When Angry

I get angry/irritated/pissed/etc about things people say and do all the time. Here are a few things I need to remember about that so that I don’t stoke the flames of that anger.

I am angry about it. Nobody has the power to make me angry.

Please note the distinction here. I am angry about it. Nobody has the power to definitively make me angry/sad/happy/etc as if they were using the remote control to change channels on the TV. I have something to say about it, even if I don’t realize it at first. Something about me creates the experience of the emotion. It isn’t programmed or controlled from the outside. It’s influenced from within. I have something to influence about my own emotional experience. If I blame them for my experience, I am lacking clarity and limiting my possibilities for other emotional experiences about the situation/person, such as love and compassion.

2) Just because I am angry doesn’t mean the other person is wrong/bad/irritating/etc. I can’t feel or perceive objective truths about other people. I can have thoughts and emotional experiences about them. These emotional experiences are based on things going on inside me. They do not indicate objective truths about the other person.

When I remember these two things, my downturns seem natural and also naturally limited. The world seems to be a less hostile, frustrating place. My emotional experiences seem to rise easily when I stay away from blame and trust my natural inclination toward love, compassion, and connection.

What’s In You Today

What do you have in you today? What can you do, think, or feel today? What is possible for your experience of life today?

Please rest assured, you have enough in you to be great today. I say this not knowing what you intend to accomplish. But no matter how limited your initial thoughts on this topic, please understand my point.

Your capacity to imagine greatness in this moment doesn’t change your capability to manifest it. In other words, the old adage, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” is wrong. Dead wrong. It’s not an absolute. Optimists fail and doubters prove themselves wrong on a daily basis. The only thing that hides us from these facts is denial. Why live in the illusion of denial when something more powerful exists? These clear facts exist: We can experience great thoughts, feelings, and actions out of the blue, and others experience the greatness of our thoughts, feelings, and actions without our awareness.

You don’t have the capacity to understand how powerful a little gesture might be to someone else. You simply can’t judge it. You aren’t in their shoes, and you may not be in the right frame of mind to see how powerful any kindness can seem to someone else. Have you ever expressed deep gratitude to someone only to have them shrug off their efforts as no big deal? It didn’t seem like no big deal to you, did it?

Not only that, but the person on the receiving end of your kindness may change her mind about its power down the road of time. How often do we come to understand the impact of someone’s influence on us only after they’ve moved on? Shouldn’t we take time to appreciate those people today? Shouldn’t each of us strive to be one of those people?

Furthermore, you do not have the capacity to judge the impact of your own efforts on yourself without the benefit of passing time. How often do we look back and discover that small seeds sprouted into something enormous? Shouldn’t we recognize the enormous potential of the little things that exist in this moment as it occurs?

Nobody is guaranteed anything. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you may still be capable of greatness. You may not always manifest it. That’s life. You win some, you lose some. But before rejecting your potential for greatness, allow me to ask: Who are you to judge your capacity for greatness before giving it a shot?

Trust what’s in you today. It’s enough.

Unseen Anchors

Hebrews 6:19. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul….

Hope is an anchor for the soul. We’ve heard this over and over the last month. It seems to be one of the most reassuring ideas we can entertain. Yet why, at times, why does it seem like hope’s anchor is bludgeoning us over the head?

Don’t we all do it? Don’t we hope for a bigger paycheck, a smaller tumor, an easier path through life, more sunshine and less rain, fewer red lights and less traffic? It seems no matter how big or small, hope let’s us down from time to time. The bigger the hope, the bigger the letdown. It’s almost as if life would be easier if we simply abandoned hope.

And yet, to abandon hope would be to misunderstand the analogy. Hope is useful anchor. It’s not always a useful expectation. Hope isn’t an outcome. It’s a force.

Consider an anchor on a boat. It can be useful to inspect an anchor from time to time and admire it’s beauty or functionality. But when we are inspecting the anchor, it is not in use. And this is where the analogy gains its true power. An anchor at use is unseen. It does its work, keeping us grounded where we want to be, from beneath the rolling surface of stormy waters.

Hope as an anchor keeps us firmly planted where we want to be while allowing us to go about our daily work dealing with the turmoil in front of us. It’s wise to occasionally inspect an anchor, but we need not keep our eye on the anchor to feel its force and effects. Indeed, in order to deal with more pressing matters raging against us, at times we need to toss the anchor overboard into the depths and trust that it will do its job even when we lose sight of it.

