Peter wasn’t one of the kids who aced the test (where’s Felicity Huffman when you need her?), but he did just fine. Better than fine, actually. He’s got a bright future ahead of him, perhaps in plastics.
In just a few short months, he’ll be attending Ohio University, the oldest university in Ohio (and 8th oldest public university in the U.S.). It’s about two and a half hours east of Cincinnati. Which means he’ll be our first kid to leave town to go to college. That’s not surprising… Peter is quite independent. Some kids march to the beat of a different drummer… Peter has a complete band playing in his head.
He’s a fitness fanatic with a super-healthy diet, has a sly sense of humor and never got in trouble during his high school years. Well, other than that silly senior prank involving Silly String.
He got busted and had to stay after school on his 18th birthday… adulting is hard!
I know Peter’s ready to leave the nest, but I don’t think we’re ready for it.
By August, we’ll have two kids out of the house and two left. It’s hard to believe… and even harder to let them go.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by RMV/REX/Shutterstock (9646726aw)
Frightened Rabbit – Scott Hutchison
Handmade Festival, Leicester, UK – 30 Apr 2018
Lead singer and chief songwriter of Frightened Rabbit, a brilliant band from Scotland. He battled depression for years, and ultimately couldn’t break free of its grip.
There are no casual Frightened Rabbit fans. You either love them or you’ve never heard of them. (The latter can be rectified, btw.) There was a sadness to Scott’s lyrics — that’s what drew us in. We are all damaged… lost souls in need of a friend… lonely hearts wanting love.
The sadness that drew us in also stole him away. Depression is a liar and a thief.
It’s been a year and I’m still torn up about it. I try to get through by focusing not on the darkness, but rather on the light. I think about the joy he brought to the world, rather than dwelling on his sad exit.
Mostly, I think of my friends who are also fans… Dale, Michael, Ric, Deuce, Sara, Reid, Maggie… We’re still here. And we can pay heed to Scott’s lyrics:
Last Sunday I did a 5K walk as a fundraiser for the American Heart Association. This sheet was in the registration packet:
Sure, “your event is not timed” means that no one was checking our pace with a stopwatch. (Actually a sundial would’ve sufficed for me.) But it struck me that you could also assign a different — and much deeper — meaning to that. I was participating in the walk in memory of a college friend of mine, Kim Collins, who died suddenly of a heart attack last May at the age of 52.
Nearly 30 of Kim’s relatives and friends participated in the walk.
Kim’s siblings Drew, Lisa and Jimmy
Kim and her sister Lisa lived together, worked together, spent nearly every waking moment together… they were inseparable. Kim went to bed early on a Friday because she was having back pain… she never woke up.
“Your event is not timed.” The event is life, and it’s not timed for any of us. We never expected to lose Kim so soon. Lisa never imagined she’d be without her only sister/roommate/best friend in the blink of an eye. We may think about mortality from time to time, but do we ever truly appreciate the good fortune of merely waking up each morning?
Your event is not timed. Now’s the time to be grateful for each day on this earth, and share that gratitude with those we love.
Time for another installment of “dubbatrubba sings the praises of ‘Gaping Void'”… it’s a monthly feature of this blog. Hugh MacLeod sends out a daily email with a cartoon-like doodle of art, and a few words of wisdom. They’re all great, and you should sign up for the mailing list on the Gaping Void website. Reading his email is often the best minute or two of my workday.
You should also read Hugh’s book Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.
A Gaping Void post from last week struck me as particularly poignant. Check it out:
One of the things we affluent, supposedly happy Westerners suffer from, is that we like to make our lives far too complicated.
We take on far too much responsibility at work, we buy houses that are far too big for our families, we spend far too much money going out, fancy cars etc., we try to read far too many books, we buy far too many toys, the list goes on.
And then the bill comes… as it always does.
You’re much better off with a simple life.
The simple life begins not with stuff, but from the human heart.
The latter, by the way, doesn’t scale.
True happiness is an inward journey.
