Tag: decisions

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The Time Between

Nobody has perfect 20/20 foresight. Not even John Adams. 

Full of excitement at America’s independence, he predicted in a letter that there’d be a great anniversary festival. He saw how future generations would celebrate it with “pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.” 

He also predicted it would be on July 2. Whoops. 

To be fair, the world looked very different when Adams wrote home on July 3. The vote to break with Great Britain had been yesterday. The vote to approve the Declaration would be tomorrow. Few people knew what had happened; fewer still could guess what it might mean. 

A moment of transformation. No, make that a moment IN transformation. A change in process, with the past behind and the new present not yet formed. 

Exciting. Terrifying. Uncertain. 

And oh, so familiar. 

The technical term is a “liminal moment,” meaning a moment on the threshold. We experience a lot of them, as individuals and a society. They’re not a comfortable place to be, not least because they hold so many questions from the inside. 

“Am I an adult yet?” 

“Are we in or out of a pandemic – or does that mean anything?” 

“Am I over the threshold or still in between?” 

We don’t like uncertainty, of course. So we try to set boundaries, definitions, signposts. (“Why, you’re an adult when you’re 18. Except for the parts where you’re 21. Other terms and conditions may apply.”) We want to move ahead and get out of the fog, finding our way to firmer ground. 

But please. Don’t rush too fast. 

That time in between has value. 

You can’t live there, of course. But you can make a life from there. It’s a moment of discarding old assumptions and shaping new ideas.  When tomorrow doesn’t have to look just like today with better cars and smaller computers. When we can choose who we are and what we want to become. 

Treasure that. 

Sure, we’ll be wrong about a lot of things. We’re human. It happens. But if we live these moments unafraid to be wrong – aware, adaptable, open to wonder – then even our mistakes can lead somewhere pretty amazing. Maybe even revolutionary. 

So here’s to Mr. Adams and all his heirs. Perhaps, in his honor, we should commemorate July 3 as well. Not the day of decision, nor the day of declaration, but a day of possibilities with all the world open. 

That’s certainly something worth writing home about. 

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Decision with a Capital ‘D’

About halfway through the death march of the Broncos’ last season, my brother-in-law Brad said he knew just what Denver needed.

“They ought to get Sean Payton at coach,” he said. “He knows how to get the most out of a quarterback like Russell Wilson. It’d be a great fit.”

We laughed and bantered and said, sure, that would be interesting. But it wasn’t going to happen. Too high a price, too many other teams likely to be interested, most of them with better prospects. Everyone knew the sort of coach that came to the Orange Crash these days: rookies and maybes, not former Super Bowl champions. Right?

Well.

Maybe I should let Brad buy a lottery ticket or two.

As you know if you’ve even casually glanced at a Denver sports page these days, the Saint has come marchin’ in. Naturally, his selection also kicked off a debate, because if there’s one thing Bronco fans love almost as much as a win, it’s an argument.  For the pro-Payton bunch, it’s the hiring of a proven winner with the prestige and tools to rebuild Denver. For the “punt on Payton” people, it’s mortgaging future draft picks against an uncertain present, one who’s been out of the game for a while and was right at the storm center of “Bountygate” a decade ago.

But good, bad or ugly, the choice has been made to shake things up. And that’s bigger news than Payton himself.

It’s easy to keep doing the same things in the same way. We see it in sports teams, in business and government, even in ourselves. And when times get hard, we often double down on it. Why risk what you still have? Best to play it safe, turtle up and weather the storm, right?

The trouble is, it often doesn’t work. Sometimes it means you’re trying to get out of a situation with the same approach that got you into it. Other times, it means you’re postponing any decision and just waiting for things to improve. But not deciding is a decision itself, and one that takes the initiative out of your hands.

To fix something, you have to risk breaking it. Commit to the action. Take the chance. Turn off the route you’re on, even if it feels like a major detour.

“The longest way round,” Alexander MacLaren once wrote, “is sometimes the shortest way home.”