When dealing with life, hope may be the last thing on your mind. Yet as long as you have occasionally inspected the anchor of hope, making adjustments and repairs as needed, you can trust it to do its job. From somewhere beyond your vision, you will be able to feel the pull of a strong and steady anchor as it works its purpose, firmly rooting your vessel, keeping you from drifting too far away from your intended center.

Hope is an anchor, and the true strength of an anchor isn’t in what you see. It’s in what you feel.

Our best to you and yours. May be be anchored with hope, even when your sight line is adrift.

Beautiful, Strong, & Important

Our great friend Ben sent us the posted photo of the cross and anchors. Upon receiving it, Celeste and Ben exchanged these texts:

Celeste: They are beautiful. They look strong and important.

Ben: Just like you.

This is the first official week of treatment for Celeste’s pancreatic cancer, although I like to think we started fighting at least a month ago. With the diagnosis and onset of treatment we have experienced an incredible outpouring of support from family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. I want to share two of those stories from late Tuesday (8/8/17) and tie them into some general thoughts on life.

The first is written above. Our great friend Ben sent us the photo above, and Celeste and Ben exchanged those texts.

The second was a comment from our great friend Carrie, who accompanied us to Celeste’s first chemotherapy treatment.

As we were driving home, Carrie said, “Thank you for including me tonight. I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but I enjoyed it. I consider it a great honor.”

It’s not weird it all. I feel exactly the same way, and I’m glad I do.

Think about the sentiment explained in those two anecdotes. Think about the possible power it holds for those who understand.

“You are beautiful, strong, and important. It’s an honor to serve you. Thank you for letting me do so.”

How awesome would it be to tell that to our teammates, those special family and friends that mean so much to us?

“You are beautiful, strong, and important. It’s an honor to serve you. Thank you for letting me do so.”

Can you imagine expanding your definition of teammate to strangers in your community, or possibly even a stranger who has very little in common with you other than the fact that we all inhabit this earth as humans today? Could you say it? What might it mean to you? What might they do with the understanding of how you feel?

“You are beautiful, strong, and important. It’s an honor to serve you. Thank you for letting me do so.”

Please consider this my word to you, and you can book it as my bond. I don’t care what you’ve done in the past or what mistakes you are going to make.

“You are beautiful, strong, and important. It’s an honor to serve you. Thank you for letting me do so.”

So, my friends, if I can serve you, let me know how. Tweet it (@woodjared and @1sideline). Facebook message me. Text. Call. Write in the comments below.

If you don’t need anything, how about you do something for someone else? Do something for a friend, family member, coworker, teammate. Do something for a friend of a friend. Do something for a stranger. Make a play. Do what you can.

Let’s do this people. Let’s move mountains. Let’s build a team. Get your butt in action. If you want to be humble and quiet, that’s fine. But if you’ve got something to say or do, I’d love to see you light up social media today with #woodswarriors. After all, you are beautiful, strong, and important. Let your light shine.

Filling Need with Deed

I strive to write clearly, but with the topics I write about, I am sure I fail sometimes. One ridiculously simple point that isn’t always clear: The title of my blog, makingtheplay.com. What does it mean to make plays? What is a play anyway? Hopefully this post will clear that up a bit.

I don’t feel the need to define play strictly. I believe you know the plays of your life when you encounter them. Sometimes they are explicit, such as picking off a pass in football or picking up a check in a restaurant. Other times they are less clear, such as openly honoring someone’s right to disagree or silently changing your experience of a situation by having an epiphany about it.

The importance of a play varies from person to person, and it varies from moment to moment for each individual. I like to think they all have unlimited potential. No play is too big or too small to be worthy of your effort.

Every moment of our lives, opportunities to make plays are available. We make some. We miss some. We move on in the present moment with new plays available for the making.

This past week, three playmakers in my family died. I wrote about my Uncle Jake last week (you can read that article by clicking to the link here It’s Been Fun). This week I want to write about Ron Block and my Aunt Susan Klaus Hoffman. You may or may not know them, but both made plays that were important to me. By discussing them, I hope to shed light on what it means to make a play.

Truth be told, Ron Block wasn’t part of my family. Not by blood at least. But I loved him, and he treated me like family. His entire family treated mine with kindness, so he and the Blocks are family to me.

As a single parent, my mom did her best, and her best was incredible. But she was human (although I think many would consider my mom Saint Kate with the love she has for the world), and after playing the roles of mother, father, and breadwinner, she didn’t always have time left to figure out how to take care of what she wanted for me. That’s where Ron and the Block family often stepped in.

