Question 334 of 365: Should we buy comfortable couches?

We currently own the most comfortable couch that I can ever hope to have. While not immediately plush and inviting, it is the kind of couch that deceptively lulls you to sleep with its firm support and ability to fully stretch out in a number of different directions. And then there is the corner. Where this traditional l-shaped wonder is most magnificent is in the corner that leaves no shoulders stressed or mind worried. This corner has basically been claimed by my wife ever since we got it 4 months ago. Having just paid off the bill, it is almost completely hers. We are not productive on this couch. We are watchers of entire TV seasons in one sitting. On this couch, we know nothing but the casual glance up at the clock and the inevitable shock of just how late it has gotten.

I wonder at our purchase, now. I wonder at just how many meals are going to be consumed on the couch because of how easy it is to make picnics within the L. I think about all of the forts that have already been constructed for my children with no regard for the utility of this piece of furniture. The naps that will be had are too many to count.

Should we have gotten two couches like we had before so that no two people could accidentally sleep end to end until 4 am when we decide it is time to crawl up to your bedroom? Should we have gotten an intentionally uncomfortable couch so that we don’t sit for long periods of time chipping away at the world’s store of great acting?

I submit that a comfortable couch is essential. I believe that whatever life we are giving up by daily relaxing and sinking into that deep mocha fabric is not worth living. The world that exists outside of comfortable couches is nothing to be concerned with. It is for those who write thank you cards after coming home from a party. It is for those who converse about lawn maintenance for over an hour if given the chance.

Comfortable couches are for those of us who believe in pressure and release. They are for those of us who root for one another to be always be better, while knowing all the while that we can crash if we need to. They are for those of us who don’t want to ever be accused of not knowing what we have until its gone.

We know what it means to be still. We know what it means to enjoy each others company. And we do it. Every day.

Question 223 of 365: What forces your hand?

My wife got into nursing school today.

She took prerequisites, applied, interviewed and was offered a spot in nursing school. She didn’t know that was what she wanted until quite recently, but here we are, staring directly at changes to our life’s as we know them. The single fact of knowing that she is going makes me afraid for the status quo.

First off, she can’t work and do nursing school. It just isn’t humanly possible (even for her). This means that everything that we have known in the relative comfort of sharing the breadwinning burden will fall to me. I have never had that unique experience. It seems unreal to me. I don’t want to talk about money as mine or what I earned. It has always been ours and neither of us have particularly cared who spent what (so long as we stayed in budget). I don’t want that to change. I don’t want the feeling of being cash strapped for the year or two that it will take for my wife to complete her program to unearth this patriarchal feeling of entitlement. I want us to know that this is temporary and that we are not the roles that we currently fill.

The reality of the decisions that we have already made is forcing my hand at a lot of things now. It is as if we set up our own predestined path and now we are watching ourselves walk along it. Every time that we think about hopping off it, the weight of our decisions compel us to keep moving forward. We don’t have anything to be afraid of because we chose this, but we also don’t know what lies ahead so we are terrified. We are being forced by our former selves to be the people that we promised to be.

Even though we made those promises, there was a large part of me that didn’t think I would ever have to be this person. I didn’t think that I would have to own up to the changes we now both face: quitting job(s), getting a different job (or finding something to supplement the current one), figuring out ways to finance a course of study, figuring out how to take care of two young children while being financially responsible and/or going to school.

This is not to say that I am defeated by having to step into these shoes. Quite the opposite. I am exhilarated by being forced to change so much, so quickly. I know that it will be difficult to have conversations about raises, about financial aid, and about family support systems. I know that I things will not be normal (read: stable) for quite some time. I know that we will never be the same family after this. But, I also know that it is what we both want.

I want my wife to be happy. I want her to know that I will work solo for as long as she needs me to. I want her to be able to take the late shift at the hospital and not worry that the kids are going to get fed and bathed and put to bed on time. The fact that we are being forced by decisions we have made is all the better. Even though we may not feel in control right now, we are. We have set things in motion that give us the ability to take control of our own destinies.

Our hands are forced because that is how you sculpt something into being. We have forced our hands to move around this raw clay of a future. We force our hands to apply pressure in just the right spots, opening up possibilities for what it may hold. The whole thing keeps on spinning, sometimes almost out of control and sometimes in the rhythm that we feel within ourselves. Our future is crafted and thrown and fired and cured. We are only done with it once it satisfies us.

