Sunday, July 5, 2009

Rocks and Sand


LeeAnn and I spent the 4th of July weekend at Snowbird. We stayed at one of the resort hotels and invited our kids who were in town to come up and do the mountain activities with us on Saturday. I think they had a ball. I know I did and LeeAnn had as good a time as she could with a nasty cold.
This morning I woke up early as I sometimes do, in one of those "got lots to do" fevers. This time it wasn't about more work at the office to do than I can possibly get done though. I was thinking more about things that needed to be addressed at home. And foremost was a feeling that I need to take care of the things that "matter most" and start shedding some of the things that don't make that list.
At age 50+, the fact that I won't live long enough to do all the things that I might like to do is coming home to roost. If I live to be 100, I'm still more than half dead. Continuing to fool myself about this, and putting off decisions about what gets my attention and what gets ash-canned has to qualify as one version of leaning uphill.
One of the things that has to stay on the attention list is quality time with family. This whole weekend was very satisfying: A weekend away with my wife, a day playing with family and then today, attending the blessing of my niece's new baby and time spent with extended family. These kinds of things can't be pushed off onto a siding.
I'm one of those guys who's attention gets grabbed by a whole lot of things. The whole world--nearly--is interesting to me. And I probably don't have to give up as much of it as I may think. I remember someone giving a talk in church or a speech somewhere else wherein they used a very graphic visual aid. They placed a large glass jar on the podium and then next to it set a bucket of large rocks, a pail of small gravel chunks and a jar of sand. They then tried to fit all of these quarry products into the jar by first dumping in the sand, then the gravel, and finally the rocks. It all never came close to going in. But when they dumped it all out again and then put in first the stones, then the gravel and finally the sand, the smaller ingredients sifted around the larger ones, already in place and it all fit nicely. Magic!
My first task has to be finding the five or six large rocks in my life and fitting them in first before I start giving up other things. Otherwise I might end up giving up half my life or more and still not having room to fit the big things in.
Refusing to make discerning choices: It's definitely one of the more egregious ways I have of trying to ski leaning uphill.
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It's not about skiing: It's about what I learned when I learned to ski.

You can't have fun skiing if you always lean uphill towards the seeming security of the uphill slope: Leaning up is natural for most of us though: after all, if you fall uphill, you don't have as far to go before you hit.
Trouble is when you ski like that, you spend a lot of time in the snow. Your center of balance is all out of whack, your skis slide out from under you and down you go. It's no fun.
If you want to zoom down the slopes free and easy you have to commit to the fall line, get your "nose over your toes" and risk tumbling head over heels once in a while in a glorious confusion of arms and legs and skis. But once you make the commitment: Surprise! You hardly ever fall and you can ski!
I don't ski much any more but life is like that too. You have to commit and risk a crash if you really want to live a full life.
This web log is a chronicle of the ways I find myself leaning up into the hill, and what happens when I catch myself doing it, and then lean forward instead.

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