johnmaconline

What were some of the best times of your life?

Were they travel adventures? Romance? Successes? The birth of children?

Do any of those best times involve layers of sweat and grime, cold showers, and sleeping on hard floors in a community room with 25 other people?

Mine do.

Each summer, our Church sent a group of teenagers and adults to various communities to do mission work for a week. Our mission was to repair, rebuild, and otherwise make safe the homes of people who could not afford to pay.

For those weeks, we slept in sleeping bags on the floor of some generous host Church. We ate whatever was graciously provided by local organizations. We showered sparsely and often in cold water.

These were some of the best weeks of my life.

At the end of each day, I was hot, grimy, and spent. The evening shower was always the best shower I’d ever had. And laying my head on that pillow on the hard floor produced sound and restful sleep. Satisfaction to the very depths of my soul.

This trip to Richmond in the late 90s was my first taste. The very first time I was fortunate enough to accompany this group of people just trying to make some difference, if even just a small one, in another’s life.

I gained so much perspective on these trips about so many things, but I could never have predicted the perspective-altering moment of seeing that gun out of context.

The first time I saw a gun out of context was in the inner city of Richmond, Virginia, with a bunch of teenagers from our Church.

I grew up in a hunting family. We had guns.

Not pistols, but long guns — rifles and shotguns. The kind legitimately used for hunting and practice (skeet, target, etc). My dad diligently taught my brother and me to respect and safely use, handle, care for, transport, and store guns. Safety was king.

We treated the gun respectfully, not only in our family but also in our hunting community. At hunting camp, we had a moment — the moment everyone unveiled the guns. It always occurred directly before we set out into the field or woods. Not too soon, and never were guns sitting around. Upon return, each person immediately secured their gun.

This system of operation around guns provided my context for what they are, how to use them, and how to handle them.

Which brings me to Richmond in the late 90s and how my context surrounding guns completely blew up.

I still cringe when I think of that moment. 

Briefly, the same feelings of shame, embarrassment, and utter unworthiness flash through me like a lightning bolt. I can feel it like it was yesterday, but it happened more than forty years ago.

The entire middle school experience, starting with the locker incident, built my wall of negative self-talk brick-by-brick, stacking one embarrassing moment on top of another. You can probably find yourself in some of these other moments.

My assigned square dancing partner in middle school gym class (yes, square dancing in gym class) looked at me with disgust and then asked the teacher for a new partner.

Getting rejected by someone that I asked to a dance specifically because her friend told me she’d say “yes.” It was really just a plot to make fun of me.  

Being greeted by a table of “big guys” laughing at me in the lunch room because one of them had struck me out the prior evening. 

Those bricks built up the wall that became my inner monologue of unworthiness. But that inner monologue is just a story, or rather, a collection of stories. I probably don’t even remember the facts correctly. I may have fabricated or conflated entire episodes. However, I remember the feelings. And that’s what our stories are about — feelings.

Whether our story is filled with facts or fabrications, we always bring that inner monologue with us no matter how, where, or with whom we show up in the world.

There it was. My locker.

All was lost.

Our hall lockers came in pairs, each pair consisting of a tall, skinny bottom part and a rectangular top part. My locker was the one on top, and I couldn’t reach it.

Even though the school, my peers, and the universe now recognized my status as a teenager, my body did not. I was still the smallest kid in the class, as I had been since 4th grade.

I knew this was a possibility, of course. I dreaded this outcome the entire bus ride to school and throughout the pre-locker homeroom activities. I had a 50/50 shot, and I lost.

This wasn’t going to work, and I had to tell the teacher. For a split second, I thought, “Maybe nobody will notice.” Already a shy, unsure, and self-conscious kid, I was terrified, but I did it.

And that’s when the nightmare became a reality.

The teacher called over my locker partner, a girl, and said we were to switch places because I couldn’t reach mine. She giggled a bit, the teacher giggled a bit, and within 1.4 seconds, the entire class knew my shame.

I had to switch lockers because I was too short. I was not worthy of the gifts bestowed upon a teenager with a locker. My talisman was a cheap piece of costume jewelry. It had no power.

I wasn’t a teenager. I was still a baby. Where was my cubby?

The day was here.

The new bus ride. The new people. The new school. Equal parts excitement and dread.

This was the first day of sixth grade — middle school.

Once settled into our homerooms, our first official task as middle schoolers? The locker.

Where would my locker be? Who would be next to me? Would I have time to stop at my locker between classes? Would I remember the combination?

