How to Be Here Page 5

  One day I paddled out and Eddie and Greg were already in the water because Greg had hired Eddie to coach him. Eddie is an excellent teacher, and when Greg took a wave in, I commented to Eddie on how good Greg is getting. Eddie said that Greg’s only challenge was to not overthink it. He then leaned in and smiled his Eddie smile and said,

  I keep telling him, “Stop thinking about shit that ain’t happenin’.”

  Is this you? You’re here, in the middle of your day, doing whatever it is you do, but your mind is all over the place, thinking about 2s and 9s and 47s, playing out possible scenarios, wondering about certain outcomes, constructing conversations in your mind about what you’ll say and then what they’ll say and then how you’ll respond—thinking about shit that ain’t happenin’.

  My friend Chico—that’s not his real name, but if I’m going to give him a fake name, it ought to be a good one, right?—runs a large nonprofit organization. He was telling me one day that he has all these big questions about where they’re headed and how their work is going to evolve and how the challenges of the city they work in are changing and what adjustments all that is requiring his organization to make. He told me that these questions are literally keeping him awake at night. He said,

  There’s so much to do! How do I know what to do next?

  But then, toward the end of our conversation, he mentioned that there’s a key person in the organization who isn’t on the same page as he is. He said it’s a growing problem because he has to keep monitoring this person’s work and correcting the work this person had done that isn’t in line with where the organization is headed.

  Do you see the problem? Chico has his 1. He’s overwhelmed with all the work that needs to be done, but there’s a 1 right in front of him. He has the wrong person in the wrong place. He needs to change that. He has a 1. And yet what keeps him awake at night are the 6s and 11s and 24s.

  Start with your 1.

  Suspend Judgment

  I once had an idea for a short film.

  I’d been giving sermons for a while and people had been suggesting that we film them. But I’d seen that done before and I didn’t find it very compelling. I had this sense that there was a way to film a sermon cinematically, with scenes and images that organically connected to the message. I’d been talking about this with some friends who agreed to form a creative company and figure it out. I then wrote a script based on a parable I’d told about something that happened to my one-year-old son and me. We went over that script draft after draft after draft until we were satisfied that it would work as a film.

  And then we raised money. We were thinking maybe the film could play on television, which for a half-hour show meant the film would need to be twenty-two to twenty-three minutes long.

  We filmed for almost a week, the footage was edited, and then the producer showed me a rough cut they’d made from the usable footage.

  A rough cut that was ten minutes long.

  This was a problem, because people had given money to see a twenty-two-minute film, not a ten-minute film.

  I remember watching it and having two very strong reactions:

  What will we tell the people who gave us money?

  followed by

  I haven’t seen anything like this before.

  We carried the rough cut around on a VHS tape (remember those?) and showed it to a number of people. No one mentioned the length. And everyone wanted their own copy.

  You start with your 1, and then you suspend judgment on what you’re doing, because you don’t know what you have when you start.

  No one does.

  When you are constantly judging what you’re doing, you aren’t here. You aren’t present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing.

  The time for judgment will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3 . . .

  In the case of those short films, we ended up making something shorter, but, in the end, better than what we set out to make.

  The first number is always a 1.

  You don’t know what you have when you start, and so you suspend judgment on whatever it is you’re doing while you’re doing it.

  Nerves

  I once had an idea that involved lots of memorizing.

  I was giving a series of sermons on the book of Ecclesiastes and the more I studied the first three chapters, the more I pictured the wisdom teacher sitting in a palace at the end of his life, trying to explain to someone younger what he’d learned from his full and turbulent days. It became less and less an ancient text to me and more and more a personal confession, like I could feel the teacher’s heart behind the words.

  As I worked through how to present my image of the teacher, I had a growing sense that the best way to explain how it must have felt to hear him wax on like that would be to memorize the first part of the book and then deliver it like a speech, a rant, a confession while I walked through the audience. Which meant I had to memorize it, and then beyond that, I had to know it, feel it, own it. (The actors reading this are thinking, Yes, it’s called acting.) I remember standing in the back of the room about to start with butterflies in my stomach, realizing that I had absolutely no idea how it was going to go.

  If you are working on something, about to deliver it, moments from opening the doors, an hour from everybody arriving, a week from the release date, two minutes from getting the results back, and you have butterflies in your stomach, be grateful.

  You are in a wonderful place.

  Nerves are God’s gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by.

  Make friends with the butterflies.

  Welcome them when they come,

  revel in them,

  enjoy them,

  and if they go away,

  do whatever it takes to put yourself in a position where they return.

  Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by.

  What You Don’t Know

  As I walked through the congregation, delivering those lines from the book of Ecclesiastes, I realized it wasn’t what I was expecting—I thought it would feel big and profound, like an announcement about how the world works. Instead, it felt small and intimate, like I was confessing something. I wasn’t expecting it to have such emotional resonance. Because usually when you’re teaching about what someone else said, you talk about that person in the third person. But when you take a shot at being that person, it changes everything.

  Now it’s direct,

  provocative,

  unavoidable,

  electric.

  We work hard to outline and plan and design and estimate and organize whatever it is we’ve set out to do, all the while keeping in mind that when we start, we don’t actually know what we have on our hands.

  It may be rubbish.

  It may be brilliant.

  It may be shorter or wider or longer or taller or louder or quieter or bigger or smaller than we originally thought.

  We don’t know, and so we suspend judgment. Right now, all we have is the satisfaction of doing it.

  You don’t know exactly what you have on your hands.

  The Ramp

  When I was thirteen years old my favorite thing to do was ride my BMX bike. I rode trails, I learned tricks, but the thing I did most was go off jumps. I couldn’t get enough of that feeling of flying through the air.

  At the edge of our driveway was a stretch of grass that led to a swing set, about twenty feet from where the grass met the pavement. I decided that I would build a ramp so big I could leave the pavement, go off the ramp, and land next to the swing set.

  So I set out to find the materials. We lived on a small farm at the time, and there were seven buildings on the property where my dad stored wood and paint and tools. I remember going through those buildings, searching for just the right pieces of wood, rummaging around looking for just the right nails.

  When we’re young and
we want something, we do whatever it takes.

  When you’re in the store and you see something you want, you ask your dad over and over and over. You drive him crazy until he gets it for you or gives you one of those definitive no’s that keep you quiet.

  When it rains and you’re stuck inside, you build a fort using every single blanket and cushion in the house.

  When it’s a summer night and you’re outside with the kids from the neighborhood, you find a can or a flashlight and you invent a game.

  You make things,

  you find what you need,

  you hunt down the supplies,

  you do this instinctively.

  You figure out what the 1 is and then you don’t rest until you’ve got it.

  Somewhere along the way in becoming adults, it’s easy to lose this potent mix of exploration and determination. We settle. We decide this is as good as it gets. We comfort ourselves with, It could be worse.

  If your life isn’t what it could be,

  if you know there’s more,

  if you know you could fly higher,

  then it’s time to start building a ramp.

  I wanted that feeling of flying through the air,

  but to get it I had to use nails and paint and wood.

  That’s how it works.

  You want a better life?

  You want to find your path?

  You want an ikigai?

  Find a 1.

  PART 6

  The Dickie Factor

  Your life has been a mad gamble. Make it more so. You have lost now a hundred times running. Roll the dice a hundred and one.

  —Rumi

  I once told my boys some stories about Dickie Shoehorn. (Where did that name come from? I have no idea. But I love it. It still makes me laugh.)

  I told them about the time Dickie went to his friend Joe’s birthday party and gave him a helmet but it turns out Joe had a massive head so all the boys spent the rest of the time trying to fit that small helmet on that huge noggin, including dropping Joe off his roof headfirst while some of them held the helmet upside down on the ground.

  I told them about the time Dickie was staying at his uncle Vince’s house and was so excited about the cereal he was eating that he said he would swim in a pool of it if he could. Which is what Uncle Vince did, draining his swimming pool and then filling it with milk and cereal so Dickie could swim in it. Dickie learned that day that you actually can have too much of a good thing.

  I told them stories about Dickie riding his bike and Dickie going to his favorite record store and making friends with squirrels—there was no end to Dickie’s adventures.

  At the end of a particularly good Dickie story we would shout, DICKIE LIVES!

  After a year or so of making up Dickie stories, I thought, I should write these stories down.

  So I typed one of them up and after working on it for a while, I showed it to my friend Alan who’s a cartoonist. I told Alan all about Dickie and described some of the adventures Dickie had recently been on, and then I asked him if he’d draw me Dickie Shoehorn. And here’s the amazing thing: Alan’s drawing of Dickie looked exactly like Dickie.

  I was so thrilled.

  Alan then illustrated one of my Dickie stories. It came out better than I ever could have expected.

  Then I tried to get the book published. I showed it to some publishers, telling them how this story was the first in a series called “The Adventures of Dickie Shoehorn.” I talked about the potential for an ongoing cartoon show. I sent them the picture that would go on the home page of the website. I described the T-shirts we’d make with Dickie Lives! printed in big letters on the front. I had so many ideas. This was Dickie Shoehorn, after all, and what we’ve learned from Dickie is that life is an adventure and all sorts of things are possible . . .

