overcoming average(?)

Couple ideas for tonight’s post rolling around in my head, but I’d be lying if I said that this bottle of The Bruery’s Trade Winds Tripel isn’t slightly muddling my focus. Instead of trying to just pick a topic and writing about it, I think I’ll just list the topics I have in my head.

- Every musician carries the self-imposed curse of wishing they were as good as they are ten years ago. If only we just could have been a good player without having to work for it.

- “Community” is (or maybe was) the best show on TV. As silly, or weird, or funny, or brilliant, or intelligent as it’s ever been, it’s also one of the most human shows out there. At the heart of the show is this amazing group of seven characters who start as strangers and continually choose to stick together as a group/family regardless of all their over-the-top flaws and idiosyncrasies. It just really speaks to me.

- My son slept through the entire night last night for the first time ever. He slept from 7:40pm until 7am and I’m so happy and proud of him. The wonderful irony is that I couldn’t fall asleep last night until after 2:30am and only ended up getting about four hours of sleep.

- I’ll say this once and then harp on it repeatedly leave it alone: I can’t understand wanting to keep taxes low on the very wealthy. I’m not saying punish success, I’m just saying that you made it with American society’s help and maybe you owe them. I didn’t say it, but to whom much is given, much is required.

- I seriously can’t wait for “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Prometheus,” and (maybe) “Brave.”

I saw a tweet today from a fellow #everydaymay writer who said that they feel like a few other writers are better at #everydaymay than they are. He included my name in that list, and honestly I was kind of confused by that because I feel like all the other writers doing this are better at it than I am.

I think that might be a common thing among us as writers. We constantly see what others are capable of writing and then wonder why we can’t be as prolific or talented. Maybe I’m just showing my own insecurity.

November was the last time I tried something like this. At the time, my son was four months old and I hadn’t slept more than four hours straight since he was born. (Even now, I’m only up to six.) I don’t know what I was thinking trying to write a blog post every day for a month. Without reading them again, I remember that I wrote most of those days even if it was terrible writing and I gave up about three weeks into it.

Yesterday I posted on Twitter the following sentence: “Really wish it was easier to grow out of being such an insecure little boy.” I won’t go into the details surrounding that tweet or why I did it. Actually, maybe I will go into why I posted that. I tweeted that because I am still an insecure little boy who deep down probably put that out for the world to see as some kind of “reassurance bait” that would lead to some positive attention. That sort of backfired, in that I was asked a genuine question that demands an actual answer. A Twitter/Blog friend of mine, Rissa replied this: “Deep. How do you do it realistically?” My immediate mental reaction was, “Hell, I don’t know.” That was soon followed by the more accurate thought of, “No, I know the truth. It’s just so much easier to wallow in self pity.” The point is that I replied to her that I sort of have an answer to that but that it is longer than a 140-character long tweet. So, here’s the blog post that explains how to grow out of being an insecure little boy insofar as I’ve come to understand it.

Step damn 1. Discover the Truth. Not the truth, the Truth. The truth is just something that can be thrown around to mean what you want it to, which in the end doesn’t amount to anything. The truth says that we’re all screwed up and life’s not fair and ends there. It’s reality without meaning. But the Truth is that God looks at you knowing the potential that He had always intended for you before the circumstances of a broken world could get in the way. The Truth says that He sees everything you were, are, and could have been and loves you deeper than you’ll ever know. The Truth, however, is harder to see and realize in a day to day existence, which brings us to Step 2.

Step 2. Live out what the Truth tells you. This is the hardest part and what makes it a process as opposed to an event. It’s kind of like making the transition from conscious thought to subconscious thought. For example, you learn how to tie your shoes as a kid and it can take some serious effort to get it right those first several times. Once you grow up a little though it’s something you don’t have to think about at all. You don’t even have to look at what you’re doing, you just do it. I know that God’s proud of me. I know that He made me exactly as He designed and has stayed with me to get me through the junk that’s happened in my life. The problem is that I know that in the same way I know that there was a genocide in Rwanda; it should affect what I do from one day to the next but doesn’t.

Step 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 as necessary.

Like I said, it’s a process as opposed to an event. It’s also perhaps the most difficult two step process I know and one I currently suck at.