Life is full of Choices

“Life”, they say, “is full of choices”.  So I made them—some good, some bad, some really bad.  In looking back though, I realize something.  These choices are the only things I truly own.  Lock, stock, and barrel they are mine, and mine alone.  

That is not to say that everything in my life is a result of my choices.  Obviously that isn't true.  If it were, I would have done a much better job of choosing my parents.  As it is, I am the result of a choice they made.  I had no say in it.  And I had no say in the physical handicap their moment of passion gave me.  Or maybe it wasn't their moment of passion.  Maybe it was my Mother’s alcohol and tobacco use while she was pregnant.  It doesn't matter.  Those were her choices.  My role was limited to choosing how I’d deal with it.  Like I said, “Life is full of choices”.  People who know me tell me I say that a lot.

I’d like to be taller sure, but due to the scoliosis, that sharp curve in the thoracic vertebrae of my upper back, I’m not.  My rib cage is off center so my heart and lungs don’t fit quite right into my chest cavity.  I think sometimes what it might be like to have a straight back, where the bones would hold me up instead of having to rely on my muscles to do the job.  Muscles tire quicker than bones. That’s the down side.   But on the up side, who’s to say I wouldn't have found life too easy that way? Maybe the drive wouldn't be as strong.  Almost certainly I would have made different choices.

My first choice was to focus on what I could do, not what I couldn't do.  Football, wrestling, basketball were not options.  Reading, writing, drama were.  I gravitated towards living life in my mind.   My father, now remarried, bought me a ten volume set of the Bible written for children.  I read every volume, then read them again.  I could be as brave as David when he slew Goliath.  I could be a smart as Joseph when he helped the Pharaoh rule over Egypt.  I wouldn't lose my patience like Moses did, but would cross over into the Promised Land with Joshua. 

From there I moved on to history.  I sailed with the Pilgrims and landed at Plymouth Rock.  I rode with Paul Revere to warn the patriots that the British were coming.  I grew up in the hills of middle Virginia with Thomas Jefferson, and went on a vision quest with Crazy Horse in the Black Hills.  In books, I discovered, there was nothing I couldn't do.

By high school I clearly identified with “the writers”.  We took Mrs. Wittmer's “Creative Writing” class, wrote for the school newspaper, and the Yearbook, and read what we wrote to each other at meetings of the creative writing club.  My poetry was published in the school anthology.  I played the lead in the Junior play.   By the time I left for college, the only subject that called to me as a major was English.

On the physical side, my body was going through its own seemingly unrelated life.  Although it would be some years before I made the connection, the “forced labor” my Father demanded on the farm was actually saving my body.  Oh it hurt.  Hauling hay is still one of my most painful memories. Hay is cut in the middle of summer when temperatures are hot.  We would take turns either lifting 60 lb bales and handing them to a fellow worker on the truck, or grabbing the bales from the lifter and stacking them in an orderly fashion so they would not fall off.   In my weaker moments, I thought that being in Hell would be preferable to this.  It might be hot, but at least, as I imagined, I would just have to stand there.  As I was to learn later, the building up of my muscles during that time would make for a much better physical life than I was imagining just then.

During this time, while mind and body were doing their different things, there was a war going on in the background.  I don’t mean an internal war between mind and body.  I mean a real war.  It was in a place called Viet Nam.  I didn't like it.  I didn't want anything to do with it, and I didn't want anybody else to have anything to do with it either.  So I did what thousands of young people like me did—I protested.  Yes, I got kicked out of school once.  I went to jail because of it.  I grew my hair long and talked to anyone who would listen about the evils of “the war”.   These were all choices with which I was comfortable.  Then I made another choice.  I used my scoliosis to convince the local draft board to classify me as “4F”.  Suddenly I was “not acceptable for military service”.  That was fine by me.

