The Noise

      So much noise.  Here’s the thing about noise, once you realize it’s noise, it can be easy to ignore … if you want to ignore it.

     Let’s say you had a person who said “I’m going to pay you $25 on Tuesday”.  Tuesday comes and goes.  There is no $25.  You see this person again on Friday and they say “Oh, I’m so sorry.  You know, next Tuesday I’ll pay you $25”.  You guessed it.  Tuesday comes and goes.  If this happens more than once you will realize that this is just noise.

     You might find that as you treat this as noise, the person who continues to make this noise will be angry at YOU because you are no longer listening.  They may up the amount from $25 to $50 to even $75 or more. What is the main thing that all of these amounts have in common?  The promise is never fulfilled.  It doesn’t make any sense.  They don’t have anything to offer.  They want the most important things you have to give.  It’s not the money.  They want the time and the attention.

     There have been multiple studies from nursing homes, hospice facilities, and elder care.  No one wishes they spent more time in the office or traveling for work.

     When we get older no one will wish they spent more time on you/twit/face/insta/space.  No one will remember the last argument they won on you/twit/face/insta/space.  They know they blocked someone but they won’t be able to remember why.  They know relationships never healed and will only remember too late that it was over something trivial.  They’ll remember the moment something could have changed but didn’t change because the other person should have done it.  They’ll regret that they didn’t try.

     Die having tried.  Did you try to spend that time with people you loved?  Did you try to fix that crazy family dynamic?  Did you try that idea you had?  Trying is not the aforementioned CouchSpirAssy of looking up something on you/twit/face/insta/space and watching other people do it.  Trying is not thinking ‘I have to quit my job and give it my all.  Failure with no back up’.  Trying is just that, trying.  You might not get a yes if you ask but if you don’t try, the answer is always no.  

     Stop listening to the noise and surprise yourself.  You’d be amazed at what you can do when you take a few minutes to actually try to do it.  Overthinking usually equals underperforming.  You can do this if you just let yourself get away from the noise.

     The noise is seductive.  We’ve all fallen into the trap.  It pays just enough attention to us to get our attention and trust.

     I remember meeting a friend and her family out for dinner at a nice brewery with a view of Long Island Sound.  For me, it was a deeper look in to the life and family of a friend I’ve known for years.  For most of them it was a trip down memory lane.  There was food and laughter and drinks and an overall good time.  

     We were all adults.  Most were married with kids or deep into a career.  There were no teenagers here.  There was a little bit of noise.  It snagged the youngest one when she pulled out her phone to take a quick photo to post on twit/face/insta/space.

     She disappeared.  For her, there was no more food.  There were no more drinks.  There was no Long Island Sound.  There was just noise.  The laughter and the fun of the family had been replaced by the sound of her being sucked into an argument on twit/face/insta/space in which she had no stakes.

     We eventually got her back but it was like taking keys away from a drunk friend at the bar who doesn’t think they’re that drunk.

     What will she remember from that night?  Will it be the family, the food, the fun, the sound, or will it be the noise?  Who knows?  Maybe, just maybe, this Tuesday she’ll get offered $100.

The Task

      What if the solution, like the goal, is more of the problem than its name suggests.  Solutions and goals aren’t typically the end all to be all.  They are completed tasks.  It’s a checked box.  The box has been checked.  Why doesn’t this “task” feel completed?

     Was it your task to complete?  Who put the solutions and goals into the box in the first place?  For the majority of our early lives we are simply clicking off goals and tasks that have been set up by someone else.  It’s all chores and homework with a few seconds carved out to fill in the spaces between.

     The busy work keeps you from “getting into too much trouble” and running the train off the tracks.  It was school, homework, some intermediate activity (band, basketball, volleyball, swimming, baseball, softball, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, theater, choir, chorus, glee club), work, college prep, dating, rejection, church, temple, or mosque.

     Heaven help us if we were saddled with sick, depressed, alcoholic, abusive, or absent parents.  If you were lucky enough to be outside of this super intense cycle, you weren’t able to sidestep all of it.  You had a friend or cousin who had to crash on your couch, sleep in the guest bed room, or seemed to spend more time with your family than they did with their own.

