"What now?"

A while back, a friend shared this comic with me.

Emotion by xkcd

Substitute a few of the pre-cancer "causes" and shift the arrival of cancer a year forward and it could be my emotions.

As my daughter's chemo treatments wrapped up early in 2012 the white area with the ?? began to grow.  Life pre-cancer was just life, it wasn't perfect, but it was. Life post-cancer is different, time feels more precious. (She's doing great, by the way.)

The white space has been filled with a fuzzy attempt to discern where my energies should be spent, what should be my focus, what is worthy of my time now that it feels more precious.  

But it's been too much thinking, not enough living.  I believe that something new, something amazing, something creative will come out of our family's experience.  Yet I'm having a difficult time waiting to see what that something is...

Random stories have appeared out of nowhere to encourage me to just move on, to live, to do.

I recently learned an adventure photographer whose work I've admired for years experienced cancer at a young age and was touched by the way his view of community changed.

A colleague shared how his career path changed following a family tragedy.

Yesterday it was Rob Bell's Drops Like Stars that jumped off the bookstore shelf and resonated in my soul as I read:

Others with far more wisdom and experience than me have tackled the "why" questions of suffering.

Here, in these pages, I'm more interested in another question...

Not "why this?"
But "what now?"

He goes on to write: "[Suffering] compels us to eliminate the unnecessary, the trivial, the superficial."

I can see that in our family's life, in the way that we've reordered our priorities and the new ways we use our resources of time, energy, and money.

Rob continues with this observation:

Sometimes what happens to us when we suffer is that we become open to the mercy and grace and gratitude and gift and appreciation and joy that are always around us all the time...

While I wait to see "what now?" I'd be content if I could be open to what is, and always has been, all around me.

Goals for 2012, or the lack thereof

Over the past decade, a friend and I have traditionally written personal goals for the new year and shared them with each other.  This year, for a variety of reasons, I'm opting to live without goals.

However, if I were to write goals for the new year, they might go something like this...

Thanks to my beautiful wife for passing this along to me, even though I thought she was poking fun at my need to set goals. :>)

Prayer & Inspiration

"How are you guys doing it?"

I can't tell you how many times my wife and I have been asked that question in the months since Chloe's diagnosis.  The answer is simple.  You get up, you get going, you get the family going, and just live the day.  You don't have a choice.

Actually, I've found there are two things that are making days manageable.  Prayer and inspiration.

Prayer is the obvious one.  However, I've found there are so many days when it is difficult to quiet my mind and heart and allow the Spirit to enter the moment.  Yet it is on those days that others tell me, from seemingly out of nowhere, that they are praying for Chloe and our family.  Today is was a colleague during my plan time, over the weekend a parent of one of my students told me that my student prayed for Chloe during Sunday School. Wow.

The inspiration piece is something that evolved as I was trying to expand my circle again.  In an effort to get back into my PLN, I began to give myself five minutes a day to explore Flipboard containing my Twitter and Google Reader feeds.  Not only did I begin to feel inspired again, I began to want to share that inspiration either through a tweet, an email, or a conversation.  A daily ritual had begun.  Now each day, without planning or forethought, I carve out a few minutes to be inspired or inspire someone else.

And that, possibly poorly written, is how I do it each day.

When the going got tough...

...to be honest, I wanted to quit.

Since Christmas Break I've been trying to get back into the running groove. Unfortunately, beginning about that same time, I began to suffer from painful IT band issues. In an effort to keep myself motivated to get out there and pound the pavement, I signed up for the 25K Riverbank Run. A little nutty, I'll admit. Yet I knew that if I didn't have that out in front of me, I probably would have quit. And boy did I want to quit.

On at least three occasions (and probably more), I came home and told Christa that I was done running. It was time for me to be content walking and cycling. She did a great job of just listening, and then usually suggested to take a few days to recover and then try it again.

Towards the end of March when my mileage was about half what it should have been according to my training schedule, I discovered that I had overlooked one possible contribution to my IT band pain: insoles. Even though I replace my shoes on a regular basis, I hadn't replaced my insoles for many (read: around 5!) years. Once I put new insoles in my shoes, the pain started to go away.
Yesterday, I achieved my goal: I finished my 25K run with a smile on my face. The run was great. Lots of energy, the rain stopped just in time for us to start, and the temperature was perfect. No record time, but I feel great about my effort.

Without going into too many details, I see so many parallels between my efforts to train for my run and the work of the ZPS TPIT. I was reminded of that as I finished up reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard yesterday afternoon. Two quotes from the final pages resonated with me:

Change isn't an event; it's a process. (p.253)

To lead a process requires persistence. (p. 254)

My run yesterday was certainly an event, but it wasn't the change. The change is my getting back into running. Likewise, handing our staff and students new technology in the coming months will be an event, but the technology itself won't create a transformative change. That change is going to be a long process, one for which we will be persistent.

Balance

For the past five or so years, a good friend and I have been setting goals at the start of a new year. The hope has always been that by sharing our goals with each other, we could support one another as the going got tough.

Life gets busy, though. This past year we checked in with one another about once a month (we currently live 600 miles apart), but I couldn't even tell you what my goals for 2009 were without looking them up. So this year we're simplifying things and going with a single goal.

Why am I sharing this with you? My goal for 2010 is to maintain some semblance of balance in my life and one of the areas that throws me off-balance the most is work. Mostly because I love my job. It's always challenging, never dull, and no two days are the same. I'm also eager to watch and learn from others, to collaborate, and to do lots of reading and reflecting. However, while I try to never put work before my family, I will often sacrifice my personal time for work. And that doesn't make me the best husband or father (or teacher or friend, for that matter).

That being said, I need to lighten my load. I need to choose wisely where I devote my time and energy. I'd love to be doing more writing about the thinking that I've been doing as a part of our Comprehension and Collaboration book club, about the small group of folks who have committed to studying constructivism and inquiry and applying it in our upper elementary classrooms, or just about the learning I do in my own classroom on a daily basis. But as you may or may not have noticed, I haven't posted much here over the past month. I can't seem to find the time. Maybe it's the holidays. Maybe it's having a two year old at home (in addition to 3rd & 1st graders). [I've noticed recently that many of my favorite bloggers have kids that are at least high school age, if not older. Maybe there will be more time then?] Maybe I'm simply trying to juggle too much.

Anyhow, friends and colleagues, I'm asking for your encouragement to help me maintain balance. The next time you see me getting ready to jump into a new endeavor, remind me to think on it for day or so before committing. Also, this doesn't mean that I'm not interested in reading something new or working on a new project, I just hope to be more mindful about it.

So, thanks for listening. How about you? Any goals, personal or professional, for 2010?

[Photo credit: SlackLine by Speleo Perdido on Flickr.]

"Presence is wisdom!"

"Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would eventually coalesce into truth.  Wisdom is precisely a different way of seeing and knowing...  I suggest that wisdom is precisely the freedom to be present.  Wise people always know how to be present, but it is so much more than that.  Presence is wisdom!  People who are fully present know how to see fully, rightly, and truthfully.  Presence is the one thing necessary, and in many ways, the hardest thing of all."

-- Richard Rohr