Yes, it can be a gamble. Action in the face of uncertainty often is. It’s uncomfortable, not least because it exposes you to criticism. Failing by the numbers, after all, shows you knew how to “do it right” – you’re part of the club. Taking a chance that doesn’t work turns everyone else into an expert on what you SHOULD have done.

But when the conventional just perpetuates the cycle, it doesn’t make sense to keep committing to the same old three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust. Then it’s time to decide. And risk.

Will this risk pay off for Denver? It’s too early to say either way. (I knew I shouldn’t have sent my crystal ball to the cleaners this week.) But it’s an attempt to break beyond the mediocre, to literally change the game.

That’s not a bad model. On the field or off it. After all, failing doesn’t have to mean failure … as long as it leads to the next attempt.

And if this one fails, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of fans ready to tell the Broncos exactly what that next attempt should be.

Right, Brad?

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Once or For All

Some moments freeze the frame. With shock. With disbelief. With the sudden awareness that you’re living in History with a capital “H.”

The last flight of the Challenger.

The morning the Twin Towers fell.

Wednesday.

The images from the Capitol felt surreal – and yet too real. Something that could have come from a movie or a Tom Clancy novel, and yet something that could have only happened in the far-too-real world.

Something that’s ours. Whether we want it or not.

As I write this, it’s been three days since the storming of Congress. We’ve seen and heard so much – the evacuation of Congress and delay of the vote, the staffers whose quick thinking got the ballot boxes to safety, the bizarre sights from the broken-into chambers and offices. We’ve heard the shouts and screams since, seen the calls for accountability, witnessed the beginnings of consequences in the real and online worlds.

By the time this appears in print, another two days will have passed. An eternity. Because the weird thing about frozen-frame moments is they move surprisingly quickly in their aftermath, fast enough to make even the most prescient observations quickly obsolete.
So I’m taking a step back from the immediate. And asking a bigger question.

What do we want this to be?

Not “How do we spin this?” Not “How do we assign blame?” Not even “How do we get in a DeLorean and prevent this from happening,” though I wish that were an option.

No. What will this be?

I’ll explain.

One of my own frozen-frame moments – one for many of us, I suspect – goes back more than 20 years to the mass shooting at Columbine High School. My mother was still a teacher at the time at a school with a very similar name, which meant that as I watching events unfold in a Kansas newsroom, I was also having to reassure friends that she was OK, that she wasn’t at that Columbine.

It was a punch in the gut. And for some years afterward, any fresh report of a major school shooting hit that wound. More than once, I went to the keyboard to pour out the pain of what had happened, to try to understand, to try to be even the smallest part of helping our country say “Never again” and mean it.

Well.

You know the rest.

They kept coming. They became so common that I couldn’t write about every single one. It took the classroom dispersals of COVID-19 to interrupt the string – March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting since 2002.

So common that it began to numb.

And the frame kept freezing a little less.

So I ask again – what will Wednesday be?

Will it be a 9/11, a one-time horror that leaves an impact but no immediate sequel?  

Or will it be a Columbine, merely the first of a chain?

Ultimately, that’s up to us.

A professor of mine, Simone Chambers, once said the fundamental principle of politics is that talking is better than fighting. It’s a simple concept to state and an easy one to abandon. After all, a conversation takes two willing people. Conflicts, like car accidents, require only one behaving badly.

Can we commit to talking? To listening? To hearing?

That doesn’t mean being a milquetoast, rolling over rather than risk offense. If anything, it requires the courage to stand up to folks who would trample on the conversation and say “No. We don’t do that here.”

Conflict is not unique to this time and place. American politics has never been an episode of Masterpiece Theatre. But we have been better. We can be. We must.

Freeze the moment again. Examine it.

And then, together, let’s decide what we want to learn.

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What a Great Idea! Right?

Anyone can sing in the car on long trips. The Dutch took it one step further.

