Category: Happiness

Recharge Yourself.

“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.

It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.

Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.

Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.

Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.

Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.

But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.

I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”

It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).

Teaching someone something new to them.

When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?

That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.

I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.

Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.

There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.

A crisp autumn day.

Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.

Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.

One out of our four cats.

We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.

But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.

The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.

That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?

My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.

As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.

What charges you up?

The Funniest Article You’ll Read Today About Risk

Wang:  “A brave man likes the feel of nature in his face, Jack”
Egg Shen:  “Yeah?  And a wise man has enough sense to get in out of the rain.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Whoever took this photo was having a Kodiak moment.

Fairbanks, Alaska.

One thing about Fairbanks (and Alaska) is that it is rougher around the edges than the lower 48.  Everywhere.  They’re so tough there that they make the fries out of real Frenchmen.  Also, other things are a little different:  for example, the Post Office.

I had an acquaintance that I worked with who had come to my workplace from a previous career in the Post Office.  He told a story of a new Postmaster that showed up in town.  I believe that this particular Postmaster had come from the East Coast.  Don’t know why he was in Fairbanks.  Perhaps he was in the Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program?

Regardless, this new Postmaster was going to make changes.

“From now on, we’re going to deliver packages to the doorstep of anyone who gets one.  The days of leaving packages at the doorstep are over.  And, we’ll knock and let the resident know that the package is there.  We can increase customer service, and we will.”

I wrote a letter today.  I might try a number tomorrow, if I feel up to it. 

That’s a great sentiment.  Heck, here in Modern Mayberry, when a package shows up, the USPS drops it right on my front porch, then rings the doorbell, and scampers off.  It’s a nice touch.  It probably takes an additional minute or so for every house.  It works well here, and the biggest danger most mail carriers see is the random housecat with delusions that it is stalking prey in the veldt.

But in Fairbanks it’s a different story – I’ve described people up there as “very friendly people who will generally leave you the hell alone.”

The new Postmaster from the lower 48 didn’t understand why his carriers were so reluctant to implement the “to the door” service for packages.  He heard grumbling, but didn’t understand it – the carriers would do it in town, but they didn’t want to do it for the remote routes.  So, he got in with a carrier, and they ran a remote route together.  I guess that made him a mail escort.

One of the houses was pretty far out, say, 13 miles from the city, up Chena Hot Springs road.  The Postmaster and carrier got out of the truck to deliver the package.  The Postmaster knocked on the door.

Immediately, the door opened as far as the door chain would allow.

“What the hell do you want?” asked the man opening the door.

Behind him, the Postmaster and carrier could see a man pointing a rifle at them, “Tell me they’re Feds!” yelled the man with the rifle.  He kept repeating that.  “Tell me that they’re Feds!  We’ll end them right here and now!”

I use a .30-06 to hunt deer.  That gives me a lot of bang for my buck.

They left the package.  The “to the door” delivery idea was quickly abandoned.  Likewise, I’m certain that Amazon® will never try drone delivery up there – the locals would just think of that as skeet shooting with instant prizes.

The carriers understood the risk, the Postmaster did not.  They knew that Fairbanks is (in a literal sense) the end of the road.  The people that come to Alaska were adventurers, misfits, and fortune seekers.  And some of that group were people wanted for felonies.  There’s a reason that for many years taking pictures of workers at a construction site was considered bad manners.

So, it was a question of risk.  Many people don’t really understand the risks that they take.  In many cases, some risks are entirely overblown.

Case in point:  at a recent high school football game here in Modern Mayberry, there was lightning during the game.  To be clear, the lightning wasn’t coming down around us, the nearest strikes were miles away – probably 8 or 10 miles.  But then I was shocked . . .

. . . that they stopped the game.  All of the players went into the locker rooms, and The Mrs. and I continued to sit on an elevated aluminum structure.  Yawn.

If lightning only followed the path of least resistance, why doesn’t it only strike in France?

