This weekend, I am going to tackle the 23-mile Georgia Jewel. I'd originally signed up to run the 50 miler. So in many ways, I won't be where I want to be.
But that won't be my focus. This weekend, I'll spend my time being proud that I'm not where I used to be. Seven years ago, it would have been ludicrous for anyone to suggest I'd ever in my life run 23 miles through the mountains of Georgia. I didn't have the physical, mental or emotional strength necessary to even imagine such a run - let alone drive 8 hours to take it on. I'll also spend some time reminding myself that my big picture life isn't where it used to be either. I think life - left to its own devices - always leans in the direction of reminding us we are not who we want to be. Like, it seems to sense when we get to feeling good or confident about a direction, because with perfect timing that's when life appears out of nowhere with the reminder: you're not as good as you could be. You're nowhere near as good as you WANT to be..... That's when we have to fight back. We have to take over the narrative that life is trying to yell over us with. That's when we need to tell life - you're right, I'm not where I want to be, but I'm also not where I used to be. We need to say it out loud for ourselves and for life that we are making progress. We need to say it as a way of reminding ourselves that is what life is all about - a work in progress. Life doesn't often show up to make sure we know we're making progress. Life - most days - feels like it's set up to limit our progress. That's why life and progress often feels like a fight. Which is why we need to remind ourselves we ARE fighting. And we ARE winning. No, we aren't standing in the ring with the referee holding our hand in the air - the new heavyweight champion of the world. But we aren't laying on the mat with that referee counting us out either. So today, if you get to beating yourself up because you aren't where you want to be. Pause. Take a breath. Own it. But then quickly remind yourself you're also not where you used to be. And be proud of that... You are winning.
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Long before I was preparing to run off to the woods to tackle tens of miles at a time, I was a high school sprinter. In fact, I once said if running involved covering a distance further than one trip around the track - count me out!
I guess times have changed.... I've learned there's a big difference between sprinters and endurance runners. Endurance runners pride themselves on being able to run all day - be the last one to stop. For sprinters, the quick start is important. Be the first one to get going. I think life draws parallels from both. But I think sometimes we struggle more with adopting that sprinter's mindset. Once or twice in my high school sprinting days I false started. I was so anxious to beat everyone out of the blocks that I took off running before the starter fired his starter's pistol. I've become a big fan of attitudes that say I want to get this thing started before everyone else does. The other day, a work colleague let me know she'd emailed a mutual contact to get a deal on a conference we're trying to send some folks to from Virginia. She had no idea I'd already worked something out with this contact. She apologized; said she was just trying to take something off my plate. I told her no apology necessary - I LOVE people who false start in the name of making things happen. For me, it's much easier to fix false starts than it is to get someone going who is standing still. False starts say eager. Standing still says I'm not sure about this. Srini Rao says, "A false start is better than standing still. You'll make mistakes, but you'll also learn things you didn't know before. You'll be further along than if you had done nothing at all." Isn't that the truth? We always learn something when we do something. We always learn nothing when we do nothing. Sometimes we de-value the opportunity to learn while we foolishly wait on the perfect place to start. Well, starting is the perfect place to start. Just start. In fact, be so anxious to start that sometimes you just might false start. Take comfort when you do. After a false start, you've learned something the person standing still will likely never learn. What's something you've been waiting for the perfect day to start? Let me encourage you: today is the perfect day. Quit prioritizing perfection, start prioritizing the chance to learn. Sometimes, when I'm going through a tough time, I overlook God. I overlook him because I'm expecting God to show up and make my tough time go away. I get to believing God will be found in the disappearing act - so when the tough time lives on - I assume God is not there.