According to Reuters, the highway near the Dutch city of Jelsum will play a song when you drive over the rumble strips. Not just any song, either. When you hit the strips at 40 mph, the road will ring out with the anthem of Friesland, a northern region of the Netherlands. Imagine if a stretch of US-287 suddenly started playing “Rocky Mountain High” and you’ll have the idea.

It was brilliant. And also insane. Because what sounds cool when one car drives over one stretch of road every now and then, becomes chaos when a regular stream of traffic travels the same road at all hours and at varying speeds.

“Locals say the musical road had created a never-ending cacophony that keeps them awake at night,” Reuters reported, briefly quoting one neighbor who got to continually listen to the anthem at high speed in the early hours one night when a long string of taxis chose to blaze across the rumble strips.

The strips will soon be removed. And the Dutch get to join a long line of people in singing one of humanity’s oldest anthems: “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

You know this song. So do I. It’s not the song of the moments that are inattentive and clueless, like the time I walked off the stage and into the orchestra pit on Opening Night in mid-song (a matter now part of Longmont Theatre Company legend). No, these are the ones with a little thought and a lot of optimism, deliberate choices that felt really good until the consequences started to kick in.

For me, it was the night I tried driving home from Garden City, Kans. on a single tank of gas, figuring I could refuel in Bennett instead of my usual Kansas stop in Goodland. Great idea – except it was late in the day on a holiday weekend when I arrived and the gas station was closed. The result was increasingly urgent prayer as I ultimately arrived in Hudson – and an open Conoco station – on fumes.

For our disabled ward Missy, it might be the decision that her Big Purse always has room for one more item. Great idea – until it suddenly contains half the known universe. The result is a purse that she’s reluctant to leave behind but often asks someone else to carry on trips.

For my wife Heather – well, she married me, didn’t she? (Just kidding … I think.)

At its best, it’s born of an admirable capacity – the human ability to imagine something worthwhile and then put out the effort to make it happen. The trouble comes when hope and sweat are divorced from judgment and reflection. That’s when the weird things happen.

When we’re lucky, the worst it produces is embarrassment, expense, and an unforgettable story.

When we’re not so lucky, the results can be tragic. On a national scale, it can even mean lives disrupted or lost, regions devastated, and seemingly-endless wars begun – though in that last case, the anthem’s title is usually rephrased to “What Else Could I Do?”

A great question. But one that’s usually never asked until after it’s already too late.

I believe in hope and imagination. I believe in making the best decision you can from the information you have, rather than being paralyzed because you can’t make the perfect choice. But I also believe that’s a different thing from not considering consequences at all, just because what you want to do seems so compelling or necessary.

Consequences have to be considered. And if they’re not faced before the choice is made, they certainly will be after.

At that point, it’s best to learn from the Dutch. Acknowledge what happened. Fix it as soon as possible. Learn from it. And move on down the road.

Because sometimes you just have to change your tune.

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Angels Askew

As I looked at our freshly liberated Christmas tree in its brilliant, slightly scrunched glory, I couldn’t help remembering the long-familiar tale.

“And Lo, the angel of the Lord did look down from the heavens and said unto them … ‘Ouch! Should I not be two inches to the right?’”

Or maybe that’s just us.

You see, in most respects, our tree is pretty traditional. There are the thousand-and-one colored lights on every branch, carefully obscuring the burned-out strands that were built into the tree itself. There’s the 40 years of ornaments that invade every square inch, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past got mugged in a yard sale. The cute and the memorable merge with the odd and bizarre (“Is that Holly Hobbie’s head?”), all of it arranged so that the wagging tail of Big Blake, the World’s Clumsiest Dog can’t hit anything fragile.

And presiding over all of it, bestowing its graceful presence on everything below, is our tree-topper angel—teetering dangerously forward as though she were about to leap from her place of heavenly glory and into a swimming pool far below. You know, the one at the first motel, where the angels did stay?

The reason for this perilous perch? Well, our home used to belong to Heather’s grandparents, and her English grandmother wanted one that had a Tudor “look.” So there’s a big, beautiful bay window in the front room, just perfect for framing a Christmas tree – and behind it, a series of thick brown beams projecting from the ceiling, one of them hanging above the exact center of the window.

