Tag: encouragement

Posted on

Digging In

Everyone has their own way of pushing their limits. Some run marathons. Some climb mountains. Some adopt intense exercise routines that would make Captain America gasp for breath.  

Me? Shoveling out a Colorado spring will do just fine, thank you.

I know I’ve got a lot of company here. If you didn’t have a blower, a service or an ally last week, you got to have your own personal encounter with Nature’s own concrete. The sort of wet, dense, heavy stuff that has to be cleared out in layers, testing your spinal column with every scoop.

“GrrrrAAAAA!”

And of course, Colorado’s snow fights back. If you tried to get a jump on the situation last Sunday, you may have had the joy of turning around at the end of a fervent shoveling session to discover your path had been covered over again. Multiple times.

In my case, my brain and heart love snow but my back and knees beg to differ. So with a big storm, I shovel the way some people read “War and Peace” – many short quick bursts rather than one long stretch. (I also have the blessings of helpful neighbors doing their own part and then some, which I’m pretty sure you don’t get with Russian novels.)

It’s tedious. It’s exhausting. More often than not, you feel like you’re making no progress at all. But you keep going because you have to.

That seems to apply to a lot of life, lately.

For some, it’s a year of pandemic existence hitting the mind all at once as a vaccine starts to come into view. So much has been endured, and with a light in the distance the last laps suddenly feel so agonizingly slow.

For some, it’s yet one more shooting in one more city with one more burst of racial hate that shakes the soul with its vehemence. A cycle we seem to keep running like a murderous version of Groundhog Day, a little more fatigued and desperate for each repetition.

For some, it’s not the global but the personal. A stubborn health situation. A broken family relationship. A life that seems to keep pounding the same streets and hitting the same blocked alleys.

Maybe there’s progress, somewhere. Maybe you can even see it, if barely. But it just … seems … oh … so … slow.

You’re not wrong. You’re not crazy.

But you’re not hopeless either.

You’re still in the fight.

And even if it feels like carving Mount Rushmore with a toothpick, every scratch is something. Simply not falling off the mountain is something.

A 10-minute burst against the snow never looks like much. Especially when it keeps coming down. But if we keep finding another 10 minutes … however far apart … things can start to change.

 And when a friend or a neighbor starts to lend their own shovel (or even their blower), that next 10 minutes starts to look more possible.

Sooner or later, snow melts on its own. Most other problems aren’t quite as obliging. But if we persist – if we lend each other the strength to persist – we can make a difference. To ourselves. To our neighbors. Maybe even to the world.

It won’t be easy. It often hurts. But if we pick up the shovel at all, we’re saying it can be done. That even if we can’t do all of it, we can do our piece.

That’s hope.

And that’s an exercise that will make all of us stronger.

Posted on

Letter Be

By the time this appears in print, Gil’s letter should be almost ready to arrive.

Gil is my stunningly brilliant 6-year-old nephew. (No, it’s not short for Gilbert, and yes, my sister is an Anne of Green Gables fan.) He’s a budding student of the sciences, who once casually pointed out landmarks on the moon and Mars to me during an imaginary space odyssey. His busy hands have built long, elaborate marble runs, followed by long painstaking videos depicting the “races” between the marbles as they swerve and roll.

And now Mister Gil has discovered the epistolary art.

“Dear Anut Heathr/Uncle Scott/Missy,” he opened in carefully handwritten crayon, with animal and robot stickers decorating each line. “Wut things are you doing? And wut book are you reading? How is the weather? Please wriet back.”

My own response is finally ready for him. I say “finally” because … well, this is an admission that doesn’t come easily to a professional writer. This is between you, me, and a few thousand other readers, OK?

The fact is, I’m terrible at personal letters.

I know, it doesn’t make much sense. I’ve been a columnist for years. I can write news stories and PR pieces easily. And I’m quick to jump on emails, social media, and all the other communications tools of the 21st century. Easy.

But good old-fashioned mail? Too often, my brain resembles a kindergarten playground, trying to get everyone to line up properly and get back to class. “Oh, yeah, I need to send that reply out … oh, wait, we’re out of envelopes, I’ll pick some up at the store tomorrow … huh, the old envelope got recycled, I’d better email Carey for the address … OK, I know I have stamps around here somewhere …. “

If this all took place in one sitting, it might not be so bad. But each gets punctuated with occasions of Life Happening and soon “Scott’s Correspondence” has become the next long-running miniseries, complete with episodic cliffhangers. (“Will Scott and his envelope make it to the post office in the same trip?”)