Have I mentioned that “Life is full of choices”?  When you choose a path, you own it.  I accepted that idea even then.  But what I had yet to learn was that once you start down a path, you don’t have to stay with it.  So often once we are on “A Path”, we think it is "The Path”, and no matter how bad it gets we just push harder.   We don’t realize that we can choose again, and go in another direction, hopefully a better one.  We own that choice too.   For me this knowledge would come as an epiphany, and not a pleasant one.

April 1975 will always be the month that changed my life forever.  I sat in my dorm room at college and watched the films from Viet Nam.  I saw the North Vietnamese army roll south into Da Nang, Kontum, Pleiku, Ban Me Thuot, and finally, Saigon itself.  I watched people clinging to helicopters trying to get out.  I watched them fall to their deaths.   I watched boat after boat crammed with far too many people floundering in the waves.  I saw desperation and fear in hundreds of eyes.  I saw women give their babies to others in the hope that their child might be saved even if they themselves perished.  I kept thinking that it wasn't supposed to be like this.  

I found myself feeling responsible.  Choices that I had freely made had resulted in pressure on our government to abandon these people.  I had thought that what I was doing was right, but now I could see with my own eyes just how wrong I was.  I couldn't turn away from the images.  I watched.  And I cried.  

I knew then that I had choices to make.  Those choices took me out of my comfort zone and into a whole new world.  I cut my hair.  I joined ROTC.  I met a young female cadet who would become the love of my life, and the Mother of my children.  I became a soldier, and not just any soldier.  I became an Infantry Officer.  I humped a rucksack with my men.  I jumped out of airplanes with them too.  I wrote operations orders instead of poems.  And I ran, and ran, and ran.  For the first time in my life my mind and my body were working together as a team.  

Many years have passed since those days.  But the truth has not changed.  Life is still about the choices you make.  Good ones, bad ones, lucky ones, totally serendipitous ones.  If you’re lucky you’ll understand that these are the only things you ever really own.  And when you own them—when you accept responsibility for them—you’ll discover what it means to be free.  That's all I'm asking these days.  Leave me alone to experience the consequences of my choices.  That's what freedom is about.

There are moments in history that you know are moments in history.  Yesterday was one of those days.  Robin Williams died.  Most likely by his own hand.

The Germans have a better word for it than we do—“Selbstmord”—self murder.  And that is how I feel right now.  This brilliant, electrifying comedian, actor and genius has been murdered and I’m aghast at the enormity of it all.

I have been reading article after article all morning in the vain hope that someone will tell me something that will make this event make some kind of sense.  It’s not happening.  Probably it never will.

Naturally everyone is posting on Facebook and I did too.  I wasn't going to be that maudlin, but the fact is that I was crying, and it’s hard to be more maudlin than that. 

Robin Williams was part of a first ritual with my new bride.  I was stationed at Fort Benning, GA, a student in the Infantry Officer’s Basic Course.  She was pregnant with our first child.  But every Thursday evening we’d sit together on the couch in a crappy old trailer house just off post, and watch “Mork and Mindy”.  For the next thirty minutes everything was OK.   Life is just not as tough when you’re laughing.

To my kids, Robin Williams was the voice of the Genie in “Aladdin”.  My middle child wanted to grow up to be him, and he would quote long passages from the movie.  That was all well and good, until one night he was quoting Williams one minute, and in the very next was off on his own riff about a Superhero named “Beer Man” and his sidekick “Hangover Boy”, and they were fighting the evil villain “Mr. Coffee”, and his little dog “Sober”.  “Quick, Hangover Boy, hit him with an ICE DRAFT!”  My wife and I laughed until we had tears in our eyes.  Unfortunately we were driving down the road at the time and it got a little dangerous until I got myself under control.  We didn't grasp the irony then. 

It was the Laughter.  How pleasant.  How memorable.  How fleeting.  That unusual juxtaposition of two thoughts that catch you totally by surprise when you first hear them. 

So now I go where I always go when death catches me unexpectedly.  John Donne.  Poet, Theologian, Comforter.  He said this:  “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.”