So every year, we have to choose. We can either shift the tree off-center so that it can extend to its full glorious height, while triggering the OCD of every resident and passing driver. Or we can put the tree in its natural spot, where the angel of the Lord is squeezed into submission by a burst of misplaced architectural enthusiasm.

This year, we squeezed. In an odd way, it seemed fitting.

In the musical “1776,” Ben Franklin talked about how revolutions are brought into the world “half improvised and half compromised.” To my mind, it’s even truer of the Christmas season. Beneath the wonder and beauty – and sometimes not far beneath – is a constant tap dance of just making things work. We cover for lost or damaged decorations. We negotiate over whose turn it is to visit for dinner this year. We struggle to find enough hours in the day, dollars in the budget, or sanity in the mind to make everything work. Heck, even the original Christmas story featured a feed box that was pressed into services as a baby bed.

And somehow, we do make it work. Not because it’s picture-perfect. But because it’s ours, brought forth in love and desperation, cobbled together from what we have.

That’s Christmas. That’s family. That’s life.

And despite all the choices and compromises – or maybe even because of them – it often still becomes something wonderful. A bit strange, maybe. But wonderful all the same.

There’s an odd kind of peace in that. A chance to truly “be not afraid” and see things from a more forgiving perspective.

In fact, we may be right on the beam.

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Dress Rehearsal

One of the best parts of being married to an actor, Heather sometimes says, is that both of us know what it’s like to endure makeup and hose.

Now we can add heels to the list, too.

No, this isn’t a “coming out” column. It’s just fair warning that I’m in another farce with the Longmont Theatre Company and that the show, “Leading Ladies,” requires me to disguise myself as a woman for at least half my time on stage.  What could be more normal than that?

Mind you, “normal” and “farce” don’t exactly belong in the same sentence. After all, this is the comedy of decisions made with high speed and little judgment, where gags fly fast and the actors fly faster, and where everything ultimately descends into complete madness … only to somehow rebuild itself into some semblance of order and justice with five minutes to go.

Compared to that, rocketing across the stage in a wig and heels IS perfectly normal – at least, by the laws of the comic universe.

If I sound a little too familiar with all this – well, yes and no. It’s been about 25 years since I played a man playing a woman, rendering a deliberately clumsy rendition of Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with tresses like a windblown haystack and a voice like an off-key piccolo.  (How high? Let’s just say that the applause probably included commentary from every dog within three blocks.)

Farce, on the other hand, is an old friend. From Neil Simon to Woody Allen, and from “Noises Off” to the offerings of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, something in me seems to respond to a riotous state of utter chaos and confusion.

Yes, yes, I used to be a newspaper reporter. Besides that.

Actually, the more I think about it (and thinking about farce is dangerous), the more sense it makes. In many ways, this sort of high-powered ridiculousness is the best life lesson of all.

Farce always has a layer of pretense. The motives are straightforward, but the methods never are. Need to impress a girl even though you’re bottom rung at the embassy? Make like you’re the top dog, despite a complete lack of diplomatic skill. The host of your party has keeled over five minutes before the other guests arrive? Weave together a “reasonable explanation” that changes every time someone new comes over.

Gee, this already sounds like the last election, doesn’t it?

Why pretend? Fear, mostly. Fear of getting embarrassed, fear of getting arrested, fear of getting booed off the stage. The personal stakes are high, and the fear of what might happen, could happen, surely will happen, terrifies people into becoming something they’re not.

And then something happens. Actually, a lot of somethings happen. Excuses start to be torn away. Disguises start to fall apart. And in the process of it all, the pretender usually discovers something true in himself or herself – something that will let them get what they really want, if they can just get past all the fantasies they’ve created.

Fear. Self-discovery. Overcoming past mistakes of our own making, and growing from it.  If that’s not relevant to most of us today, what is?  (The fact that it’s bundled into a package of slamming doors and hilariously awkward situations is just a bonus.)

