Tag: reward

Pride

Pride has a bit of a bad rap, I think.

It’s inclusion as one of the 7 deadly sins seems excessive. I mean, murder doesn’t make the cut, but pride does? Taking satisfaction in something you’ve achieved is not only incredibly human – isn’t achieving something of which we can be proud one of the prime motivating forces within each of us? – I think it’s constructive. Achieving something that makes me proud puts me in a great mood and adds to my confidence to strive further still.

I concede that, like everything else we do, pride has its seemly limits, and it’s grating at best and infuriating at worst when you have to interact with someone who is full of himself. Using a parallel to sister-sin gluttony, I can eat one, two or even three Oreo cookies without harm to anyone while granting myself an enjoyment. If I eat 100 of them, however, I’m not going to enjoy it, and pity anyone who has to see me vomit them up or deal with the mess that makes.

I am conflicted about pride though. I am a father to two daughters, surprisingly different from one another, and yet each spawns in me a feeling best described as pride. They are both remarkable people: thoughtful, responsible, funny, capable, with only a shared talent for creating untidy spaces to mar their perfection. And I revel in all of it.

But I have rarely, if ever, told my children that I am proud of them. I worry that my pride in them actually diminishes them.

They are not my creations, so why should I feel so much satisfaction as they reveal their brilliance and wit and humanity or as they accomplish amazing feats of intellect, reason, creativity and generosity? Only half their genes come from me, and even in that I’ve just been the vessel from my own parents and grandparents and theirs too. While I’ve had a hand in raising my children, helping them through a variety of experiences, teaching them skills and knowledge and sharing my perspectives, what I’ve contributed to their development is nowhere near half of what they’ve absorbed. There’s no denying I’ve had some influence, but even if that influence is one of the most significant in their lives, it’s still responsible for just a fraction of the persons they’ve become. A village really does raise all children.

There is only one person who directly experiences the pleasures and pains, triumphs and humiliations and decides how she will absorb them into her personhood, who reads and observes and tries and adjusts and chooses what to believe and when to shed that belief in favor of something else more true. And it’s not me. So when I feel that swell of pride, I also feel that it’s fraudulent. Sharing their joy, reflecting their own pride to validate their feelings – those feel legitimate. But taking pride myself in their achievements? It may not be deadly, but it does feel wrong.

Kinda sinful, I guess.

Simplicity

Time is a resource that cannot be replenished. So why do I waste so much of it?

I think I’m not as intentional about using my time as befits its value. And I spend too much of my time maintaining past decisions. So between not paying attention as the minutes and hours and days go by and having to spend minutes and hours and days doing things past choices obligate me to address, I despair.

I don’t have time!

The solution is simple, though not at all easy.

The first part is addressed with discipline. Simply making a plan and sticking to it. Being mindful. Choosing how I spend my time instead of letting one game on TV blend into another, hanging out for an extra hour or two when I meant to go to the gym, napping for ninety minutes when I intended a catnap. I need to do better at time-bounding my activities before I start them, and then honor the deadline. Like many, I struggle with transitions, so perhaps it will help to set expectations with myself that I will move to the next activity when my allotted time ends. And if I feel compelled to continue, then I must do so consciously, with an explicit recognition that I’m sacrificing what I had intended to do with that next block of time.

Easier said than done. I have many times during the day when I stay on Facebook or watch the post-game show when I intended to do something else. My lack of resolve shames me.

The second part is also straightforward: live simply. Everything I add to my life must be maintained. Floors need to be swept, dishes and clothes washed, furniture dusted, computers and phones charged and updated, cars gassed and serviced. I must show up for my engagements on time, presentable, and I have to do my work to expectations. So whenever I add something to my life I should ask many questions. Do I really want this? Can I afford it? How quickly will I tire of it? How much time will I need to devote to this? What will I be sacrificing because of the time I need to spend keeping this up?

We value different things. We value the same things differently. But I think the questions pertain to all of us. Each of us has the same 24 hours in a day to use. And maybe it’s human nature to be satisfied only with something more than we currently have.

I have made strides. I buy only clothes that can be machine-washed. I make meals with five or fewer ingredients. I love fitness though, and I will spend hours every week either working out or reading about it. You may like fashion and be willing to handwash or dry-clean clothes. You may like to cook, and relish preparing intricate dishes. And you may not want to know a thing about exercise. But we all get the same 24 hours. Shouldn’t be strive to spend as much of that time as possible doing what we love most?

If we are diligent and intentional in our decisions, and then disciplined in our behavior, I think we’ll feel that we have enough time to do what we want. I’m not sure we’d still be human at that point though. . . .