I wasn’t really worried.  In the years between 2006 and 2019, 414 people were killed by lightning in the United States.  My chances of being hit were, oh, nearly zero.  Exactly 12 football players were killed by lightning during that entire period.  As badly as our home team was doing that game, well, they could have used something to charge them up.

But lightning?  It is estimated that 243 people are injured each year in the United States by lighting, and 27 killed, on average.  And 1/3 of those killed?  They were inside.

Yes, lightning kills.  How many?  Hardly anyone.

But yet I’m sure that every school district in the country has a lightning policy that says something to the effect of, “If there’s any lightning any nearer than, say, Poland, shut it all down.”  The policy was probably written by lawyers that want to take the danger out of anything and everything.

“Let’s go Brandon”

People rarely understand risks.

The biggest risks for someone dying when they’re young are car accidents.  By far.  The human organism is pretty strong when young.  The main cause of death is, well, being old.  Of the top 10 causes of death in the United States (those top 10 cover over 74% of deaths) all of them but one are things that mainly happen to old people.

Of the top 10, only “unintentional deaths” (6%) are more likely to happen to young people than old.  In Modern Mayberry, those deaths often involve a motorcycle, a ramp, a cow, road flares, super glue, and the phrase, “hold my beer.”

So, risk number one to avoid is getting old, which can be done using only some beer, a motorcycle, a ramp, a cow, road flares, and some super glue.

A Mexican movie stuntman died recently.  I guess Jesus died for your scenes.

I think the reason we focus on some of these risks that are ludicrously low probability is simple:  it is much easier to focus on them, rather than on real risks.

The question I ask myself is this:  What is it that I know, that I’m avoiding?

It’s a powerful question.  A Twinkie® is a much greater danger to my life than a lightning storm.  Do I avoid thinking that?  Do I try to rationalize big risks and run scared from small risks?

What am I trying to hide from myself?

When I answer that question, then I know what the real risks are.  The biggest risk, perhaps is if I become a Postmaster.  Then people would expect me, John Wilder, to be funny, and I’m not sure I could do it.

After all, it’s all in the delivery.

Friday: Things I’m Thankful For

“He’s like the hard-working, grateful employee we never had. Wish he would wear underwear, though.” – Bob’s Burgers

I don’t need coffee to wake up, I wake up to drink coffee.

It’s Friday.  Time for a happy post.  We’ll need one, because (brace yourselves) I think Monday’s post is going to be grimmer than a crab bake with Paris Hilton or father’s day with Woody Allen.

But we have today.  And when I am feeling down, a step back to realize and think about what I’m grateful for always brightens my day like a big old gravitationally contained spherical continual thermonuclear explosion.

Here goes.

  • I am thankful for you, readers near and far. I’m happy for the one-time visitors, and happy for the faithful weekly visitors to Modern Mayberry.  I had written thousands of words in a journal before I ever put a single word down on a blog.  This is better, and it’s because of you.
  • I am thankful for the really great fried potatoes The Mrs. made last night. They were very crispy on the outside, yet buttery-smooth on the inside.  A dash of ketchup to taste?

I couldn’t find the thingy that peels the potatoes so I asked Pugsley.  It turns out she’d gone off to the store.

  • I am thankful for the people that I have a chance to impact in meatspace. Hmm, that’s poorly worded, it makes it sound like I’m as bad a driver as a blind Antifa® member late to get his estrogen shots.  Let me rephrase:  I’m happy to help people in real life.  Times are tough, and they’re even tougher when people are tools on purpose, so if I can make someone’s life a little better?    Many times all it takes is real empathy and a single word.
  • I’m thankful that Pugsley forgot to take the trash out to the curb this week, so I can needle him about it (playfully) all week. Seriously, though, I’m really thankful because I haven’t had to remind him in the last six months, and he’s only missed trash day twice.
  • I’m thankful that The Boy will be down from Big State University this weekend. It’s always nice to have him around.
  • I’m thankful that sunny-side eggs taste so good. And I’m thankful that the crisp taste of a fresh tomato exploding as I bite into a cool slice on a hot day exists.  I’m grateful for the knowledge that a tomato is a fruit, and the wisdom to not put it on fruit salad.
  • I’m thankful The Mrs. We have saved each other from being very horrible spouses for other people.  After being married so long we’re like good lawyers:  we never ask a question we don’t already know the answer to.