Intrigued? Come on down to the theatre on the weekend of Jan. 13 or Jan. 20 and we’ll give you a crash course. (Details of “Leading Ladies” are online at www.longmonttheatre.org.) If nothing else, you’ll get the chance to see if Scott can really run in high heels without twisting his ankle.

It’ll be a riot. And a total drag.

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To Cap it Off

Down in the basement, Heather searched for yarn. And if that doesn’t frighten you, it should.

Some people, I’m sure, must have basements that practically sparkle, ones that could be rented out as living space or wow the judges on a reality program. Mine tends to descend into a state of nature if left on its own for longer than a week. It’s the sort of place that Indiana Jones might explore with torch and bullwhip, or where Gandalf might issue a warning about the things to be found in the deep places of the Earth.

But that’s where the old crafting material had gone – I thought. And so the archaeological expedition began. Past the baby toys. Around the Christmas stuff. Behind the kennel that was too bent to use …

Suddenly, Heather’s eyes widened. She’d found the yarn, all right. And a little something extra.

“I didn’t know any of these were left!” she said as she pulled out a small “elf hat” – a short, knitted, close-fitting cap seeming to hold all the colors of the rainbow. Heather’s Grandma Val had made several of them before she passed away a few years ago, planning to give them away. A few had made their way to Missy – Val’s daughter and now our ward – after she was gone. But those were treasures of another day, presumed to be long-gone.

Except … now they weren’t. Two caps sat in the box, one finished, the other still attached to a knitting needle, needing just a small amount of work to finish it off.

“There’s not that much left,” Heather wondered out loud as she fingered the rows. “I wonder if I could …”

And for a moment, across the years, Val reached out to touch her one more time.

We’ve all known moments like that, I think. Heck, the universe has known moments like that. In a recent experiment that will probably win someone the Nobel Prize, scientists managed to detect gravity waves for the first time – the slightest tremble of space-time left behind by two colliding black holes around 1.3 billion years ago. The event validated a 100-year-old prediction by Albert Einstein and also confirmed a basic human truth: What you leave behind matters.

We all touch lives. There’s no real way to avoid it, short of living in a hamster ball. But often it’s done without thought or realization. After all, we’re just trying to get through today – who has time to worry about tomorrow?

But tomorrow comes. Some of those choices we make will live on. Shouldn’t we make sure that they’re the parts of us that we want to survive?

Grandma Val planted miniature roses. Some of them are still coming up in the garden now each spring, despite my certified black thumb. A small decision that continues to add a little beauty to the world.

Another friend who recently left us planted stories. Some were his visions of the stories of others, brought to life on a carefully-lit stage. Others were the memories and tales he shared in the gatherings and cast parties afterward, with a wry smile and a bright eye. The best of those stories still makes me laugh … and remember.

What are we planting?

We all plant something, whether we intend to or not. With a little thought, it can be the best of us, whether it’s a work of our hands or a kind word at a hard time. It might seem small, something sure to be forgotten.

That’s OK. Forgotten hats get found. Forgotten flowers bloom. Forgotten energy ripples the universe long after its collision is gone.

Reach out. Care. Touch. Make a mark.

And while you’re at it – don’t forget to clean the basement.

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A Step Over the Cliff

Not long ago, a man stepped off a 60-foot cliff while sleepwalking in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest. He survived with only minor injuries – thank goodness for bushes – and an indelible memory of Newton’s First Law. Once started, some journeys are hard to stop.

I suspect David Cameron might have a fair amount of sympathy.

Cameron, for the unfamiliar, is facing the prospect of having the United Kingdom become the “Untied Kingdom.” In just a few days, Scotland will be voting on whether to declare independence from the rest of the UK, and for the first time since the referendum was announced two years ago, polls suggest that the separatists might win.