But my God isn't a disappearing God. He takes far more pleasure in saying "watch what I'm going to do with this" than he does in saying "watch me make this go away." I think we get that if we see God as a God who wants to shape our character and not our comfort. Running has taught me that. Last night I shared briefly about my Georgia Jewel journey. Over the years, that one event has been the home of more physical, mental and emotional challenges than I can count. But every one of those challenges has shaped a better and stronger me. To the point that I know those experiences have never been about making me better at running the Georgia Jewel, they've been about making me better at being Keith. Last weekend, I got to speak to the incoming freshmen at the college where I work part-time. College was one of the most challenging times of my life. There were days I wondered if I'd ever make it out of that decade long college experience alive. But there I was - alive and well - talking to a group of young people just beginning their own college experiences. There I was, a full grown miracle, a miracle grown out of days I simply wanted God to make go away. As I watched those kids' eyes focus on me. As I watched them absorb every word - some much more intensely than others - I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if God had simply made those days disappear. What if my God had been more interested in showing me my comfort instead of his miracles? I know God's not done answering that question. I know some day in the future, at least one of those 400 kids is going to benefit from God's relentless commitment to changing me - even when it feels like he's ignoring my plea to just make it all go away. There are many days, now - when I'm feeling the adversity in my life - that I don't even bother asking God to make it all go away. I've come to realize God doesn't enjoy seeing me suffer. He doesn't take pleasure in my discomfort. But God does enjoy seeing me grow. He does celebrate seeing me change. Oh how he loves planting seeds. Because when we're standing in the moments of those seeds turned to miracles, we know exactly who planted them. And we're suddenly thankful that God is much more than a disappearing act. We live in a world that is so vocal about what it's against that I sometimes wonder if anyone can be nearly as vocal - and articulate - about what they are for.
I sometimes wonder how much time we even spend pondering what we're for. It's easy, really, to be against something. In many ways the world gets set up that way. Many kids are raised to be afraid of doing what the family is against. Many religions are founded on making us afraid of doing what that particular religion is against. Many employers manage their employees by making them afraid of doing something the company is against. The end result is often a world full of people running around certain of what they are against - to protect themselves they HAVE to know it - without having any idea what they are truly for. Seth Godin says, "it's possible to be in favor of something without being against something else." I'm not sure everyone believes that. I'm not sure I always have. You know, I waited until I was in my mid-30s to get married. I always said I wouldn't get married until I knew I'd never get divorced. That's because to me, based on a lot of cultural and spiritual ideals, the definition of marriage WAS not getting divorced. Til death do us part..... What I know now - it's possible to be so against divorce that you no longer know what it takes to stay together. You can spend so much time and energy holding a stop sign up to divorce that you no longer have any idea what a green light looks or feels like in the marriage the stop sign is trying to protect. Sometimes we can become so proud of ourselves for not being one of those people who gets divorced that we have no idea how unhealthy our fixation on not becoming one of them has made us. Sometimes we stand so firm and fearful against the things we're against that we have no idea how to stand up for the things we're for. These days, I am absolutely for every marriage staying together until death do us part. And I'm no longer against divorce. Some people will say that's a lack of principle. I'll say it's defining a focus. Because the reality is, when we're sure about what we're for, that is an 'us' thing - it sharpens our focus on the things that will make OUR lives better and healthier. It will do the same for the people closest to us. What we're against - well that's often an 'others' thing. It often reflects our desire to apply pressure on the choices other people are making for THEIR lives. And it's often an attempt to recruit people to stand against the things we stand against. This week, maybe spend some time reflecting on what you are for. And why are you for it. Knowing what we're for - and why - that's a much better path forward than knowing what we're against. Knowing what we're against often isn't a path at all. It's often a stance; a wall. Stephen King once said, ""If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness."