As children in a semi-rural community, each of us converged on the middle school from outlier elementary schools, many with a single classroom per grade. We had never seen most of our classmates before. We knew nothing of changing classrooms mid-day.

Lockers in the hall? Uh, no. A cubby in the classroom and a wall hook for your jacket.

A cubby was for children. Lockers were for teenagers.

The locker was the talisman of the middle schooler. We were no longer shackled to a particular room, teacher, or even the same group of kids. It represented endless possibilities.

The locker was also the center of middle school social life. It was our own little piece of real estate in the community.

“Meet me at my locker.”

Entire soap operas, playoff recaps, movie reviews, and music performances came to life in those 4 minutes between classes, 60-90 seconds of which were spent at the locker.

This was the moment.

I got fired while on vacation with my family at the beach.

It was in the late summer of 2004. I got the call from my manager while sipping a beer on the deck of the rental home, and he gave me the news.

“I’m so sorry to inform you, but you’ve been put on the list of people who will be laid off…”

I have no idea what he said after that first sentence. In one dreadful instant, the culmination of a lifetime of worry came to a head and flipped me upside down.

I had no control, and I was terrified.

What am I going to do? 

What will my wife and kids think of me? What will my friends say about me? What will the world think of me?

Am I a failure?

Am I less of a husband, father, man?

And why me? What’s wrong with me? 

Am I not good enough at my job? Am I not a valuable employee, or a valuable person?  

As it turns out, I didn’t get laid off at that time. I was rescued off the list and moved to another group and set of projects. 

Crisis averted. 

But that crisis, that existential moment of dread, has become one of the moments for which I am most thankful.

It woke me up. It was the inflection point. 

It was the moment that I decided to change the story and focus on what I could control.

Thumbing through pictures…

“Wasn’t that when we had the Dodge? Damn, that thing was a pain in the ass. Remember when the thermostat stuck shut on the way to the farm?”

“Look at that. There’s the old red Wheel Horse. That sumbitch just worked. Remember when we pulled out that old tree stump?”

“Right! I think that was about the same time we got that old piece of shit Maytag. Remember when that sucker let loose all over the basement on Christmas Eve?”

I’m a Gen-X’er. 1969, to be exact. The year of the moon landing, Woodstock, and the birth of ARPANET. 

We, the Gen-X’ers mark the end of a nostalgic era in mechanized life. An era in which we fully anthropomorphize the machines from our past as family members. These machines are full-on characters in the stories we tell. Sometimes protagonists, and often just MacGuffins, but always playing a role. 

Watch a Gen-X’er or boomer thumbing through pictures. Watch the eyes when a mechanized family member pops up, usually in the background. Then pay attention as briefly the story takes a quick sidebar. Complete with one’s overall view of the machine and a specific illustrating memory.

We live stories. We tell stories. We remember our past through stories and the characters in them. And our past informs who we are and the lens through which we see the world.

Those stories and their characters, including the mechanized ones, make us who we are. 

The gardner does.
The flower receives.
The birdwatcher observes.

You might be called to one from deep in your gut, or the universe, or God. Or you might find comfort and balance in shifting between.

Maybe you started out as one, but that was then, and this is now. Just look at how much life has happened since then. You could never be that again. So now you’re another.

That’s OK. You’re no robot. You’re a human. You are the journey.

Whichever you are, or rather, whenever you are, be a good one.

Becoming famous is simple. 

All you need to do is get the public to recognize you: to know your name, face, or the work you do. That’s a one-step formula.

But let’s face it. You and I are already famous. At least in our own circles. Even if it’s just your family, friend group, or colleagues, you can always define a public in which you are famous.

Most of the time, “What did the important person say?” really means, “What did the famous person say?” Does it ever actually matter what the famous person says?

Whereas, “You’re important to me” or “You’re important to us” carries an entirely different wagonload. 

What if we used our famousness, at whatever level each of us is famous, as a means to dig into our importance?

What would you do with a 1000-chimp army?

If you cared for a large property, maybe you’d put them to work on that — mowing, weeding, trimming, raking, cleaning.

If you ran a manufacturing plant with an assembly line, maybe you’d put them to work on that — picking, moving, drilling, spraying, screwing.

If you managed a data analytics firm, maybe you’d put them to work on that — gathering, calculating, sorting, interpreting, publishing.

What would those chimps need to do that work?

They’d need a lot of training, oversight, and checking of their work. Presumably, they might need less and less over time with the right amount. It’s possible they’d even form some sort of hierarchy that would take care of a lot of it.

But you know what they really need from you because they will never have on their own?

Intent. Only you can provide intent.

This message isn’t about chimpanzees.