Nonetheless … we’re doing this. Because it’s important to Gil. And therefore it’s important to us.

He’s learning. And all of us in the family want to encourage that. So we write. We click on his YouTube videos. We keep an eye out for books and toys that’ll fuel his interests even further. And we smile as he constantly finds more for us to encourage.

After all, when you reward behavior, you tend to see more of it.

That’s true for most people, whether we’re talking 6-year-olds or congressmen. Oh, granted, the 6-year-olds usually aren’t as stubborn and willful as the politicians (I blame a lack of regular naps and the occasional time-out), but the principles are the same. Communicate. Show up. Be clear. Encourage. Don’t stop. Packing a town hall or filling up a voice mail box may not be as cute as attending a school program, but it’s part of the same idea.

Smart politicians know this. The ones that forget sometimes become unemployed politicians.

And the best part is, it shapes you too. It makes you a better voter. A better relative. Maybe even a better letter-writer.

What you touch, touches you. And both can be better for the experience.

If you’re lucky, you’ll even get some cool robot stickers out of the deal.

Posted on

Words of Honor

“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

— Rudyard Kipling

 

Slowly but surely, the words are claiming the wall.

Muhammad Ali watches from one point, Saint Paul from another. Novelists share space with masters of social media. It’s a small crowd right now, but I know how quickly it will grow, piling wit onto wisdom onto timeless endurance.

I ought to know. We’ve been here before.

And as before, it’s more comforting than a few rows of taped computer paper has any right to be.

 

“In the garden of literature, the highest and the most charismatic flowers are always the quotations.”

— Mehmet Murat ildan

 

It started, as it often does, with Heather’s health. My wife is a lovely, funny, creative and tough-minded person. But she also tends to attract chronic illness the way a car accident attracts rubberneckers. Years ago, before we met, it was Crohn’s disease. A couple of years after we married, ankylosing spondylitis came along for the ride. Endometriosis used to be part of the mix, and we’ve never been quite sure if lupus was milling about in the crowd or not.

Lately, as some of you have read here, there’s been something new. We’re still pinning down all the details – which is a bloodless way of saying that we’ve been going through a lot of sleepless nights and painful days trying to figure out what in blue blazes is going on.

One morning I had just checked in with my boss to mention that I was going to have to work from home – again – in order to help Heather through the day. She sent back her best wishes for the struggle – and a few words from Muhammad Ali for comfort.

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses,” the words read, “behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”

And all of a sudden, I remembered.

 

“Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?”

— Philip Gilbert Hamerton

 

The last time something like this happened, back in Kansas, Heather had had to spend far too much time in the bathroom. (Having Crohn’s in combination with severe back pain will tend to do that.) So, to make life a little more bearable – or at least entertaining – I started to paper the opposite wall with quotes.

Like many writers, I’ve always been a fan of the well-chosen word, whether from prophets or Muppets. A good quote is a quick moment in life when your mind suddenly blinks and then laughs, or winces, or nods “Yes – yes, that’s exactly how it is.” They’ve decorated my college papers, my desks, even my email at work.

And now, they decorated my bathroom. Heather found the first one and I quickly gave it a lot of brothers and sisters. Soon, you couldn’t drop a hand towel without coming across the latest aphorism or wisecrack.

Now, we seemed to be in a similar place. Maybe it was time for a similar remedy. This particular illness was keeping her confined to bed for much of the day, so I picked a readily visible bedroom wall and went to work.

Some space went to encouragement. (“We must live lives of unstoppable hope.” – Stant Litore.)

Some was claimed by humorous sympathy. (“I’m not clumsy. It’s just that the floor hates me, the tables and chairs are bullies, and the wall gets in the way.” – Liza Mahone.)

And some, inevitably, went to doctor snark. (“I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

I don’t know. Maybe it’s not doing anything but using up ink and Scotch tape. But maybe, in its own small way, it helps. It’s a way to bring life over the walls, to remind us that someone’s been there before, that there’s more to think about than “Ow, ow, ow.”

Maybe, to borrow from Miguel de Cervantes, these “short sentences drawn from long experience” are better medicine than we know. I hope so. I really do.

Sticks and stones can break our bones. But words can maybe heal us.