It seems to me that old Mr. Donne got it right, and this idea has become my place of refuge in times like these.  I find that I am thankful that Williams left so much media behind.  It makes it a lot easier to re-read his chapter.  And as for his new translation?  I guess I’ll have to wait until I've been “so translated” to find out. 

I am just beginning to grasp that I now live in a world without Robin Williams.  I ponder that thought with some trepidation.  I've never lived in that world before.  I’m not sure what it will be like.

So I’ll close this post like probably a million others will close their posts today and say with simple frustration and sadness, “Well Shazbat!” 

Yes. You can.

I don’t much like excuses.  Explanations I can deal with.  Excuses pretty much turn me off.  I bring this up because lately it seems like excuses are coming out of the woodwork.  There’s two excuses in particular that move right to the top of my “peeve list”.  The first one is, “I just don’t have the time”.  What?  How can you not have the time?  Unless you’re dead you have exactly the same amount of time everyone else in the world has.  You have 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year. If you can’t bring me some evidence that you were born with a congenital time deficiency which causes you to only have 50 minutes in an hour, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you what you are.  A liar.  Yeah, it’s a little “white lie”, but what you’re really saying is, “This just isn’t that important to me to spend time on it”.  And that’s OK.  We all have to make choices.  There’s a ton of things I choose not to spend time on.  So admit it.  Don’t tell me you don’t have the time.  It’s insulting.  I know better.

The second excuse I’ve heard goes something along the lines of “Well I just don’t have the education”.  That may be true.  I won’t call you a liar on this one.  But where my peeve comes in is that an education is available.  All you have to do is reach out and take it.  Now I’m not talking about going back to school.  Sure, that’s great if you can, and if you have the time and resources you should definitely do it.  What I’m talking about is the same thing that Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he wrote to his college-age nephew, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., “…you can proceed by yourself in a regular series of historical reading.  It would be a waste of time to attend a professor of this.  It is to be acquired from books…”

Yep, books.  Reading.  You don’t have to be a graduate from high school, or college to do it.  Louis L’Amour, the prolific writer (over 100 novels), and historian, was entirely self-educated.  He left high school during the Depression to provide some income for his family, and never went back to school.  Yet he became recognized as one of the most educated men of our time, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor reserved for those who make extraordinary contributions to our nation.  How did he do it?  Simple.  He read.  And thought about what he had read.  (Read his story for yourself.  You’ll find it in his book The Education of a Wandering Man.)

He’s not the only one.  ABC News reporter and anchorman, Peter Jennings did the same thing.  Or how about Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s restaurants?  OK, Bill Gates did graduate from high school, but not from college.  I think you get my point.  So…

READ.  Several years ago this simple word was used on posters and billboards by a literacy activist group to encourage people to…READ.  I think this advice may now be more important than ever.  Even though the “futurists” among us are convinced that reading will be replaced by television, DVDs, iPODs, and technologies we haven’t heard of yet, I still believe that reading, and more importantly, the ability to read, will remain a significant factor between those who achieve success in this world, and those who don’t.

READ.  So why are so many people so reluctant to do it?  In times past, what we would call “classical” schoolmasters divided learning into three stages called “the trivium”.  The first stage was called the “grammar” stage.  (Hence our grammar or elementary schools).  This stage focused on memorization.  The idea was to gather information---C A T spells Cat, or 2 X 4 = 8.  The goal being to acquire a certain amount of knowledge.  The second stage was called the “logic” stage.  It required that the student start thinking at this point.  Evaluate.  Is this information correct or not correct?  Is this a cause or an effect?  The final stage was called the“rhetoric” stage.  Remember the first time you were asked to write an essay?  This is rhetoric; learning to construct your own opinions based on the facts you have accumulated.  The classical educators knew that this pattern—learn facts, analyze those facts, and develop opinions about those facts—is the basis for life-long learning.

