Do you remember the last moment when time stood still for you?
I do. For me, it was the last class of the last day of my junior year of high school. May 2001.* I'm sitting there in Mr. Takatsuka's classroom, and the minutes are dragging by painfully slow. Sure, this was due in part to the impending desire to begin all the glorious things that come with your Senior Year Summer.
*To note how long ago that was: gas was around a buck, "Weapons of Mass Destruction" wasn't a part of our lexicon, and Britney Spears hadn't shaved her head.
But there was another reason, too. For as excited as I was about starting life at the top of the public-school* food chain, there was within me an overriding fear; a realization that the countdown to young adulthood was about to begin. A year from now, I'd be removed from the veritable empire I'd established, a world that included three guaranteed meals a day, a closet full of clean clothes, and a list of responsibilities that seems astonishingly embarrassing in retrospect.
*Fort Dodge Senior High, for the St. Louis readers.
So there, in that moment, time stood still long enough for me to realize, if not fully appreciate, the amazing degree of good fortune I'd been blessed with in 17 short years, and the degree of work it was going to translate "good fortune" into "hard-earned".
Now sure, I've had my emotions moved in other ways since then. When I came back to school that fall, the unbridled enthusiasm of Senior Year was interrupted by the shock, then fear, of September 11th and what that might mean for me and my soon-to-be-draft-eligible classmates. During an internship in college, I had every breath in my body knocked from my lungs by the most gorgeous woman I'd ever seen. Three years later, that same woman knocked the breath right back out of me when she walked my way down the aisle at our wedding. When my son was born, I cried for three days straight at the combination of joy, amazement, and fear.
But ever since May 2001, these and other events have been but interludes in what has become an increasingly breakneck pace to life. As funny as it sounds, daily routines seem to not slow the pace any, but rather make it fly by faster and faster: run to work late, catch up at work, drive to daycare at speeds that would make Jeff Gordon blush,* make something quick for dinner, sleep, repeat. Remember the dad on the TV show "The Wonder Years"? His name was Jack Arnold, and he had this great line in response to his kid asking him what he does for a living: "I get up at 5am, I fight traffic, I bust my hump all day, I fight traffic again, and come home... [smiles] And I pay my taxes." Jack Arnold was not one to spend much time in thoughtful reflection, folks.
*$10 per minute for every minute you're late, ya'll!
Now lest you think I've gone off the deep end or that I'm having some sort of quarter-life crisis, let me get to the point of all of this. Maybe its not that May 2001 was the last day time stood still. Maybe its just the last day I purposefully took time to stop and reflect on where I had been in life's journey, where I was then, and where I was headed. That becomes harder and harder to do as we get older (read: more responsibility), but its importance does not diminish.
I love the Jimmy V speech. The one they show on ESPN where he implores the audience "Don't give up, don't ever give up." Well, there's another great line in there that fits the spirit of this post. Coach Valvano says, "To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special."
I'm turning 30 in 333 days.* And it has me thinking, for the first time since May 2001, about where I've been, where I'm at, and where I'm going. There's something about turning 30 that makes me feel like I should turn back, salute the young man I was, and begin to embrace the, what, more seasoned man I'm about to become? You get my drift.
*I looked it up. God bless the internet.
As I've stated, reflecting is a hard thing to do these days. So, I'm going to make an effort to force myself to do it in the next 333 days. I'm going to accomplish this in two ways. One, I'm going to keep a blog so that people like my friend Ted can harass me if I go to long without posting.*
*I had a blog in college about the Kansas City Royals. Ted still asks me to this day when I'm going to post on it again.
Second, inspired by my favorite show I never watch-ESPN's 30 for 30 series-I'm going to tackle a list of 30 yet-to-be-determined items. I'm going to act on the challenge laid forth so eloquently by Jimmy V and laugh, think, and cry. Some things may be funny, some may be in the "deep-thoughts" vein. I'm not really sure beyond that where this project will take me.
I hope, too, that this will inspire some of you to do something similar. Maybe it won't be to risk public humiliation by blogging about thirty different things over the next sort-of year. But at a minimum, I hope you'll use it as a purposeful reminder to pump the breaks on your own life from time to time and reflect at the world around you.
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