Yesterday, I met in person with the team I work with at my state job. A 'real life' meeting. My boss gathered all 12 of us together in her back yard. It was the first time we'd been together in 18 months. EIGHTEEN. MONTHS. In fact, there were 3 new people on the team I'd never met on the other side of a screen. I was sitting at one end of the table with folks whose offices used to be closest to mine back when offices were a thing. The folks I used to cut up with the most. The folks who may have helped me get our wing of the building labeled the 'party wing.' Which, depending on how hard people were trying to work in other wings, wasn't always said with affection...... Well, it didn't take long before we were cutting up again. And there I was, laughing uncontrollably, the tears rolling down my face, folks at the other end of the table wondering what on earth we had to drink in our cups. The truth is we were drinking water. The truth is what we were laughing about wasn't really that funny at all. The truth is we were going crazy with togetherness. It became official in my world yesterday. There is nothing the online world can do to replicate real world togetherness. I'm not saying the online world doesn't have a role in connection, it does, but IT IS NOT togetherness. Our team has been meeting online once a week for the last 70 weeks. And yesterday, I felt more togetherness - more alive - in that one 60 second burst of laughter than I'd felt in our 140 hours of online meeting time combined. In that one moment of going crazy with togetherness, I came to fully understand just how crazy I was going with loneliness. I knew I was lonely; yesterday I discovered just how unhealthy that loneliness has been. Not just for me, but for all of us. Yesterday, I discovered there is no replicating the most important part of our churches. There is no replicating the most important part of our employment. There is no replicating the most important part of our schools. There is no replicating any of that because there is no remotely close substitute for what happens when two or more lives are sharing the same space together. As much as I value the chance for you and I to come together in this space in the mornings to share our minds and hearts, we are not sharing our lives here. Life happens when we are doing life together. I like to think this is a good space to make us better at doing life together. There is an unseen and often unspoken value that comes with just being near one another. Physically near. When we are tens or hundreds or even thousands of miles away in a screen, no words close that distance. No words hold the same power to connect humanity that proximity holds. When we can't share that proximity, being online together is a great way to fill that gap. I'm thankful for it. But I think it's time we get more committed to eliminating the gap than filling it. It's time we get back to going crazy with togetherness. Yesterday, my friend Hannah posted an image of a text from her teenage daughter. The text said, "the bus driver remembered my name."
In her post, Hannah said, "In case you’re wondering teachers, bus drivers, staff, it matters… even to the big kids ❤️. I wrote yesterday about how in the earliest days of our lives our brains get wired to need acceptance. Acceptance makes us feel safe. Do you know what the very first word we often hear is, the word we hear most when our brains are most actively wiring together the sights and sounds that make us feel safe? Our name. More than anything else in the earliest moments of my life, the thing that made me feel safest was the word Keith. Because the people who were coming into my life saying Keith were the same people coming into my life to confirm that I was accepted and safe. That is why my friend Hannah is right. Remembering someone's name - using it to address them - it matters. It matters to the big kids. And I promise you, it even matters to the very old kids like me. There's something that happens when someone greets me in person or sends me a message and adresses me by my name. It's a feeling. It's safe. My guess is that feeling is tied to a memory in my brain that goes all the way back to the cradle, where people saying my name was the safest way I had at the time of identifying my people. Hannah's daughter yesterday - when the bus driver called her by her name - she felt like the bus driver was saying 'you are my people.' You are my people comes with a feeling of acceptance. When it comes from someone you assumed had forgotten your name, it can also make you feel special. Relationships and acceptance are challenging. But there are some things we can do that are quite simple. Simple, yet when you are on the receiving end of them, they are something to write home to mom about. Simple like calling someone by their name. Today, if you want to make someone feel accepted, call them by their name. And if you want to go a step further and make someone feel special, call someone by their name who assumes you have no idea what it is. Because I think Carnegie is right, "names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language." I've thought about this a lot lately. How our expectations of one another stand in the way of us loving one another. We spend so much time expecting people to be the kind of people we can love, and then resenting them for not becoming those people, that expectations often become a bigger pathway to hate than to love.