I hear that insane people are driving trains in Mexico.  I guess they have loco-motives.

  • I’m thankful that I have had the good fortune to have had great bosses in most of my jobs. A good boss covers your back.  A great boss pulls more out of you than you ever knew you had.  One boss made the mistake of telling me to have a good day, because then I went home.
  • I’m thankful for being granted the maturity to (mostly) know when I was wrong, and to look at those times not as a personal attack, but as a hint on ways to get better.
  • I’m thankful for books. One of those great bosses that I had said, “Books are the only real way that you can talk to the greatest minds in history.”  He and I got along very well.
  • I’m thankful for the troubles I’ve had in life. Most of those troubles were like the chisel of a sculptor – they knocked off bits of me that I didn’t need, and left me better after the trouble passed.  As dead Danish dude Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”  After I learned this lesson, every time in life I encountered difficulty, I asked myself:  “What am I supposed to learn from this?”  Life got way better after I realized that what started out as a difficulty could be the greatest gift ever.

The French donated the Statue of Liberty to the United States because they had no use for a statue with only one hand up.

  • I am thankful for fuzzy slippers in winter, electric fans in summer, and good cigars all year round. Protip:  if you look up “how to light a cigar” on the Internet, you will get 80 million matches.
  • I am thankful for the innocence I had. I am thankful for the experiences that removed it.
  • I am thankful for the valor of strong men who have defined bravery and given us heroes and heroic stories to the ages. I am stronger because of Leonidas.  I am stronger because of Seneca.  I am stronger because of a certain carpenter who lived and died and rose again some 2,000 years ago.
  • I am thankful for history, and the ability to gather vast amounts of scholarship to understand the past in ways that would have been impossible for all but the most dedicated scholars until recently. What do the “good parts” of American history and common sense have in common?  They’re both being wiped from existence.
  • I am thankful for PEZ®, because now I can honestly say that I’m the man who developed the PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ space drive (PEZ Spaceship Secrets).
  • I am thankful that the heat of summer has given way to the cool nights of autumn. I won’t miss summer.
  • I am thankful for the way a perfect ride on a motorcycle feels as the gears shift smoothly upward under full acceleration, which, for a moment, is like riding the wind.
  • I am thankful for a hot cup of coffee on a cool fall morning, on the deck, with a book, a breeze, and nothing else in the world to do.

Pugsley called me, “Severely ignorant.”  I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  • I am thankful for the things I don’t know.
  • I am thankful for one of our cats, not so much for the rest of them. Of course, the cat I like is the cat I wanted least.
  • I am thankful for all of my children – each of them in their own way.
  • I am thankful for a night of good sleep, and a morning where I have something exciting that pulls my head from the pillow. The Mrs. likes to lightly rub my back while I sleep, which is an amazing expression of gentleness. Unless you’re in prison.
  • I am thankful for work.
  • I am also thankful for time off.
  • I am thankful for the way my shirt smells the day after a campfire. It’s not uncommon for people to die in campfires – I mean, it’s not common, either.  I guess it’s medium rare.

What are you thankful for?

When Times Are Tough, First, Sharpen The Saw

“You have personal habits that would make a monkey blush.” – Red Dwarf

I know a lot of broken pencil jokes, but they’re all pointless.

Stephen Covey made roughly a bazillion dollars with his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which at least makes his marketing pretty effective. I read it back in the early 2000s when I found a copy sitting on a shelf in an office when I started a new job. This was lucky for me, since I could never find the self-help section at the library. The librarian just would say, “Well, if I told you where the self-help section was, that would defeat the purpose.”

I couldn’t name most of the 7 Habits unless I cheated with Duckduckgo®, but I do remember the last one of the seven: Sharpen the Saw.