  But nobody was interested. Not one publisher. No one had even the slightest interest in seeing Dickie live.

  And so I put the book in a file in a crate in my garage, and that’s where it’s been to this day.

  Whenever you create anything, you take a risk. And that includes your life.

  It may work out, it may not.

  It may be well received, it not may not be.

  Sometimes you do things and you get results and that effort leads to more effort which leads to more results and away you go, success building on success. And then other times you try something new and it ends up in a crate in your garage because no one is interested.

  Whoever you are and whatever your ikigai is and however you move in the world, it always involves risk.

  Often when we face our blinking line the first thought that comes to mind is,

  This is risky.

  Which is true. It’s always a risk to take action. It might not work, it might blow up in your face, you might lose money, you might fail. No one may get it.

  But that’s not the only risk.

  There’s another risk: the risk of not trying it.

  How is not trying a risk? You risk settling and continuing in the same direction in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.

  I remember asking a man with a Ph.D. who has had the same job for more than a decade what keeps him inspired in his work, and he sighed and said, Well, not much—once or twice a year I hear something that’s kind of encouraging . . .

  You could see in his eyes as he said this that he’s bored, weary, cynical—somewhere along the way he settled, buying into the lie that this must be as good as it gets.

  There are always two risks. There’s the risk of trying something new, and there’s the risk of not trying it.

  You may write the book and no one is interested. You may decide not to write the book and then find yourself wondering, What if I had made that book . . . ?

  Either way there’s risk. And sometimes stepping out and trying something new is actually the less risky thing to do.

  The question is,

  What are the two risks here?

  and then,

  Which path is actually less risky?

  Deep Waters

  There is a place within each of us that is the source of our life—it’s the well, the tank, the engine, the overflow in our soul that we live from. In the wisdom of Proverbs it’s the place in our being where the waters run deep.

  Sometimes this place is overflowing with life, and sometimes it feels drained and empty. Certain actions and ways of life choke it and starve it and smother it; others cause it to hum with life and vitality.

  My friend Chris had an idea for a new business. He and a friend resigned from their jobs, rented a small room with two desks, and then sat there every day starting that business from scratch.

  He didn’t know if it was going to work,

  he had no guarantees,

  he just sat there, day after day, working.

  He didn’t make any money that first year. He worked every day for a year and didn’t make one dollar.

  And yet he was more alive than ever.

  It’s possible to have emptied your savings account and be living in your friend’s basement riding your bike everywhere because you can’t afford a car and yet feel like you’re bursting with vitality.

  It’s also possible to have lots of money in the bank, living in the house you had custom built, going on expensive vacations to exotic places, and yet you’re miserable.

  When you are bored,

  restless,

  longing for something more,

  unfulfilled,

  feeling like you’ve settled,

  haunted by the sense of being trapped in your own life, these are the deep waters of your soul speaking to you, telling you something is wrong, something is missing, something needs to change.

  It’s written in Proverbs that it takes insight to draw out those deep waters in your heart.

  Sometimes we don’t take the risk because of something that happened in the p
ast. We tried something and it blew up in our face and so whenever there’s a new opportunity all we can think about is what happened back then.

  Is this you? Are you dying where you are right now but unable to take a leap forward because it seems too risky?

  If you stay there, you may continue to feel like you’re dying—

  now that is risky.

  Failure

  Risk sometimes leads to failure, and failure is overrated.

  Your business went bankrupt, but when you talk about it years later you realize how much you learned from the experience, how much it humbled you, how much it realigned your priorities, how much it made you a better person.

  It was bad, but it also produced an extraordinary amount of good in your life.

  You went through a divorce and it left all sorts of scars, but you are a far more compassionate and courageous person because of that experience. Your marriage ended, and yet that ending started something new in your life. It was awful, but what has come out of it has been good.

  Your friend died of cancer and to this day you miss her, and yet her death woke you up to the incredible gift that your life is. . . . It was so sad, and yet you now live with so much more gratitude.

  You tried something new and made a complete mess of it, but now you don’t live with that nagging question, What if I had tried . . . ?

  You now know. You weren’t successful at it, and yet it was something you needed to try.

  You failed,

  and yet that failure made you a better person.

  You failed,

  but it worked in your favor.

  You failed,

  but it made you stronger, more resilient, more appreciative.

  You failed,

  but it created all sorts of new life and growth and maturity in you.

  You failed,