Unfortunately, educators started to skip the first two steps and started asking first graders how they feel about what they’re learning before they’ve even had a chance to learn it yet.  This “short cut” is now ingrained for many.  They go right to the opinion making, before they’ve even learned the facts.  (Don’t believe me?  Just listen to talk radio for about 5 minutes, or review those Facebook posts from your friends.)  As Susan Wise Bauer points out in her book, The Well-Educated Mind, “Like badly taught six-year-olds, we are too quick to go straight to opinion making without the intermediate steps of understanding and evaluation.”  And a formal education does not make you immune.  I’ve known Harvard grads to jump right to stage three without ever pausing to gather a fact, while the old Oklahoma farmers I grew up with wouldn’t make a move without “studyin’ up” on a subject first.

So what’s the hardest thing about reading?  Making the time.  As Susan Wise Bauer notes:  “The first task of self-education is not the reading of Plato, but the finding of twenty minutes in which you can devote yourself to thought, rather than to activity.”  Taking care of the kids, getting ready for work, fixing supper, paying bills, checking email, answering the cell phone, all these things push at us.  And we bosses don’t help.  “You don’t have anything to do, well come see me, I’ll give you something to do.”  And I’m willing to bet you’ve never heard, “Why don’t you just go back to your desk and spend the rest of the afternoon reading and thinking.”   We both know that ain’t gonna happen, but I sometimes wonder what great things we might accomplish if it did.

And no, I don’t think you only have to read “The Great Books”—you know, Plato, Shakespeare, Homer.  You can learn a lot from reading well-written novels.  Nora Roberts’ books can take you traveling around the world; Louis L’Amour will take you back to the frontier and steep you in the values of that era.  Tom Clancy will take you into the depths of military technology and current politics.  Reading can be fun.  If you haven’t been reading for a while this is how you should start.  The brain is an organ and it has to be exercised to stay in shape.  Just as you wouldn’t think about running a marathon without training for it, neither should you just jump into a schedule that calls for two hours a day of difficult study.  You won’t stick with it.  So start easy, and build up to it.

Having said that, if it’s a broader education you want, at some point you will have to take the plunge and begin to delve deeper.  History, biography, philosophy, economics, politics, theology.  And even here, you don’t have to devour everything you run across.  As the sixteenth century philosopher, Francis Bacon, has pointed out:  “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”  Find a menu that appeals to you, and systematically, and methodically, go through it.

In the meantime, it doesn’t matter where you are in your life right now.  If you want an education it’s there for the taking.  And you can do it in thirty minutes a day.  Get up thirty minutes earlier.  Watch thirty less minutes TV.  Surely there’s thirty minutes that aren’t absolutely “must see”.  (Personally I can give up the thirty minutes for “Two Broke Girls”, just don’t ask me to give up “Big Bang Theory”).  Especially if you haven’t read for a while, thirty minutes is plenty to start.  Much longer than that and you likely won’t stick with it.  As your brain expands you may find your time spent reading expands too.  That’s fine.  Let it happen naturally.

Don’t get caught up in the excuses.  You do have the time.  It’s your choice how to use it.  You can get an education if you really want one.  It’s not up to a school.  It’s up to you.

This was my first post about the World Cup.  It was eight years ago.

The tension just continues to build, and by this weekend it’ll explode.  No, I’m not talking about work.  I’m talking about FOOTBALL!  “Yeah right”, you say.  “Nobody plays football in July.”  Well, actually they do, it’s just that we in the US tend to ignore them.  “Soccer” is just not “our” sport. 

That’s true, so far as it goes.  But this is true too:  There is not other sporting event in the world like the World Cup.  Nothing compares to it.  More than a billion (with a “B”) fans worldwide will watch France play Italy for the World Championship.  And, yes, I will be one of them.  I hope some of you will be watching also.  (ABC Sports 1:30pm Eastern).

Admittedly, I haven’t got to see as many of the matches as I would like.  Most of the matches have been shown on ESPN or ESPN2, and living in the sticks as we do, we don’t get cable.  We can’t get satellite Direct TV either.