You might think that this would be a reference to Jason or Michael Meyers, but no. In the book he relates a story about Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked if he were to race to cut a tree down, how he would do it. “Well first, I would sharpen the saw, and then I would hire the neighborhood kid to do it and then I would invade the South,” Lincoln replied.

Talk about a one-trick pony.

How many Amish people does it take to change a light bulb? None.

But Covey picked up on this idea: if you’re not sharp, you’re not at your best. You can look at that through several dimensions, and include things like fitness, but you know how to get in shape. That answer is simple – even if you don’t want to do it.

The dimension of sharpness that I want to write about is mental. I know how to exercise to get fit, but if I’m so burned out that I don’t have the motivation to do it, I simply won’t.

The first level of control I do is to control the intake of my mind.

Around 2016 I went full-stop on listening to NPR® radio. NPR™ had always had a lefty slant, but in 2016 they went Full Throttle Leftist. The conclusion that I came to is that if I felt like shouting at the car radio that the host was wrong, I should probably just stop listening to them.

And I did. The reason I did wasn’t that I was afraid of the facts – no. I embrace finding out when I’m wrong. The reason was that the opinion that had always been in the backseat of the car became the driver. And I don’t like the opinions of Leftist NPR© hosts unless they’re midgets: the midgets always know what’s up.

Cats kill more birds than windmills. Heck, I can’t recall the last time I heard of a cat killing a windmill.

The Mrs. relayed to me that some journalism schools were now teaching that journalists should be, rather than impartial reporters on a story, a good journalist should actively intervene in favor to further Social Justice narratives.

My site isn’t a news site. My site is generally an opinion site – your opinion and my opinion. We can all have them, and as long as we agree to that, it’s fine. But NPR® began peddling opinion as fact, and editorializing during straight news stories, “discredited” and “false” were used as modifiers in news, as in “Fauchi debunks the false and discredited idea that people should wear masks,” a week before Fauchi says you need to wear six masks.

NPR® was harshing my mellow without giving me anything that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

The next level of control is to rest.

If I’m going all out, working and blogging, I might average five hours of sleep Sunday through Friday morning. That’s probably not enough. I play catch-up on weekends, but that’s not quite enough. A few weeks ago I decided I wouldn’t go in to work until after lunch on Friday.

It was glorious. I started the weekend with a full tank and that Friday was amazingly productive.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I have a list of things I have to get done. I do often live with a sleep deficit, but I do try to at least monitor it. I did find a scientific test on sleep deprivation online. It told me how much sleep I needed: just five minutes more.

And Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He decides what time it is.

The third thing I like to control is chaos.

Okay, I can’t control chaos. But I can control what I care about. I can prioritize. I can plan. I can make lists.

Make lists? How does that help?

I find that when I’m feeling whelmed, that just making a list turns a chaotic list of things to do into something I can attack. And sometimes, I just pick something I can do, something I can complete from the list, and just do it even if it’s not the most important thing.

A shopping center burned down – nothing left but Kohl’s®.

The best catalyst for action is . . . action. When I start getting things done, more things get done. Then things begin to disappear from the list as I cross them off.

At the end of the day, I feel good. Things are done. Sure, some aren’t, but finishing tasks and crossing them off the list makes me happy.

The fourth thing I do is step away. Turn off the chaos by connecting with other people. By reading. By writing.

There is always the danger in distraction. If done too often, it is simply running away.

But a moment to pull back, reflect, and work with the important connections in my life? That’s keeping the reason I face the chaos in perspective. I do those things for the people I love, for principle, or because it’s virtuous and has meaning.

Reading? That’s how I get ideas. That’s how I hit the reset button by focusing on other ideas.

Writing? That’s how I work through ideas. When I put it in writing, I begin to understand where the holes are in my thinking. Then I research. Then I get closer to the Truth.

Again, done too often, it’s an escape, not a refresh.

When the aquatic mammals escaped from the zoo, it was otter chaos.

Finally? I pray.

YMMV, but prayer does wonders for me. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” except when he said it, it came out more like, “Livet kan kun forstås baglæns, men det skal leves fremad,” and it probably sounded like Søren was gargling a mouthful of small wet frogs.