Right now, I am looking at a huge hunk of clay and I wonder just how I am going to make it into something beautiful. My wife got into nursing school, and we are just getting started.

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Question 205 of 365: Why don’t we clear the board more often?

I have been to a few emergency rooms, mostly for highly nervous new parent reasons. Near each one is a board with names on it. Ussually this board has ailments, procedures, and where patients are at any given time. It tells of upcoming surgeries that require a certain level of expertise. This type of board has been highly popularized by shows like Grey’s Anatomy and other hospital dramas. It always struck me as a very public way for everyone to know what was going on in the hospital on any given day. No one can hide from the responsibilities that the board requires. The board dictates your schedule. Every day, new patients arrive and old patients are erased from the board. More than once a day, the entire slate is wiped clean and the whole process starts anew.

I wish this board existed for more than just hospitals.

Instead, we lower the stakes. We move the boards into more private areas like meeting spaces and classrooms. We let notices stay there for weeks or months with large “do not erase” signs around them. Or, we digitize the process and make it even more secretive in our email inbox or content management systems. There is no feeling that we must clear the board or people will die. There is no feeling that everyone will know exactly what we have been up to because our names are tied to the procedure to which we were assigned. In essence, the board is inconsequential in our working lives. It doesn’t dictqte order or urgency and we don’t feel the need to clear it nearly as often.

But what if we did put up such a board in our schools and workplaces? What if we put the things that we were doing up for everyone to see and then cleared them away with a medical efficiency? I would like to see the progress and the stories that get told then.

If I had to guess, most people wouldn’t spend their time on menial work. If their tasks were going up on the board, everything we did would become important. If we had to write up there what we were learning about or what we were about to tackle on any given day, we would see just how urgent our procedures can be.

And when we needed help for a given procedure, we could elicit help from one another simply by adding one another’s names to the board. We could focus on the collaborative spirit that is required in a hospital in order to keep patients alive. There would stop being a competition between who has harder or more important work because the task for each day is not to complete your own work, but to help clear the board. If you have a free moment, help someone else clear the board. If you have something that needs doing, write it up.

I don’t clear my email inbox as often as I should because there is nothing making me do it. It isn’t life or death and there isn’t any help if I get stuck. But if every one fo my job requirements were up on the board, waiting to be cleared by a team of highly skilled people, you had better believe that I wouldn’t still have an unreturned email from last December just with a draft that has been saved 5 different times and then abandoned because something more interesting came up.

I get that I am not saving lives by creating learning objects or by talking about social media or asking better questions through video. But hqt doesn’t mean that the ambition and pride that doctors feel for clearing the board is unavailable to me. I just have to make my system more open to people walking through my emergency room. I need to allow others to help me, too.

If I simply keep my work as public as possible and not try to own everything, I believe that more will get done and I will feel better about it as well. Or maybe I will jut better be able to put myself in the shoes of someone in ER or House.

Question 199 of 365: When do we stop asking for medicine and band-aids?

I had a favorite medicine growing up called Triaminic. It was the wonder cure-all. Pretty much anything that was wrong could be fixed with a little Triaminic. It had this syrupy sweet cherry flavor that wasn’t overly thick. It didn’t have the aftertaste of a Robitussin or the fleeting quality of a Tylenol. It was what I asked for by name whenever I stayed home from school. It was an elixir, a special potion which could give me back both health and confidence with a single spoonful.

I eschewed band-aids, though. They were for kids that couldn’t handle the wonderful sensation of picking at a scab. I don’t know if my kids will ever know how much I loved to pick at the places on my elbows and knees that the sidewalk had found and rubbed up against only days before. They won’t know because they love band-aids. Every time they get hurt (and many times when they do not), they ask for a new band-aid. Many times we go through several for every cut. It is almost as if they continue to get hurt just so that they can get me to put the sticker with medicine on them. Almost.

They too are magic. Band-aids for my kids instantly turn crying into thanks. They instantly cause the world to once again be in its right place. My children find the littlest wound or oldest scab and find it detrimental to their continued play, but as soon as the Band-Aid enters the equation, there is silence. The smiles return and off they are, bounding through to the play room. They are ready for the next adventure because they got patched up.

At some point I stopped asking for Triaminic and my parents stopped offering. At some point, my children will too stop begging for hello kitty Band-Aids. These wonderful fixes will lose their luster. They will no longer be good enough. But, what is that point? How long can I keep the quick fixes in circulation. How long can I keep the illusion going that anything can be solved with a simple capful of medicine or a few easily removed adhesive tabs?

