Life at 3 miles an Hour

I’m on vacation. Just being able to write those words should somehow elicit some overwhelming feelings of joy shouldn’t it? Vacation….I’ll write it again and see if it sinks in. I had always expected more. I’m having a “Princess Bride” moment right now. You know the line. “Vizini, you use that word a lot, I do not think it means what you think it means…” That’s how I’m feeing about vacation. It used to be that I had high hopes for what one might actually be like. That was, of course, back in the day before I could afford to really take a true vacation. You know the type, airlines, rental cars, eating out, blah, blah, blah. Now that I’m older and more capable of taking said vacation, not to mention that I’m older and really need said vacation, I have found that it is all illusion. A friend asked me, “where would you go on vacation if you could go anywhere?” That’s a nice thought. I really didn’t have an answer for that. Every place I could think of involved airlines and ren...

I live within a closed world. At least sometimes it’s closed. Too often it’s closed. It shouldn’t be closed at all….ever. After all, the one who created said world formed it with quite the opposite view in mind. The world I refer to is the world of my faith. Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not closed unto myself. It is actually the community which one becomes associated with when living within a faith context that can too easily become closed. We can speak our own language. We have our own symbols. We have initiation rights and coded conversations. To be fair, most of us don’t realize that we’re doing it. Many that I am friends with would never seek to live in that vein. And to be fairer still, I have been part of many subcultures who act in much the same manner. In my manufacturing engineering days I existed in a culture of acronyms. Never knowing what any of these letters or designations stood for, we would pompously posture ourselves to show off our limited yet impressive ...

I’m into wrestling lately it would seem. I’m not referring to the “men in tights”, thrashing around on a big mat, type of wrestling. I’m also not referring to the chair on the head, cage match to the death, arena lights and fog machines, pseudo rock star world of the WWF. It’s a more personal form of wrestling. It’s like shadow wrestling if there was such a thing. Most of us deal with it. Some of us deny it and still others are treated for it. The opponent is a formidable one to be sure. Everyone has, is, or will face him. In my life, I’ll just call the opponent “the point”. Some would call him “purpose”. You may call him "meaning". Whatever the name, the contest is the same. I refer to it as wrestling because I know the feelings, emotional and physical that are attached to a real life wrestling match. Unknown to most, except those who have known me from childhood, is the deep secret that I was once a person of the mat. I was actually fairly good at it. In my short tenure I w...

It’s amazing the things that one notices when paying attention. I’ve been coming to this particular part of the universe most weeks for the past year or so. And is my nature, I usually sit in the exact same place. Some would call that boring. Some would call that predictable. I call it calculated. Whatever. It’s just who I am. Anyway, this morning, as I sat at my corner table, I realized something very profound. I face the corner, but just to the left of my table is a window. There is also one just to my right, next to me in fact. Looking straight ahead, my view is divided by the corner into two distinctly different worlds. I’ll refer to the one on my left as “coming” and the one to my right as “going”. In the world of “coming”, off to my left, there are streams of people and their various means of transportation slowing to approach the intersection. They have decisions to make as well as signals to give. Some are approaching with caution and some are testing the laws of physics and br...