But Søren was right. Life is tossed by uncertainty and fortune, good and bad, and no one is getting out alive. As I get older, I begin to understand, and see the structure, though I have enough wisdom to know how little I really know.

Prayer brings me peace.

Thanks for sharing in my saw-sharpening. I hope it wasn’t too dull.

Fear: Don’t.

“The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” – Star Wars™

It’s hard not to stop and stair when you’re on an escalator.

On most Fridays, I try to get away from the heavy topics – the ‘Rona and Afghanistan will be there next week.  And, probably the week after.  And the week after.  I believe we are in now week 70 of “two weeks to stop the spread.”

There is probably more similarity to both of these failures than most might imagine, but that’s probably fodder for another post.  That would make a good topic for a Monday.  We’ll save the coming economic collapse for Wednesday.  By Friday, though, I’m getting ready for the weekend and figuring out ways to best spend time with family.

I do have an issue, though:

One particular problem I have is, well, I think.  Give me a potshard and I’ll try to reconstruct the political and economic history of the Mayan civilization that created it.  When I find out it was from a $1.99 plate from Wal-Mart that broke when Pugsley was experimenting with motor oil, aluminum foil, and topsoil in the microwave, I can just start on a new theory.

“I wonder how the Mayans got aluminum foil?”

Back in 2012 people were making Mayan jokes like it was the end of the world.

Part of thinking is that I often think about things that can go wrong.  I have accurately predicted four of the last two recessions.  I know where my house sits relative to former ash deposition related to the past eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano.  I have a (fairly) accurate caloric inventory of the food I have stored “just in case.”

Thinking is not quite a superpower, but it’s close.

One of my friends says he has the superpower to talk to dead people.  It would be amazing, but they can’t talk back.

But it doesn’t help me sleep at night.  It’s like looking up the disease that you might have on the Internet when you have three symptoms.  “Hmm, it could be the common cold, or it could be a rare form of Dengue fever that would cause my bones to rubberize and my intestines to liquify.  Heck, then I’d be spineless and gutless, just like Joe Biden.”  Then I’d worry.

So, I don’t look up symptoms anymore.

The ability to predict bad things is important.  It is something that’s so hardwired into all living things that even the lowly slime mold reacts to predictably changing conditions by anticipating them.  If only Joe Biden could do that!

Lately, though, I’ve been a bit concerned when I make my rounds on the ‘net that there seems to be a consensus that something is now really, really wrong.  Again, I generally predict that things will be much worse than they end up being, and therefore I am happily surprised when things turn out much better than I expected.

This is normally the case.  My bones have yet to turn into a gelatinous mess.

Looking on just the bad things that can happen is limiting.  It’s no way to live a life.  It’s a weakness.

If you lose a Dalmatian puppy, don’t worry.  They’ll always be spotted.

My solution?

I’ve learned how to turn it off.  To just stop worrying about everything.  Sure, I can see horrible things that might happen.  In reality, seeing more of the downside than of the upside has probably cost me an opportunity or two.

That’s okay.  I’ve avoided enough bad things that I think they balance out, at least so far.

One of the things I noticed from Pa Wilder as he got older was that he got more afraid as he aged.  He had seen more of the world.  He had seen things that could go wrong.  Often, years will do that to you.  Even though I’d never seen him wanting, he could see many different ways things could get tough.

I’m not sure that it impacted the quality of his life, but I decided that I’d take a different route.  I could live with a lot of things, but I decided that fear wouldn’t be one of them.

So, what did I do?

I decided that, whenever possible, I would face my fear, head on.  Okay, that’s easier said than done if I have a fear of walking into traffic.  But when I developed a fear, I decided to not let it sit (G. Gordon Liddy Post).

Fear debilitates.  It creates a barrier to rational action.  Fear is one of the ultimate enemies because it leads to despair.  When we look at the biggest tool used to turn good men bad, it’s generally this one:

Fear.

And if a giant trips on a volcano, does he Krakatoa?