How did things get here? Because of an agreement that Cameron himself made two years ago with Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond after a big Scottish Nationalist win in the local elections. He didn’t have to. Cameron was already deeply unpopular in Scotland; saying “No” couldn’t really lose him any more ground. But it probably seemed harmless. No previous referendum had succeeded, after all, so this could be a way to soothe popular opinion while closing the books on the question for another generation.

Oops.

Once started, some journeys are hard to stop.

With ancestors on both sides of the boundary line, I’m not entirely sure of my own feelings. Is it a good thing for a people to claim its own national identity? It can be, yes. Is it a good thing for a people to stay joined together, to try to make something more than the sum of its parts? It can be, yes. Living in Longmont and not Glasgow, it’s not something I have to make a commitment on, fortunately.

But pardon me if I fail to feel sorry for Mr. Cameron. He’s running hard against a political law as hard as any of Newton’s: decisions have consequences.

It’s a point worth remembering.

A good friend recently forwarded one of the multi-point lists that seem to spring up on the Internet like dandelions in a lawn. In this case, it was “Twenty Daily Practices That Changed my Life.” And the very first point stuck with me – simply asking the question “Do I want this?”

It’s scary how easy it is to forget to ask that. Many times, we make choices feeling there is no choice. We keep the uncomfortable job because of the insurance. We keep the bad relationship because it’s not always like that … is it? And on a higher level, we – whether voter in the street or leader in the capital – go along with a less-than-desirable policy because of the political realities.

But do we want this?

What could happen if it failed?

What could happen if it succeeded?

I’m not arguing for indecisiveness. And heaven knows that compromise is vital to politics and even to life in general. But if you haven’t taken a moment to see your own choices clearly – to weigh what you really want and what costs you’re willing to pay – then you’re compromised before you even begin.

You’re sleepwalking off a cliff. With no guarantee of a bush underneath.

However the Scottish election goes, I hope it works for the best. Because that’s really all that can be done now. No nation makes its own breakup easy to do (as we’ve seen here, even breaking up a state can be quite difficult) but if a free country gives its people that choice, it has to live with the consequences. Whatever they may be. All of Scotland must now ask “Do I want this?” and weigh the answer well — better, perhaps, than Mr. Cameron did.

Mr. Newton said it. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. The actions we start may be hard to stop.

Choose them well. With eyes open.

Or be ready for an abrupt awakening.

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Benedict of the Doubt

When the Pope made his big announcement this week, I was probably one of the few people thinking of car keys.

Not at first, of course. Like a lot of us, my first reaction when Pope Benedict XVI announced he would retire at the end of February was “What? He can DO that?” I guess when a trigger doesn’t get pulled in 600 years, you kind of forget it’s there.

After that? Some sympathy, some jokes, some expressions of good or bad memories of the Pope and what he had or hadn’t done. And of course, some confusion and anger over Benedict’s decision to lay down the Fisherman’s Ring.

“If a Pope is, literally, a father … elected to be a father to the Body of Christ … well, fathers don’t step down,” said one Facebook friend who admitted to being “flabbergasted” by the news.

I can understand the feeling. But I came at it from a different angle.

It’s true that fatherhood isn’t something you can retire from. But it is something you can be forced to lay down. I have at least two close friends who had to become a parent to their fathers because their dads had grown too weak, physically and mentally, to take care of themselves, never mind a family. It was a hard moment for both of them, one born of love and pain, and they weathered it with all the strength they had.

Most of us, I think, haven’t been brought to that point. I hope we never are. But we probably all know someone who has made a smaller decision in deference to age and ability.

Namely, the decision to hang up your car keys for good.

My grandma had to make that decision last year. It wasn’t an easy one. She’s long been used to going where she wants, when she wants: church, the library, the pharmacy, the store. As she got older, she cut out night driving and out-of-town trips, but kept the rest into her 90s.

But when the choice came, it came for a good reason. Her reflexes weren’t what they had been. Small warnings that would have jumped out at her even five years before could be missed now. It wasn’t what she wanted to do – it’s probably not what any of us want to do – but for her safety and that of others, she made the decision.