My childhood memories are filled with times I spent with the Blocks. They drove me to countless games and events. As I write this, I have visions from their back of their minivan flooding my head (to be clear, there was a new minivan every year, and I hope more than a few of you are laughing your butts off at the thought of one of Dee’s new minivans parked next to Ron’s old S-10, both immaculately cleaned by Ron’s compulsive hand). Ron was typically at the wheel, unless of course we had been to the beach where Ron had imbibed plenty of fun (and more than a few Black Labels), in which case Dee drove back home. Anyone who knows Ron will have plenty of memories of Ron smiling and laughing as if the point of life was simply to smile and laugh, which very well might be the point of life. The man could celebrate, and he never needed much of a reason.

Once when Ron and I were celebrating at a graduation party, we had a conversation about my personality. I was a pretty serious kid at times (okay, that’s the understatement of the year, quit laughing people), and Ron noted that as I entered my early 20s, I was starting to loosen up a bit and have a little fun. I like to think I’m still on that path, and I like to think I learned some of it from him.

One particular memory of Ron has been popping up in my mind for years. One year Ryan and I had to make Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts. Ron knew mom and I couldn’t handle it on our own. He was good with tools and had a workshop in his basement. So he took Ryan and I, and we designed, drilled, weighted, cut, and finished our cars in the workshop. Unlike so many parents today, Ron didn’t interfere with my design, weighting, or aerodynamics. He let me create and build my own car. He simply made sure I was safe with the tools. It was the perfect level of guidance.

I am pretty sure the design of the car was mediocre and finished with mediocre results, but today the process means much more to me than any result ever could. Ron thought about me and cared enough to step up and make a play. In my opinion, it’s one of the most beautiful things life has to offer: Someone sees a need and fills it with deed. It’s like a dovetail joint that brings together the spiritual with the physical, the intangible with the tangible. It’s common, yet when it’s experienced with great awareness, it seems miraculous. It’s the essence of making a play.

When Ron made plays for me, Dee, Rhondi, Ryan, and Darren should get credit for their assists (and they made their own plays for me too). They shared their husband and father with me, and that’s worth more than a small mention. Sometimes we can’t make plays without assists from others.

That’s where my Aunt Sue comes in. She certainly made her own plays in life, but she also made assists by allowing my Uncle Hank to be another father figure in my life. She and my cousins, Kyle and Tim, shared selflessly and included me in their lives in so many ways.

Aunt Sue also shared her family of origin with me. I have great memories of spending time with her brothers, sisters, and parents, Harold and Ruth Klaus. One of my earliest memories is of her marriage to my uncle at their family farm in Harbor Beach. Another is smelt dipping with Uncle, Harold, and her brother Tim. We fished for hours, then used scissors to gut the fish for what seemed like hours more, then fried and ate them. Talk about filling a need with a deed. It was a perfect adventure for a young boy.

When her brother Tim was a teen, he and Uncle Hank put up a basketball hoop that provided hundreds of hours of fun for me, and I’ll never forget fishing on Sanford Lake with her sisters Jackie and Linda. These were times they used their skills to make plays my mom couldn’t make. That is not a knock on my mom. It’s a nod to their thoughtful efforts to make the plays my mom simply couldn’t. It was filling a need with a deed.

Given all the memories of my aunt from my youth, perhaps it’s a bit ironic that one of my lasting memories of her will be her late-life battle with MS. Truth be told, it wasn’t necessarily the battle that impressed me; It was the grace with which she accepted her disease.

Early on in the course of the disease, she fought through pain and debilitated motion to continue making plays in life. She constantly sought to make contributions to her communities. When she wasn’t teaching a class of her own, she was working as an assistant, tutor, or volunteer. She was always active making plays in her community through the schools, churches, and other organizations. She lived to make plays that helped enrich others.

I am sure she had moments of frustration, but she rarely showed it when I was around. On the contrary, she often seemed to be at peace with her frailty. It was as if she understood: This is my path. It’s the only one I can travel, and I recognize that I am the one who must travel it.

It often seemed as if her greatest strength, her grace, was revealed through her greatest weakness, the weakness that eventually took her life. With her grace, my aunt displayed one of the key principles of what makingtheplay.com is all about. The situations of our lives do not dictate our experiences of them. They do not control us. We have creative power to construct our own experience and meaning of life. We rise above situations when we understand that our experience of life resides in our own awareness. Ultimately, perhaps life becomes what we can make of it. No situation is too big or too small. Every play has unlimited potential, and you may never truly understand the value another person attributes to your play.