If we look at the way fear of the ‘Rona has been used in the last year, it has been masterful.  Create pictures of people dropping dead on the street in China.  Use fear to create a fear of gatherings, to create a fear of the most basic of human interactions.

As a society it’s almost like we’ve become addicted to that fear.  We have the choice to not let it win.

We head together into an uncertain future.  Many of the news stories that I read don’t give me hope that much of what we have become used to will long hold together.

That’s okay.  In some cases that will be good.  In others, well, not so good.

Much of the future is beyond our ability to project.  As Pa Wilder would have said, “Don’t pay interest on money you haven’t borrowed.”  Our future is not set, so spending our lives worrying about it gives us nothing.

What is the proper way to recognize someone who stopped bleeding?  “Coagulations!”

Certainly, we should think.  Absolutely we should prepare.  But do it without fear.  When you’re afraid, face that fear.

It’s a lot more fun that way.

And, it’s Friday.  Have a good time this weekend.

Efficiency: Not Always Our Friend

“Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.” – Star Trek (TOS)

I’d tell you a German knock-knock joke but they already have AI-enabled sensing that lets them know who it is.

Let’s pretend that you had to break a big rock.  A really big one, say the size of your mother-in-law’s butt.

Okay, that’s a big ask.  The last time I had to break a big rock that big was . . . never.  That’s a big rock.

Big rocks, mothers-in-law?  You’re thinking, have you had too much ale, John Wilder?  Bear with me, this will make as much sense as Joe Biden’s economic policies.

So, we’re back to breaking a stupid rock in our mind because John Wilder asked us to.  What’s the most direct way to do it?

What does a member of the Southern Buddhist Church say when they die?  “What in the reintarnation is going on here?”

You might think you could use a sledgehammer, but not so fast, Thor.  That’s not the most direct way, and Disney® will probably sue me for mentioning Thor because they now have the intellectual property rights on all things Norse.   Ignore Disney®, since they don’t have (yet) a copyright on hammers.  But I don’t want to give them ideas, because soon enough they’ll have a copyright on interstellar space.

To have a steel hammer, you’d have to make one.  That would involve having a mine for iron ore.  Then the ore would have to be processed into steel.  After you figured out how to do that, you’d have to forge the head of the hammer (it has to be strong, right?).

Even then you’re not done.  You have to find a tree, get some wood suitable for a handle, invent an entire industry to just get the knife to carve the handle, and finally mate the handle to the hammer head.

Nope.  A hammer isn’t that direct. To have a hammer, you have to have a functioning civilization.

Thor’s enemies never get drunk:  they just get hammered.

For the most direct way, you’d have to grab a stone or something hard nearby and just start thwacking the rock.

That’s not very efficient.

A hammer is more efficient.  But how about you build a piece of high-strength steel to use as a drill?  That’s faster.  But the drill requires advances in metallurgy even greater than the hammer head.

Okay, what’s the most efficient way to break rock?

How about you blow it up?

Note to the ATF, this is economics, not a suggestion.

That’s a really good way to make a big rock a bunch of tiny rocks, quickly.  But in addition to making your hammer and drill, you have to also create an entire industry dedicated to making explosives.

This points out a lesson from the (dead) Austrian economics dude, Ludwig Von Mises:  the most efficient way to do something is the most indirect.

To break a rock more efficiently, you have to look for increasingly more indirect methods.  That requires time.  It requires effort.  And, it requires resources that might be hundreds of miles (around 7 kilometers) away.

We have a really efficient society.  We can have fresh strawberries delivered to us (cheaply) in January because they grow them in Peru or some other country that rarely visits here.  We can have fresh roses for Valentine’s Day® because we have airplanes that deliver them directly from the cocaine fields.  Or something like that.  I’m not a botanist.

Efficient is better, right?

Well, no.  I’d like to put forward as Wilder’s Exhibit A the human body.  Nobody needs two kidneys, at least that’s what the girl in the motel in Vegas told me before I woke up in the bathtub.  Yet we have (on average) two.  We have two lungs.  Everywhere that having a spare part might make it easier for you to pass along your genetic information, the parts are paired.  I’ll leave the other locations of other paired organs as an exercise for the reader.  I mean, everyone has six toes on their left foot, right?