If I can acknowledge that that’s a good idea for a relatively small responsibility, how much more so for one that could affect the entire world?

“In order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary,” Benedict declared on Monday, “strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

Those had to be hard words to say. That he could say them at all wins some respect from me.

Were there other motives behind the decision? Probably. When a world leader surrenders power, it’s rarely just for one reason. I’m sure there’ll be speculation for months on the whys and wherefores, maybe even a book or two.

But for me, for now, the stated reason is more than sufficient. However willing the spirit, there comes a time when the body can’t back it up.

At that point, there’s a strength in surrender. In knowing, and acting on the knowledge, while you remain able.

It’s a sign of wisdom.

You could even call it a key decision.

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Just a Minute

Union Station has the words “All aboard!” My niece Riley puts it a bit more simply.

“Go-go!”

And off the Riley Express rolls again.

The Riley Express is a red Radio Flyer wagon that arrived under the tree this year with a label by Santa, shipping information by Riley’s dad and assembly by a whole lot of sleep-deprived elves. It’s a thing of beauty, capable of hauling every plaything Riley has ever owned.

Or one 2-year-old with a suitable bodyguard of toy ducks.

“Go-go!”

Since the weather’s been chilly, the Riley Express has stuck to indoor routes, going around and around the first floor of the house. It sometimes means clearing a dog or two from the track, but that’s the price you pay for an all-season infrastructure.

The locomotive, of course, has mostly been the Uncle Scott No. 1. It’s a used engine with an uncertain drive train (as a co-worker pointed out), but so far the on-call record has been fabulous.

“Go-go!”

Some routes last longer than others. Some have musical accompaniment that ranges from Sesame Street to Johnny Cash. But they all have one thing in common: if the locomotive’s in the yard, the train will be ready to roll.

There’s time.

Even on the craziest days, there’s time.

That’s harder to remember than it sounds.

You all know this. After all, we just started a new year. The time when some of us still make pledges and promises, resolutions and good intentions, to take something we’ve always wanted to do and make it real.

“This is the year I finally learn to cook.”

“OK, I will hit the gym this time. Five days a week, no exceptions.”

“That novel I’ve been thinking about? Totally going to do it.”

It’s sort of like the Mayan apocalypse in reverse. With an old calendar gone away, it’s as though prior history was wiped out with it. This is the fresh start, the new dawn. The time to do what we always wanted to do.

But that’s the catch, isn’t it?

Time.

We make the commitment. Sometimes we even start well. And then suddenly it’s June and we haven’t thought about it for five months.

“Things just got so busy. But I’ll fit it in, when I can find the time.”

Uh-huh.

Now, I know some of us have a genuinely insane situation. The ones working two jobs. The ones trying to be two parents in one body. The ones who probably don’t even have time to read this column, never mind add one more commitment to their life. (If you are reading this column in the midst of all that, by the way, I’m flattered.)

That I understand.

The rest of us, as Ricky used to put it on the late-night reruns, have some ‘splainin’ to do.

I’m not talking about productivity or hyper-efficiency or all the other grand buzzwords that bosses use to mean “Get off your tail and work already!” None of us needs to pack every minute or grind our lives into exhaustion.

But one thing I’ve noticed. If something’s important enough, the time can be found.

It might not be found quickly. But then, J.R.R. Tolkien spent more than 10 years writing The Lord of the Rings.

It might not be found easily. The Russian composer Alexander Borodin had to squeeze time for music while also working as an organic chemist, with friends on both sides of the line convinced he was wasting his time. Closer to home, I once met a children’s author who wrote his first book during stolen minutes on an assembly line.

But more often than not, the time is there if you want it to be. If it’s important enough to be.

I’m going to try to remember that a little more this year. There’s things I’ve been meaning to do for a while: books and plays to write, skills to learn, visits to make. Maybe it’s time to put my clock where my mouth is.

Once I give Riley one more pull in the wagon, anyway.

Because when the really important things call, you simply have to go-go.