As I sit here this morning, the greatest gift in my life is the gift of God's love. I get to start my day knowing I am loved. Right now. God isn't waiting until lunchtime or bedtime or next week, when maybe I start acting like someone a little more lovable, God is saying to me in this very moment: I accept you just as you are. God went to great lengths to prove that. When he came to earth and went walking from village to village preaching about love, his messages always started with I accept who you are and who you've been - he didn't start by making people put their hands on the bible and promise to change before he loved them. Jesus always led with I accept you. Any expectations Jesus had of people always started with the promise that I already love you. I always have; I always will. In the earliest days of our lives, as babies, that is how we come to define love. We come to define it like Jesus defined it - by acceptance. We define it by the people who keep showing up, no matter what, love in their eyes, saying you are my people. That never goes away - even as we grow older - the need to be accepted. The need to see it and feel it in the people who show up in our lives. But as we grow older, sadly, it's often expectations that stand in the way of that. Babies are easy to accept. We give them unconditional understanding for why they aren't acting exactly the way we think they should act. We hold off on expectations and go all in on love. Somehow we lose sight of that secret to life as the baby becomes a child and then a teen and then an adult. We somehow think the definition of love changes over the lifespan. Well for God it doesn't. God tells us he will always love us like a little child. Even when we are adults. Does he tell us that because it's the secret to HIS love, or because he wants us to discover the pathway to OUR love? Maybe today experiment with making the balance of your interactions with people lean more toward acceptance than expectations. It is the more loving way to lean. More and more, I have a growing fear that people are being encouraged to 'be hard' instead of 'be resilient.' Although I think there are times being hard can be a life saver, if being hard becomes our primary tool for managing stress, most of us will end up with a life of stress.
I do a lot of presentations on resiliency. I usually open them by admitting "I hate the word resiliency." It's not because I don't value someone being resilient. I do. A lot. It's just that I know the moment I start talking about someone becoming more resilient, the audience immediately thinks I'm talking about someone becoming more hard. Let's stop and think for a second about how we are built to manage stress. We come into this world little balls of stress. We emerge from a comfortable dark and quiet and warm womb where we've been hanging out for nine months, and then abruptly face a world of lights and noise and chaos. Talk about stress. And then someone meets us screaming 'stay hard.' No, that's NOT how someone meets us in that moment. Most of us were met by someone showing up to help us manage our stress. They held us. They used a reassuring voice. They smiled at us. Resilience building began with someone showing up, not someone challenging us to suck it up. In the earliest days of our life, resilience building is someone showing up in our stress, helping us learn to manage the level of stress we're in, so that the next time we encounter it we are better equipped to manage it on our own. Which sets the stage for us to learn to manage the next level of stress. Please note that I said 'manage' stress - and not 'be hard' through it. Most of the time, when people are encouraging us to stay hard, they want us to believe that no matter how tough times become we have the personal capacity to endure them. We have what it takes inside us to deal with our circumstances long enough that we will somehow come out the other side as survivors. Again, I think there are moments in life we need to know we are hard enough to survive. But when we begin adopting 'be hard' as our way of managing all challenging moments in life, we are not doing life, we are surviving it. Be hard is a 'you've got this' mantra for life. Be resilient, that's a 'we're in this together' mantra. The mantra that has been wired into us from the moment we emerged from the womb. We are not wired to be hard, we are wired to be together. We are not wired to endure stress, we are wired to navigate it with each other. The more we come to believe that being hard is the same thing as being resilient, the more we start to believe people have the power to endure things most people are not wired to endure, the more we believe people can do things on their own they just can't do - the moment we start believing people have a hardness they just don't have - the less we show up for them. There's a lot of research that says we are lonelier than we've ever been. I think that's because we've come to believe we and the people around us are hard enough to go it alone. And you know what, we're not. We were never wired to be hard enough to go it alone. We are paying a price for confusing hard with resilient. We can fix it, though. We can. We can start showing up for people instead of telling them to harden up. After all, that's what we were made to do. One of the many things running has taught me is this: no one is sending us our prizes in this world.