Dear Mr. Horner,

There are a few places in the world, of which “the sticks” of Wyandotte, Oklahoma is not one of them, which do not get satellite TV.  However, you are correct when you say that you can’t get Direct TV.  The solution to this is quite simple:  Pay your bill!  

Sincerely,

The Collections Department, Direct TV 

OK.  They may have a point, but they’re leaving out the “rest of the story”.  However, I digress.  Bottom line is that I have to go to my daughter’s house to watch the big matches with her and her husband.  Fortunately for me, I have a great son-in-law, who either doesn’t mind the intrusion, or is at least polite enough to remain quiet about it.  Besides, their TV is bigger than mine. 

Really it’s only fair.  I blame my kids anyway.  When they were growing up, I made the same mistake young parents often make—I agreed to coach my son’s soccer team.  He’d been playing for a couple of years, but was right at the age when they are supposed to cease chasing after the ball like a flock of young geese, and start learning to play “positions”.  Coaching in this environment is not easy.  You could get the girls to stay put, usually by ignoring the fact that they stayed in place so they could look for four-leaf clovers, but getting the boys to wait for the ball to be passed to them instead of just going and kicking it was an uphill battle.  You might as well wait for hell to freeze over.  It wasn’t happening.  So I spent most of my time running along the touch line hollering uselessly.  Of course, this was back in the days of “non-competitive” soccer.  We didn’t keep score so we could encourage the kids just to go play and have fun.  This didn’t work either.  At the end of the game my son would walk off the pitch and say, “We beat them 12 to 9”.  “How do you know”, I’d ask, “we don’t keep score”.  To which he’d reply:  “Maybe you grown-ups don’t, but we do.  We know who wins”.  And so they did.   

Anyway, part of the reason the World Cup is so big is that it only occurs once every four years.  Sure we have our Super Bowl, but it’s every year.  It’s a pretty big show as it is.  Imagine if we only played the Playoffs and Super Bowl every four years.  It’d be over the top.  And so it is with the World Cup.  From 1958 until 2002, it has been played every other time in Europe or the Americas.  In 2002, it was held in Asia (South Korea and Japan shared the venues) for the first time. 

I’ve noticed that most of those in the US who don’t like soccer complain that the game is too slow.  What they mean is that it is by nature a low scoring game, and doesn’t have touchdowns, homeruns, or slam dunks.  Yet, the same people who tell you that soccer is boring will sit in front of the TV watching the US Open and tell you to “Shhhh.  Mickelson’s putting for a birdie”.  Give me a break!  How can you compare the athletes who run, jostle, trip and tackle without ceasing for two 45 minute halves, plus another two 15 minute overtime periods if required, with a bunch of guys who walk around whaling on a little white ball with a bunch of sticks?  And these guys don’t even carry their own sticks!  Tell you what.  I don’t think I’m the one who doesn’t get it.

Naturally, I’m disappointed that Germany didn’t make it to the final, but I’m delighted that they played as well as they did.  Having lived in Germany for three years, and hosted two German exchange students while my kids were in high school, I have a soft spot for the Black, Red, and Yellow.  Even though Germany is the host country, the “Deutsche Fussballnationalmannschaft”, wasn’t supposed to even make it to the quarter-finals.  They made it all the way to the semi-finals only to lose an overtime heartbreaker to Italy in the last two minutes.  They play great attacking football and hopefully will prevail over Portugal to take third place.  (Saturday on ESPN if you’re interested.  Yes, I’ll be at my daughter’s.  Don’t call.)

But go ahead.  Have a relaxing weekend if you want.  Just chill out by the pool with a daiquiri or two, and catch some rays.  Not me.  My adrenaline is pumping already.  I can barely sit still.  Two days of watching THE BEST football players in the world awaits.  Not for another four years will you have a chance to see this level of skill and talent come together on the same field.  It’s an event not to be missed.  Besides, what will you do Monday when 1.5 Billion of us just want to talk about

 “THE GAME”?