Our biological frailty has taken two great ones this week, Ron Block and Sue Hoffman. Even though they are gone from the world, their spirit will surely live on in those who knew them. For me, I hope to remember them by making plays like they made for me. I hope to be able to see needs and fill them with deeds. I hope to understand life is what I make of it. And as I progress toward my own inevitable frailty, I hope to show grace and acceptance of what I can no longer influence.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you. Ron and Sue were certainly worthy of your time. Whether you know them or not, I have a humble ask. Make a play. Fill a need with a deed. Place Ron or Sue or someone else you know in mind, someone who made plays for you and has now passed. Grab your favorite beverage, and give a toast to them and the plays they made.

Prost. Cheers to Ron, Sue, and you and yours. May you make plays until the day you can’t, and when you pass, may your plays live on in the memories of your loved ones.

It’s Been Fun

Human resilience amazes me.

After a long battle with various ailments and pain, my Great-Uncle Jake died Sunday. We buried him Thursday. He was 87 years old. He was a fine man. A damn fine man.

To me, Jake always looked like Johnny Cash if Johnny Cash were a farmer. He was a big, strong guy. He had a great sense of humor and was quick with a smile and an unforgettable laugh.

If the world around us had ever sunk into chaos, Jake’s farm would have been a good place to be. Jake was self-reliant. He could grow things. He could fix things. He could hunt. When he wasn’t working on the farm “making hay while the sun shined” -as his eldest grandson Steve eulogized – he was working a second job in a saw mill or spending time with his family. He had an unstoppable work ethic and generous heart.

Jake walked a path in life that is hard for me to imagine. When he was 11, he and my grandmother (who was then 16) ran the family farm when their father died (he was trampled by horses) and their other brothers were off fighting World War II or running their own farms.

When he was 29, Jake (and my Great Aunt Mary Lou) lost a daughter. She lived 4 days. When he was 48, he lost his oldest son. Young Jake was 21 when he was cut in half by a drunk driver who plowed into the back of his semi as he attended to it on the side of the road. He left behind a wife and a 9 month old son (Steve, Uncle’s eulogizer, now a 39 year old PhD geneticist with a wife and 2 children of his own).

When I sat down for the funeral and read his obituary printed in the program, I’d forgotten about the young daughter, Marilyn. But I remember when Jakie died. I was 5, but I still remember my mom and grandmother and their seemingly unstoppable tears. It was the 3rd death of a 20-something male in my family in a 5 year span. I was only 7 weeks old when my father died, so it was my first memorable experience of despair.

But this isn’t about despair. It’s about resilience.

Our moods ebb and flow, and with the changes, our thoughts change as well. We go from up, optimistic, open, full of possibility, to down, pessimistic, closed, and devoid of hope. We then feel our thoughts. When we lack awareness, we blame the world for how we think and feel. When we are fully aware, we understand that we project our thoughts and feelings onto the world independent of the circumstances of the world. As John Milton wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Our experience of the world is what we can make of it. Most of us understand this at times. We have some say in how we experience life.

Yet certain situations seem to have a gravity to them, an inescapable force that sucks us down into it. The death of child is one of those. Uncle Jake lost two of his children.

To me, the most incredible part of the grieving process is our human resilience. While it is completely normal to grieve, it’s also completely normal to move on from it. Yes, when the loss is in mind again, the pain returns. Yet we always move on at times, often long stretches at a time, demonstrating that forces such as gravity do not exist in thoughts and feelings even though it seems as if they do. It’s in our nature to overcome what seems like emotional gravity. We have resilience. We nurture our own emotional crops.

My uncle understood this. You see, farming wasn’t just his occupation. It was his life. He used the dirt of this world as a fertile medium for growing the life he desired.

Once, when Steve asked why he became a farmer, he responded, “You get to be your own boss.” Despite all the lack of control farmers have over weather, disease, and soil, he still viewed himself as his own boss of his experience. He was a farmer. He was his own boss, the man with influence over the crops he cultivated. He did the best he could with what he had.

He understood this to the very end. At his funeral, Uncle’s pastor described his last rites and meal in the hospital before going home to hospice care. He asked Uncle, “Is there anything you want to tell Mary Lou.”

“It’s been fun,” Uncle said.

