Who Cares How You Climb?

This is a New Year's-esque post even prior to Christmas.

What can I say? I tend to be an impatient man.

My two year old and I were out in the backyard yesterday. Our home, which we moved into this past January, used to operate as an illegal daycare center. That's a bit sketch, but the benefits to us are that some previous owners built a climate-controlled enclosed sunporch we get to enjoy as well as two nice swingsets and a slide.

Beckett has this funny thing about the slide. He doesn't much like to take the time to climb up the stairs and slide down. Takes too long, you see (wonder where he gets that?).

He finishes the slide and then starts climbing right back up the slide to do it all over again, ignoring the fact that the stairs are faster.

I have photographic evidence:

That's my boy.

I don't necessarily recommend this approach to either you or your toddler, but I am probably not going to change at this point in life.

When I'm ready to engage something, I engage it all out. When I'm ready to be done with something, I'm done.

On some visceral level, I've always resonated with St. Paul's words in the New Testament:

"Forgetting what lies behind...straining towards what lies ahead".

Now, that's not a perfect way to navigate life. It can be part and parcel of denial and deflection. Some of you are analyzers and processors and deliberators and I honor that.

But there's a tribe of us who needs to be reminded to be true to ourselves by going for it, ignoring the conventional ways of getting to the top of the slide, charging - straining, even - ahead.

Maybe that's you. Even if you've never acknowledged it before.

It's not quite the New Year, when such resolutions tend to be made, but who cares?

What do you need to forget (while being grateful for what it may have meant) and wave goodbye to?

Better yet, what's the next thing ahead of you? It shouldn't scare you and you shouldn't hesitate and you shouldn't allow yourself to feel guilty about it.

My normal writing style is to list examples at this point, in the belief that universal examples can lead to particular personal application.

Gonna hold off on that this time and let you fill in your own blanks:

____________________   _________________________   _____________________

Endeavor to strain for wherever it is you are going with all you've got. Even if others say "Hey, that's not the way to get there!"