     There were the raised voices behind closed doors, arguments held over the phone, the “maybe this isn’t really our business” conversation.  “Please, you can’t let them go back.  He’ll kill them.  Just let them stay until he sleeps it off” response.

     So many intense kitchen conversations were over heard from a vent in the bedroom.  We were quietly listening to our parents talking other parents off the ledge.  They were younger parents who were supposed to have everything but couldn’t understand why it was all going sideways.  They came to my parents because they were older.  In hindsight they were younger than I am now.

     Maybe you were on the other end of the phone hoping you could crash on a friend’s couch, sleep in their guest bedroom, or spend more time with their family than your own.  Maybe you were too young to remember the last time you left your house but you somehow, even though you were crying and wanting to stay, knew you weren’t going back.

     Whose boxes are these?  Who would choose any of these boxes to check?  What if the busy work were finding out about who we were deep inside and moving in that direction rather than distracting us from the unknown?  

     When we were little, my Dad didn’t just send us to bed.  Our bedtime was 8:00 pm.  At 7:30 we would do 5 minutes of calisthenics and then we would ‘sit and listen to the house’.  We would close our eyes and try to listen for the sounds of the house.  Because we couldn’t hear the house, he would have us listen to our breathing.  He would then have us pay attention to our heart beat.  Our feet would be planted on the floor and we were allowed to leave the day behind.

     When we opened our eyes we had carved out a few seconds in the day to keep the train running on the tracks.  This is a box I choose to check.  Feet planted, shoulders dropped, door wide open.  Task chosen.  Task completed.

The Goal

      That’s the question, isn’t it?  You chase and you chase and you chase.  Is it the journey?  It’s supposed to be about the journey.  What’s the point of getting somewhere if you haven’t learned anything by the time you get there?

     As wonderful as vacations are they are typically made better when something almost happens.  “We almost missed the plane” or “We almost got into a car accident” or “We almost missed the show because we hopped off the wrong exit”.

     If it’s easy it’s usually not memorable or appreciated.  If you woke up, grabbed a bag that was packed the night before, neatly packed the night before by the way, arrived at the airport 2 hours early, had a flawless flight, got the rental car you wanted, and easily checked into the hotel, you’d be scared as hell.

     You’d be looking over your shoulder the whole time waiting for some shitty, inconvenient thing to happen.  It’s not that anyone wants that shitty, inconvenient thing to happen, it’s that the shitty inconvenient thing happening early allows you to take a deep breath and enjoy the rest of your time.

     How many times have you gotten to your destination and said some variation of “It’s about got damn time!” and collapsed on the bed or in the biggest comfy cozy chair you could find?  The struggle to get to the destination allows you to appreciate the destination. 

     Sometimes it allows you to find out who you really want to hang out with when you are at that destination.  How many times, when you were younger, did a relationship or a friendship end when you actually took time to travel with that person?  You can date for six months to a year and slowly find out things about someone OR you can go on a problematic trip and see how someone reacts when things get real.

     How sexy is that person when they accidentally miss the exit and you really need to use the bathroom?  What type of terrible things come out of their mouth or your mouth after you’ve been awake for 2 days straight only to get to the wrong location?

     As great as it would be to get somewhere without issue and without problems or without struggle, how can we appreciate the highs without knowing the lows?  

     I remember winning a trip for work.  It was out of the blue.  It should have been great.  But due to an impending storm I had to take an earlier flight.  I missed my connecting flight because I was unfamiliar with Chicago O’Hare Airport and our escort didn’t show up on time.  

     Luckily the agent took pity on me (the escort who picked us up 30 minutes late also stepped up) and put me on the next flight to the destination.  It rained sheets of rain for the first two days. Finally on the third day the storm broke.  You could see the ocean from the balcony.

     The sunlight glistened off the rain soaked trees.  The air was clean.  By mid afternoon everything was dry and looked new.  The forecast for the next 3 days was sunny and 72°.

     By 4:30 I walked on to the balcony, inhaled deep, dropped my shoulders, collapsed into the biggest comfy cozy chair on the patio and declared, “It’s about got damned time!”.