And once that simple trust in these remedies is broken, it is all we can do to try and get it back. I think that our entire lives are spent in figuring out ways to make Band-Aids and Triaminic work again. We search for quick results and a simple answer to the most complex professional and personal problems. We try the same things over and over in the hopes that some of the magic will return. We “sleep on” our biggest decisions as if the mere act of sleeping will somehow provide insight. We have recurring meetings as if the fact that getting the same people together will produce innovation. We make budgets as if the fictional numbers will somehow keep our wants in check.

I know that there is no cure-all. That it is all snake water and workarounds. I know that time and working toward a better life is the only medicine at all for the present. I’ll take them, but they taste much more bitter than my Triaminic ever did.

Question 147 of 365: Who are the workout haters?

During my first year of college, I decided that I was going to work out every day. And I did. I ate whatever I wanted, but I worked out for at least an hour. I would start off by running on the treadmill or doing the stationary bike and then I moved on to the sit ups. I did about 50 a day for the first few months and then I started adding weights to my chest. This was a hold over from the summer before when I just used my graduation present dictionary.

I would do work on the machines in the fitness center too, but I never felt all that confident on them. I think I always just thought of myself as having more control over my body when I was the only thing that could break.

Throughout that year, I didn’t miss a day. I even found a gym while I was visiting my girlfriend’s family. I was obsessed then with making sure I worked out, much in the way I am obsessed now about writing these questions.

Right in the middle of the year, though, I received a phone call from a good friend of mine. He was worried about my working out so much. He said that my time on the treadmill was going to hurt my knees. He told me that I should take it easier and not worry about it so much. Now, this was coming from someone who didn’t work out at all. It was coming from someone who, while a wonderful friend, had no idea what the workouts were all about.

To him the running on the treadmill was something you did to get into shape. It was something to be avoided, if at all possible. To me, it was the rhythm of my day. It was what was helping to sort things and out them in their place. It was a way of establishing responsibility for something when I really had nothing to take care of. I had nothing tying me to anything else, other than my studies. I worked out because I could rely on it.

And for him to suggest that this thing was going to negatively impact my knees was ludicrous. It was as if he was attacking being healthy and being sane at the same time. I didn’t stand for it, either.

But, people keep telling me to get off of this treadmill too. While they admire my stamina, they keep on asking if I am really able to reflect or write to the depth that I could if I would slow down. They tell me that I am going to get burned out or that I will run out of ideas. I can’t guarantee that either of those things won’t happen, but what I can do is to pound even harder on the keys.

The repetition of writing at this point is much more about fighting of the intense instability that is everywhere else. This is what I can control. And I have continued to add weights to my chest as I go.

At first, it was just answering questions. Now it is something different. Now, I have to tell stories. I have to write over 700 words. I have to tell the truth. Now, I have to challenge myself to write about more and more personal memories, to see just how much I am willing to let out.

This daily habit is breaking me too. I don’t have the option of taking a night off or quitting because my question sucks. I have to follow my idea to its logical end, otherwise I will have wasted a day.

I can feel myself getting stronger, too. I don’t hesitate to state my opinion or couch it within a greater movement. I don’t have to apply everything to a technology or a teaching technique. I can let my posts just stand for themselves, even if no one reads them. I trust myself that given enough time to think and write, I will come up with something that at least I will be interested in reading again someday.

So, don’t tell me I am going to hurt my knees. Come running with me. Don’t say that my torrent of posts in your feed reader is too daunting to catch up. Draw a line in the stand and start there. Don’t say that I am spreading myself too thin. Rip down barriers for me so that I can spread unabated.

If only I could find time for working out now, too.

Question 128 of 365: Why should we smoke?

I got to know my wife by smoking hundreds of cigarretes with her. We would sit outside of the dorm and talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. We would meet each other after class and hop in her car that constantly leaked oil. We would crack the windows and smoke to our hearts content (or not so much, if we are being realistic). The parliaments would sit in-between us, temping us to make the trip a few minutes longer.

While I am glad that we no longer smoke, I am also glad for the time that we had while we did. I found out more about her, faster. I learned things that you can really only share over something that is actively killing you. And, it was wonderful.

