Friday, January 10, 2014

The Doing

When i was an assistant hockey coach on my daughters team our head coach had motto, if you are going to do something then it's better to do it out here with the kids than standing in the cold seats drinking coffee and trying to stay warm.

Wise words,  but then you make it and get through it which is always easier than the  thoughts of getting through it.  It's always amazing what a human can survive, but yet we bitch about the simplest and most beautiful opportunities in life.

I found myself in this dilemma the other day... you see i have been teaching kids cooking class once a week since the fall.  Well it's after the season and we are into a new era, or term so to say, and i kinda wasn't feeling it... i actually went for a huge walk up Mt. Tabor in the pouring rain to sort it out.

lets go into an aside...

When i was a kid i got hired as a tutor to a younger kid across the street, now i didn't understand a lot, and i came from a very critical culture, and in the end i didn't think i was getting through to the kid and so i felt bad in charging this money... i was making good money btw.  In the end i quit on that kid, without really realizing that's what i was doing.  In the end i sent the message "you are hopeless" that came from a voice in my soul that said "you can't do this right".  Now that i am older and have seen things, i know that just sticking with the kid would have meant more than if he learned what i though  people might think he should.   It's a sad story but the moral is don't quit on things, even if you don't see development it doesn't mean it is not happening, you might just be looking in the wrong places.

But the reality is that after school is a weird time, mostly to do with an effort to try to talk to my mother who is suffering from a good dose of dementia but refuses to understand that which lands the kids in the house to scatter on me and set up various decoys to a structured outdoor activity... but then i thought... that's what we will do! We will all walk to the grocery store down the street and get the ingredients for the dinner, because a shopping trip is actually part of good cooking (clearly a trip to the garden is much better)... it got my head turned around from the fear of being trapped in a house full of kids for too long, and i felt better and began to get excited again.  Of course on the day of our cooking class it was raining cat's and dog's so we bypassed on the trip to the store, and made a fine dinner none the less.  Something my brain might not have been capable of had it not had the freedom of an idea that never happened.  That is a key... everything is mental, if you believe you can you can, and if you believe you can't then don't bother fake trying.

You gotta be bad to be good said some jackass somewhere in some song.  When you get involved in things there is always comedy.. sometimes it's not good to laugh at it when it happens, but in time you get a feel for these things... not being involved is not good, never comment on things you are not involved with, it's petty.  As if to say... "If i wasn't layzing on my ass here i would have done things differently".  Nope... you missed it, it just was what it was and those that were involved were involved and those that weren't have their opinions.  I guess I'm lucky, i have no fear of interaction, to me it serves a purpose to engage ideas... clearly using this method sometimes you have to slam it in reverse, but that's part of the deal, just don't be afraid to.

We all want to be important, and often times we can be important without actually feeling that way.  The fact that you are there doing it is often more important than any micro goal you see yourself failing in... it's not the failing it's the doing that is important in these times.


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