When it comes to prizes, I figure we're in one of three places: We've given up on the prize; for many reasons we don't believe it will ever be ours. We believe in the prize, but we're waiting for it to magically show up in our lives. Or - we are so sure the prize will be ours that we're out there working our way toward it every single day. Life BR (before running), I think I spent a lot of time in that second space. The space of waiting and wishing. This space of knowing and believing I have gifts and talents that are unique to me, and capable of bringing unique gifts to the world, yet, a space I was far more comfortable living in than working in. After all, dreaming is so much easier than doing. On our recent trip, my boys were talking about all the ideas people have gotten rich from, ideas my boys just know they could have come up with. I told them ideas aren't game changers. Being willing to leave the space where ideas are made to live in a space where people work on making ideas real - that's the game changer. The willingness to leave wishing and dreaming to begin the work of dream pursuing - that's the game changer. I love the life metaphor of running. I love the sequence of it all. This idea that we all start with some level of 'I could never do that.' But for some reason we just can't stop imagining that prize at the finish line - it won't let go of us. It won't quit telling us 'yes you can do that.' Then one day we believe it. And we start running, day after day, until we are standing there at the finish line - someone handing us the prize we have won. The prize that says you have gone from 'I could never do that' to 'you just did it.' We walk away with the prize, but the prize is much bigger than the medal or the trophy or the blanket. We will set those prizes on a rack or a shelf. We will look at them from time to time. And when we do, I hope you hear your prizes say what I hear mine say. There are more prizes out there. But Amazon's not delivering them. You have to go get them. You have to put in the labor. Labor is the difference between dreams that die and dreams that come true. Labor is the difference between wishing and living. Labor is the difference between the gifts that haunt you and the gifts the light up the world. So go put in the labor. Go light up the world. It's been a rough few weeks for relationships in our country. It happens when our passion for agreement becomes more important than our desire to love.
It happens when we feel a need for everyone to agree with what we think happened in Afghanistan. It happens when we feel the need for everyone to agree with what we think about vaccines and masks and abortions. It happens when we feel the need for everyone to bow down to the same president and the same Jesus or not-Jesus we bow down to. It happens when we let WHAT we believe interfere with the WAY we love. In a couple of weeks, I get to have a reunion with a buddy I haven't seen in a couple of decades. We will be meeting at the Georgia Jewel where he'll be running the most challenging race of HIS life. And sharing in that - it will be one of the most meaningful experiences of MY life. It will be meaningful NOT because of our shared love for running long distances on trails, but because of the way we've navigated all the things we haven't shared a love for over the decades. Because when it comes to beliefs, there are many we don't share. I think that's why - when I think about relationships that have shaped my life - this one is one of the more meaningful ones. This relationship has showed me NOT what happens when you obediently love people who disagree with you - as dictated by my faith - but rather, it's showed me what it feels like to WANT to love people whether they agree with you or not. I'm grateful that I had the chance to work with this buddy for a couple of years. I got to know the person beneath the beliefs. Because the reality is, when we define people by what they believe, it's much easier to begin defining love by agreement. Beliefs can begin to build walls; walls are never a healthy part of relationships. Here is the other thing I've learned from my buddy. I do think there are some areas in life we'd all be better served agreeing on. I DO have some things in my life I think ALL of you should agree with me on. Some things I think would help us all be healthier and more loving. And all of you have those kind of beliefs as well. Well, there are a lot of things I agree with my buddy on that I didn't agree with him on two decades ago. What changed my mind - and my heart? Well I assure you not a bit of the change has been in response to what he believed. Almost all of it has been in response to the way he has cared for me in the face of disagreement. You see, all change, all learning, all transformation - it ALL begins with love. And the reality is - at least the reality I believe - if the personal beliefs we hold for ourselves and for one another aren't rooted in a desire to collectively love one another well, then I'm not sure what good our beliefs are. In fact, they may be far more damaging than they are good. |
Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
May 2024
CategoriesAll Faith Fatherhood Life Mental Health Perserverance Running |