That’s where the real joy is.
Good luck.
Ah, Hugh, you’ve done it again. Genius… plain and simple!
Sorry to channel my inner Greta Garbo, but it’s true. At least it’s true for the office, most of the time.
I work in one of those “open office” environments that companies love to tout these days… even though they don’t work for things like, oh, doing actual work! They’re supposed to promote collaboration but really they just promote confabulation. They’re supposed to foster innovation but are better at creating interruption.
Last year, a survey by enterprise software strategist William Belk found that 58 percent of high-performance employees say they need more private spaces for problem solving, and 54 percent of HPEs say their office environment is “too distracting.” The survey netted 700 respondents from a broad swath of industries.
In 2013, researchers from the University of Sydney examined the “privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices” and found that the benefits of easy communication that are intended to go along with open-plan offices don’t outweigh the drawbacks, such as a huge lack of privacy.
And, psychologist Nick Perham found that office noise impairs workers’ ability to recall information and even do basic arithmetic.
I’m a music lover, so my headphones save the day nearly every day. But my company also has not one, but two forms of instant messaging apps active right now. And I despise them… they are the biggest interruptors of “flow” ever created, and I’m a flow guy to my core. (Learn more about flow, also known as being “in the zone” in the TED talk below.)
The book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (co-founders of Basecamp) , is my new bible. I love what they have to say about chat apps.
“Yet another thing that asks for your continuous partial attention all day on the premise that you can’t miss out.”
While they admit that there are times when chat is handy, overall it typically makes it way too easy for someone to interrupt a colleague:
“But it’s terrrible when that one expert is fielding their fifth random question of the day and suddenly the day is done.
The person with the question needed something and got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That’s rarely a fair trade.”
Amen, Brother Jason and Brother David! Finally someone who understands where I’m coming from on this topic, and doesn’t think that I’m just being a stubborn old man in the face of change. (I’m still a stubborn old man, but we all need alone time to do our best work.)
The entire book is great for:
A. pointing out the many reasons why the current norms for the “crazy” corporate world need a major overhaul AND
B. offering much calmer alternatives.
It’s highly recommended.
And since we started with a Greta Garbo reference, we should end with one… from The Kinks!
I spent some time crate-digging over the weekend, looking through the albums at the thrift shops near my house. (Yes, thrift shops – plural – we live in a classy neighborhood!) Two albums from 70s pop idols caught my eye.
Donny Osmond and David Cassidy… it doesn’t get any more 70s than that. No, I did NOT purchase them! Mainly because I don’t care for bubblegum pop… and also because the Donny album cover seems a bit too, shall we say, pedophile?
But those album covers gave me a chance to contemplate a few things:
Why am I spending weekends in thrift shops?
Why is Donny’s album twice the price of David’s?
What’s the price of fame?
Donny and David had a lot in common. Hit songs, hit TV shows, multiple TigerBeat covers, huge fan clubs… and amazing hairstyles. But they wound up on different paths. Donny fell off the pop culture radar for most of the 80s, but has had top 10 songs since then, done musical theater, hosted TV game shows and syndicated radio shows, won a season of Dancing with the Stars, and has been appearing in Vegas (where else?) with his sister Marie since 2008.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1088191265148006400
David Cassidy‘s post-teen-idol path was a bit rockier. He had modest Top 40 success after the Partridge Family, dabbled in musical theater and acting… and had the requisite reality TV appearance (Celebrity Apprentice, 2011). He also had multiple drunk driving charges from 2010 on, filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and died of liver failure (due to alcoholism) in 2017.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “there are no second acts in American lives.” In Donny’s case, he was wrong. In David’s, he was correct. Fame is fleeting, and it can extract a heavy toll from your life. Gaining fame is great fun… but losing it isn’t.
Some are born to move the world To live their fantasies But most of us just dream about The things we’d like to be
Sadder still to watch it die Than never to have known it For you, the blind who once could see The bell tolls for thee….
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
You done said…