Waste

There were two things my children could do when they were younger that guaranteed that I would lose my temper: say “I can’t,” and waste something. “I can’t” will most certainly come up another day, but waste has been on my mind quite a bit.

Actually, it’s always on my mind.

That waste is bad is an a priori statement to me. Waste erases whatever time and whatever energy that went into producing something. And it also aborts whatever else could have been produced with the time and energy that was tossed away. We lose twice: we junk something of value, and we are without the alternate uses of the resources that produced it.

I know waste is inevitable. But I heard today that we throw out almost half the food we produce. Half. That shouldn’t be inevitable.

And I am as guilty as anyone. I do our menu planning and most of our grocery shopping. And on a weekly basis we throw out vegetables, fruit, meat, and a lot of leftovers that spoil because the food plan was too robust. Soups that looked good in the store didn’t find any takers in our house, and their expiration dates passed while they were in our pantry. We’ve opened our share of tortilla chips gone rancid while they sat in the garage, because they were the second half of a buy-one-get-one-free promotion that came at a time when we only wanted one bag.

But we waste more than food. Electricity cools empty houses. Cars idle in parking lots. We’re oblivious to time as it passes while we scroll further down our Facebook feeds. We have dreams, we make plans, and then we leave them to wither.

And I’m as guilty as anyone. I want to do better. But can I?

Blame exhaustion from our busy lives. Blame our disposable culture that encourages us to get rid of things when we tire of them. Blame our distractions. But really, blame ourselves. We choose what we do, and we own our choices. I hope I can do better.

Change

Change is in the air. It’s always in the air. Change is omnipresent.

But there are two kinds of change: the change that happens to us, and the change we make happen.

It’s said we resent the change that happens to us. Lack of control, I guess. I see it differently.

An amazing world has unfolded in front of us with no effort on our part: smartphones that keep us continually connected with the people we care about, cars that safely and comfortably take us where we want to go, access to convenient flights all around the world, medicines that dramatically improve our quality of life in the face of illnesses both acute and chronic, hundreds of channels of entertainment that come from everywhere on the globe. We don’t like some aspects of our lives when they change: the new traffic light that slows my commute by a couple minutes a day, the neighbor who painted his house an unflattering color, the new boss, the new PTA president, the new layout at the grocery store – we complain all about these little changes while we take the newest advances that actually change the way we live as a birthright.

It’s the other change that interests me at the moment though. It’s daunting to try to make change in the world. The investment of time, energy and emotion is enormous, and the outcome is uncertain. And in our world, where we’ve been accustomed to beneficial change just happening, having to face situations that cause us great discomfort – and I’m thinking specifically about the current political situation in the United States, where a government with the minority of votes controls both the legislative and executive branches – is a big-time gut check. If you’re not happy with the current situation, what are you willing to invest to try to change it?

There are seminal events that happen, events that fire the imagination or awake the passions of multitudes of people. But those don’t really create any change. They are the flashpoints that start the processes that lead to change, but to actually change the world we must find focus, determination, and dedication. We need deliberate, sustained action, day after day after day after day.

Do we have the requisite resolve in us? Time, as always, will tell.

Fairness

Fairness. It’s such a fundamental concept for each of us, and we all claim to want life to be fair. Is it?

The answer is, as always, it depends.

It depends on what you mean by fair. Do you mean that you get what you deserve? Or that you get a clear path to what you want? Or that you get help whenever you need it? Or that you should get whatever you set your eyes on? To me, fairness has always been about getting a result commensurate with the personal investment you’ve made to get it.

So is life fair? Do we get that commensurate result?

It depends.

It depends on commitment. On circumstance. On luck, even. In our house we talk about the 80-10-10 rule. Eighty percent of the time we get what we deserve. We give a sincere effort, we get the result we want. We study for the test, we get the grade we wanted. We prepare for an assignment at work, devote time and energy without shortcuts, and we get recognition for a job well done. We prep the wall for painting, tape the baseboards, paint mindfully, and the wall looks great. Or we fail to give that effort, and we come up short. But the result is fair.

Ten percent of the time we give the sincere effort, but we don’t get the result. The teacher tests us on something that wasn’t on the exam prep. The data in our systems turned out to be wrong. The tape on the baseboard was defective and didn’t hold. So despite best efforts, we failed. This is where we’ve been screwed. And this is where we all say, “It’s not fair!”

And it’s not.

But neither is the other ten percent of the time, when we take a shortcut, when we blow off the work and still get the outcome we want. We seem to forget about these instances, where we achieve only because of good luck, when the test is completely on the one part of the chapter we read or when the boss asks the one question we know something about. Instead, we take those gifts as our rightful results, and we don’t remember them when circumstances break the other way.

So is life fair? It’s not always fair, and not always unfair in the way we think. It depends.