And on nights like tonight, when I am only really trying to figure out how a house gets so messy after only two days of being lived in with children. On nights when my whole world is comfortable and easy. I miss the chaos of ciggaretes. I miss thumbing my nose at health and sensibility. And, I wonder what it is that actually replaced those moments of laying down in the courtyard of a university, looking up at a cloudless sky and learning about your future wife’s childhood.

I knew that I was going to marry her while smoking. When she told me about her grandmother who constantly frightened her with thoughts of hell, I knew. When she told me that she was not going to accept her Americore placement, I knew. When we waited for the all clear to sound after a particularly late-night fire drill, I knew.

I have outgrown the need for a cancer stick in my hand while I talk to my wife, but for a while, it was my crutch. It was the easiest way to have an excuse to go outside and think out loud. It was the way for us to dig deep for an adventure when we both knew that there really wasn’t anything much going on.

So, what has replaced smoking for figuring out our future?

Mostly, it is going on walks and sneaking away from work while our children are at school for a lunch or late afternoon appetizer. Now we choose to put one foot in front of the other and make that our habit. Now, we look directly at one another for longer than most people are comfortable doing. We talk about the days we have had and the ones we know are coming. We let the connection we have built waft up into the sky above us, or hang low around our heads.

We have become our own glowing embers, inhaling deep the daily adventures with our kids. We take deep drags off of our own shared sighs, knowing that the days are hard and that the only relief is one another. And we never throw the butts of our days out, instead choosing to save them to ensure that we don’t litter the world with a longing or resentment for what has passed.

While this isn’t really about mother’s day, it is in a way. The mother my wife is today has everything to do with the woman that I shared cigarretes with, when there was nothing at stake. She could have chosen to share a pack with anyone, and she chose me. She could have quit on her own, but instead she chose me to support her. She could have chosen to have children with anyone, but she chose me.

And that is why I love her. She chose all of those things, and she continues to make those choices for our family. She worries and hopes and creates and communicates by choice.

And if one day when my children ask if we ever smoked, I will tell them that it is how their parents met. I will tell them that it is why their parents know each other as well as they do. But, I will also tell them that it was only by moving on from ciggaretes to children that we became addicted to the right mix of chemicals.

They might think that is cheesy, but I know it to be true.

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Question 124 of 365: Are there clowns hanging up on our walls?

The Cleveland Clinic was my childhood hospital. I visited my pediatrician there with my two brothers more times than I care to remember. I didn’t recognize it as the world-premier institution that it is, though. I just knew it as the place with the clown posters on the wall.

Within this enormous waiting area with a few children’s toys and books, there were these rather intimidating clown posters that had french words written on them. The clowns weren’t sad or particularly happy. They were just there, staring down at you as you waited to get your next shot.

The clowns were such a part of my childhood that I lamented their loss when the Cleveland Clinic decided to venture out into satellite buildings closer to our house. As I was old enough to drive and needed blood work instead of height and weight checks, I still wanted to wait in that room. There was something about having clowns look down at you that made everything seem absurd, and by that measure, made everything relatively okay.

The question I really want to ask is if I have ever replaced the beautiful smeared lipstick of the clown with anything else that is worth noting. I want to know if there has been anything that I have hung up around me that has given me the same level of consistency and understanding for things, even in all of their chaos and unbelievability. And more than that, can we all hang our own clowns up in the waiting rooms that we frequent so that nothing seems as real as it is and we can float away from the pain that forthcoming into a place of fantasy and interest?

The waiting rooms in our lives are not in hospitals for the most part. They are in our cars, in our homes, and wherever else we can’t have the instant gratification we crave. They are even in our email as we wait for responses. They are in our physical objects that don’t update as fast as our digital ones.

And as we wait for lights to change or someone to hit the reply all button, there really is very little in the way of clown ambiance. But, I think that there could be more of it, if we tried hard enough. We could make the background of waiting just slightly more comforting if we worked to create reminders of the hilarity of it all.

Here is what I am proposing:

1. E-mails should have an escape hatch. Within every reply there should be a link that you could click to get away from the experience entirely. There should be a link in signatures to an inspiring photograph of an absurd situation. There should be a labyrinthian puzzle to traverse before you can get back to your e-mail. It should be hard and worthwhile, but it should be more difficult to do your e-mail without being reminded of how ridiculous it is that we are tied to a machine for multiple hours of the day.

