindset in people regardless of whether they have a scholastic affiliation or not. There’s a certain indolence common to the onset of vacation season that seems to…
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Come and Get It
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from mere animal biology to an act of culture. –Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto There is something remarkable that happens when people eat together. While we share our thoughts, feelings, and waffle fries, we connect. We become known to one another in a more intimate and familiar way. The fancy term for this is building social capital. It happens by degrees, running the gamut from a quick lunch in the corporate cafeteria to working shoulder to shoulder in grandmother’s kitchen at Thanksgiving. (The kitchen in every home…
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Hypotenuse (or As the Crow Flies)
Hypotenuse – The side of a right triangle opposite the right angle. There is something in me that craves efficiency. Perhaps it’s a flavor of impatience. It says that if I am here and what I want is there, getting what I want should be as easy as traversing the distance from here to there–traveling the hypotenuse like the proverbial crow. The problem is…life isn’t straight lines and short cuts. Life is filled with crab walking, roundabouts, and waiting and seeing. When we think we know where we’re going, our circuitous routes feel like detours. When the destination is less certain, the path can feel like a perpetual aimlessness. We don’t fly like crows.…
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10,000 Hours
In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers suggested that anyone can develop world-class expertise at any skill by dedicating 10,000 hours to practicing it. While not all experts agreed with his theory, it does support the age-old adage that practice makes perfect. So, now that we’re considering committing the 10,000 hours, the bigger question is how do we decide that we will practice? You may think, what a minute, I didn’t commit to practicing anything! But consider the idea a little more broadly, where we spend our time is where we are practicing already. To that way of thinking, we are all practicing something. What is it we are choosing to perfect? There…