It’s been fun. Imagine that. After 87 years, under any life circumstances, could you have a better testimony about life? This was from someone who was forced into being the man of the farm at 11, lost two of his children, farmed for a living (and sometimes a starving), breathed saw dust in the mill all winter long, and fought the pain of those physical occupations for decades.

It’s been fun. What a damn fine man my uncle was to be able to see that. And yet, if we are being honest, he was completely ordinary and normal. He is a testament to finding the miraculous in the common.

For his last act of resilience, his sons Bill and Mike have taken on their father’s sense of humor. At the funeral, they laughed the laugh they inherited from him as they delivered a nod to the cycle of life only a farmer can truly appreciate, “He still has one more spring planting to do.”

As the procession left the funeral home parking lot to go plant Uncle in the cemetery soil, we drove past a last reminder of his life here on Earth, a life spent working the earth. Mike had driven his father’s old tractor to the funeral home and parked it in the lot near the road. It was the first thing I saw when I pulled up. It was one of the coolest and most fitting tributes I’ve ever seen at a funeral.

It was a fine tribute to a fine man. A common man yet a miraculous man. A man who used his life to point in the direction of our incredible resilience and capacity to enjoy life.

I have no answers folks. I won’t pretend to understand how the spiritual works here on Earth or beyond. I won’t tell you what to think, and I am fine with whatever you believe. But today I like to believe that Uncle drove his tractor to heaven, hopped out on two good knees, and firmly shook God’s hand. And I like to believe that God grasped my uncle’s big, powerful farmer hand in his own and gave it a worthy shake, the type of firm, respectful shake I practiced with Jake when Mom and Grandma tried to teach a father-less boy how men shake hands. And I like to believe God greeted Jacob Hoffman with the message I would speak to him if I had one more chance to tell him what I thought about his time in Earth’s dirt.

“You cultivated a damn fine life, Jake. Glad you enjoyed it.”

Painter, Paint, and Canvas

Please consider an analogy. Like all analogies, it is imperfect. I can see other meanings, combinations, and possibilities within this analogy. Perhaps your own disagreements or combinations of the parts will be informative to you. In any case, I’d like you to consider this analogy:

Life is like a painter creating a picture on a canvas.

The more you blame or give credit to the outside world for creating your experience of life, the more you become the canvas. You are simply a passive canvas built for the purpose of telling others’ stories. The outside world is both paint and painter.

The more you believe that you are free to create your experience of the world with what you can think, feel, and do, the more you become the painter. The outside world of canvas and paint are simply the tools available for creating the life you desire.

The more you believe you are a soul possessing a body being used for a higher purpose, the more you become the paint. The canvas is the world around you. The painter is a higher power.

With everything you think, feel, and do, you are moving toward one version of this analogy. It’s not for me to say which one is best for you to pursue. But I wonder, which one fits best for your typical experience of the world? Which one do you use the most? Which one do you believe in the most? What are the implications?

*Many thanks to Alan Maciag for the picture of his portrait. He is a wonderful Michigan-based artist. You can find his work at alanmaciag.com.

It’s Not About You

I know nothing about Mahershala Ali, but in my humble opinion, he gave a great acceptance speech for winning the 2017 Best Support Oscar for his role in Moonlight.

What did I connect with? First, he started off by thanking his teachers, which I thought was a classy move. But what I really connected with was the gist of his speech.

“It’s not about you. It’s not about you,” his teachers instructed. “You’re in service to these characters.”

You are in service to these characters. What I heard was this: You have a role that is bigger than you.

To me, it hit home with my current coaching role as an assistance on my daughter’s basketball team. It’s never about me. It’s about the girls. It’s about the team. It’s about the entire experience for the organization, but it isn’t about me.

It hit home with my role as a father and husband. It’s not about me.

It hit home with my role as a psychologist. It’s not about me.

It hit home with every role I play. Whether son, friend, coworker, bypasser…..it’s not about me.

I’m a conduit for my role. That’s what it should be about. It’s separate from me, not about me. It’s not about my ego. There’s a bigger picture, and there’s not just a role. There’s a plot, a scheme, a theme, a purpose.

Perhaps it’s just a faint whisper of my ego still talking, making up a reason for my existence, but what I heard tonight is that I am in service to these characters. Without service, it’s about me, and if and when anyone else adopts that same belief, we’re going to have problems.

I can hear that voice: It’s not about you. It’s not about you. You’re in service to these characters.