2. Traffic lights should be hackable. Instead of just having a green orb to tell us to go, we should have the ability to upload our own (filtered, perhaps) image to the green light so that when it changes we are looking at what it could possibly be. The only people who might be able to see this change are the ones that just missed the light the time before, and thus the folks with the most time on their hands. By ensuring that others can tap into what the traffic light is all about, it is ensuring that the absurdity of humanity is represented in one of the craziest practices we do every day (letting a color tell us when to go and stop).

3. The physical objects around us should make fun of us on a regular basis. Or, maybe we should just get in on the joke. After all, books know more than we do about their particular subjects or stories. Chairs do a better job than us at supporting a person’s weight. The plastics that we use everyday will likely outlive us. Perhaps all of this should be made known to us more consistently. Subtle hints could be dropped in the form of notes or casual taunts. Our objects could be the clowns of consistency that stare at us every day if we let them.

While I’m not sure that the Cleveland Clinic was trying to promote this idea or not, here is what I learned from sitting in that room for endless hours in my youth:

The whole world is a circus. The sooner you recognize that and start laughing about it, the better the world will become.

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Question 111 of 365: How hard is it to be born?

It is all a matter of perspective.

My typical perspective is that it is hard to give birth to something. My wife  knows more than I do about this. She is intimately aware of the discomfort, the sleeplessness, the depression, and the sickness that occurs in the process of creating a human being. I know about the worry, the late night runs, and the intense planning for every possibility with my future child. Even still, I have never considered it from my child’s viewpoint. I never thought about what it must be like to go through all of those things and experience those particular stresses from the inside. Moreover, I have never considered the process of birthing anything else, like a company or a school, from the perspective of that entity. At least, not until today.

Today I heard this idea: “The hardest thing to do is be born.” It was merely in passing. It was in between discussions, between powerpoint slides. But, it stuck with me.

The hardest thing to do is be born.

I immediately thought about my kids and I thought about what I am attempting to do with this book. Is it their intention to be born? Have they conspired with the universe to struggle into being? Do I even have a choice in the matter?

The hardest thing to do is be born.

I am always so wrapped up in getting things done that the insurmountable process of creation always seems so much in my control, as if it would never occur without my help. But my creation is the one being born. It has a vested interest in being born well, and it struggles and pushes forward to complete the process, no matter if I help or not. It grows, however incrementally, and I can’t stop it. The only thing I can do is to feed it the right things and exercise it and take it in for checkups.

My Isabelle was first. We saw her fingernails and her lips and her lack of hair through the lens of a newfangled 4d ultrasound, and we knew that she was growing and moving and working so hard to create herself. We saw her hands move and reach out to grasp at the dense tissue around her. We knew that these things were happening, but seeing them is something else entirely. There is nothing like watching the created in the process of creation. There is nothing like watching growth occur, even if in tiny increments.

But what are the fingernails of a startup? What is the lack of hair in a new school? What are the premature hands reaching out toward in a project? If it is so hard to be born, shouldn’t we be going in for ultrasounds and seeing progress the same way that we would our own children. While I recognize that they are different and they should be different, I don’t think that birthing something of worth really should be left to chance. And I no longer believe that it is entirely in our control either. No matter what, the DNA of a creation is going to guide the process along and our influence is not always going to be positive.

Just to ensure that I am doing it right, I would like to see a pregnancy chart for an organization. I would like to see what the trimesters are going to offer me and what obstacles I would likely have to overcome. I would like to know what the morning sickness is like for some of the projects that I am a part of creating. I would like to know how changes to the biological makeup will influence the outcome. I want to see the Punnett square possibilities for eye and hair color. And yet, I still want to be surprised too. Just like with my own children, I would like to see what unforeseen beauty is created when the right mix of founders get busy.

The hardest thing to do is be born.

It should be hard. It should be worthwhile, too. An idea is conceived. It is housed in a hostile environment many times, but the people that care about it should be able to protect it. So long as it is cared for, the DNA will replicate and complete its mission. A fruitful idea requires frequent assessment and progress monitoring, and for this it needs people who know what they are talking about. Just as I couldn’t tell a boy from a girl in our original ultrasound, I can’t tell whether or not my ideas are progressing effectively.

I need expertise to see if the hard work that my idea is doing is going to lead to any long-term health effects. In short, I need idea doctors and nurses. I need them to see the whole and the parts and to analyze what is progressing appropriately and what is not. I need them to produce an ultrasound picture for me too. One that I can show off to all of my friends and family. I need them to reassure me that everything is going to be just fine too.

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