Happy Father’s Day / live outside "The Band"

First day of summer, longest day of the year and the day to honour all the fathers… so to mine, and to the rest of you men out there who have rugrats, large and small, chasing around your coat-tail… Happy Father’s Day! (In the interest of gender equality, Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers; and for those of you who have opted out of the offspring-care programs of life… Happy Individual’s Day to all of you who are childless.) I am quite sure that there is no Individual’s Day, but I know I started this public venting program after Mother’s Day had already past.

I had a computer-free weekend this weekend. Partly because it was way too nice out to be sitting at a desk; partly because it is too hard to read the screen on my computer when I bring it out on a deck; but mostly because it is too easy to let technology control our lives and miss something that we can’t get back… time! The weather here on the tropical island of Newfoundland was indeed tropical this weekend… so, enough said.

Friday night I had dinner with a couple of my buddies; Saturday night I went to a beach fire with a bunch of friends and Sunday I basically hung out with my family. Until recently these were all things that I took for granted, which should really be a no-no in my life. I don’t take a lot for things for granted, like the weather, my job, my ability to travel, the fact that I am an awesome cook… so many things that I appreciate and am grateful for and yet the most important things seem to be things that I assume will always be there.

A wake-up call, in my case a little ball of flesh called Achmed, is something that we all need sometimes to make us realize how fortunate we are or to snap us out of oblivion and stop wasting our opportunity.

My buddy Matt has a very interesting view on how we all grow in our level of potential as we go through life and between the two of us on Friday night; we kind of came up with a theory to explain it… yes there was wine.

Imagine that your life is represented by a horizontal line that goes across the middle of a page and above and below the line are 10 evenly spaced markers that measure levels of incremental learning. Above the line are all the perceived positive things that happen in your life, such as: graduating from school, getting your drivers licence; getting a job; getting married; having children; getting a promotion; travelling to new places; buying a house… etc. Below the line are all the perceived negative things in your life: failing school; getting a speeding ticket; losing your job; getting divorced; discovering a serious illness; the loss of a child; going bankrupt… etc.

It would be fair to say that in both the negative and positive situations of learning, those different things have different impacts on our lives and we learn different lessons from them… or at least if we are paying attention, there are opportunities to learn from them. (Matt is one of my best friends, and we predominately talk about hockey, music and money… I would actually like to see the video replay on this whole conversation)

This line, with a plus or minus 1 or 2 is what we refer to as “The Band”. Not the music band that we always talk about starting and never do, but the band of acceptance and minimal learning that most of us live our lives in… basically, I think of it as Status Quo. I have always been a believer in change, oddly enough, when Achmed joined me for the ride, the last thing I wanted in my life that day was that particular change.

Getting a speeding ticket would obviously be a minus 1, crashing into a telephone pole and ending up in a wheelchair would probably qualify for an 8 or 9 at least! The same type of thinking can be used on the positive side: getting your driver’s licence would be a plus 1, winning the Daytona 500 (including the path to get there) would have to rank pretty high on a list of learning.

So now, assuming that I haven’t lost you yet, look at a specific example. Getting diagnosed with a treatable brain tumour would probably hit around the minus 8 on my scale. Acknowledging the wake-up call and taking on a positive attitude and arranging to take on the challenge in a proactive way would probably be a plus 8. If we stop here, we could probably say that the two situations are happening at the same time, therefore the positive cancels out the negative. That certainly could be true, and if it was, it really would not be all that bad… except by cancelling each other out, you remain in “The Band” and you don’t get anything new from your experience. You are no worse off … however; you are no better off than you were before you had an opportunity to grow.

If we believe that we learn new things from the good things in our lives as well as the bad, this particular place I find myself in right now gives me the chance for exponential learning. For those of you who have been really following along… pick up the piece of paper and roll it into a tube. On the opposite side of the tube from the line that represents our life, the two points (negative 8 and positive 8) of learning meet… giving us (or me specifically) the opportunity to double our (my) learning.

I am not suggesting that everyone needs to go develop a tragedy in their lives in order to learn something new about themselves, I am sure that we will all be tested plenty before the bell rings for last call and we need to check-out; the trick is recognizing the opportunity. If you believe in God, or Budda, or Yahweh, or Allah, or The Source, or A Greater Power, you likely believe that you will not be given more to handle than you are capable of handling. (If you are an Atheist, the fact that you believe in the fact that there is absolutely nothing to believe in… well, I am sure that you get what I am inferring)

That is kind of deep… I am starting to think that I should have studied Quantum Physics!

From Achmed and Me… Live Life!