Wow.  Looks like Chee-toes® instead of actual toes.

Not everything is paired.  We each have (on average) one brain, though I think my ex-wife had six or so brains, one for each personality and species of venomous snake that she would normally impersonate.

But that single brain is armored as well as it could be.  Likewise, physics says that having two hearts works as well as having a man living with two women living under the same roof.  Thankfully, we have a solution that’s the next best thing – death.

Two eyes.  Two ears.  I could go on and on.  It appears that humans are designed based on the philosophy that “two is one, and one is none.”  Huh.

Efficient designs are vulnerable.

From experience, I can say that any business that has any spare capacity will do anything to use that capacity.  Wall Street doesn’t want 90% utilization – Wall Street wants 99%.  They want . . . efficiency.  They don’t want profits for the next decade, they want profits this year.

Just like I have two lungs, I’ll say this again:  Efficient designs are vulnerable.

How many of the semiconductor chips in your life came from Taiwan?

A lot.  Here’s what the Financial Times noted:

“Yes, the industry is incredibly dependent on TSMC, especially as you get to the bleeding edge, and it is quite risky,” says Peter Hanbury, a partner at Bain & Company in San Francisco. “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.”

So, most of the best information and knowledge in making computer chips that define the very essence of your life are built at one factory in a country that the Chinese now know that Joe Biden will defend with all of the force of . . . a strongly worded speech.

The Chinese word for Asia is the same as their word for Taiwan:  China.

It’s efficient.

I can’t help wondering how many of the current shortages of “stuff” that we’re seeing is just China messing with us.  “Hey, if we turn this lever, what happens to the United States?  Oh, man, that was funny.  Did you expect to see used car prices go up?  And those pickles and baking soda?  That was a hoot.”

Outsourcing and internationalizing is efficient.  Having no surplus production stored in warehouses is efficient.  Having no redundant capacity is efficient.

When efficiency works, it means everyone has more stuff.  The factories are working at 100%.  The people are consoooming apps and video games and pantyhose and PEZ®.

Did I mention that efficiency is vulnerable?

What happens when an efficient process gets disrupted?

Shortages.  Price increases.  Business failures.  Revolutions.

Maybe the question that we should ask is what can we do to make life less efficient?

I guess I have stock-home syndrome.

More efficiency means empty warehouses.  Do you have food storage?  Do you have ammo storage?  What happens if you lose the grid for an hour?  A week?  A month?

What happens if you lose the efficiency of modern life for a day?  For a week?  For a month?

What happens if you lose it for the rest of your life?

What happens if you have to live a life that’s less efficient?

I guess there are always more rocks, right?

Remember: Your Mission Isn’t Done

“Santa Maria! Captain, you cannot punish the crew like this. They will mutiny!” – Sealab 2021

The big problem with the French Revolution is that lots of folks lost their heads.

One winter, while hunting elk up on Wilder Mountain, we had, well, an issue.  We were about fifteen or twenty miles in from the nearest pavement, and headed home.

It was overcast.  It was lazily spitting snow, with a breeze that was slowly picking up.  Looking to the west, where there should be a resplendent sunset, the sky was dark, heavy, and pendulous with brooding storm clouds that blotted out even a hint of the winter Sun.

That was when the problem hit.  Pa Wilder, while driving over a “road” that was little more than a common path cut by four-wheel-drive vehicles over the course of decades of hunting and firewood gathering, drove over a small branch that had fallen in the road.  Not a problem, right?

Well, it was a problem.  In this case, the branch had the stem of a broken off limb, sticking straight up.  Pa drove the GMC Jimmy® right over that sharp shard of limb.

In the span of a dozen or so feet, we had lost not one, but two tires.  It penetrated the center of each tire, poking a hole the size of a half-dollar coin in each.

Amazingly, we had lost another tire already that day, already.

Ahhh, I remember this trip.  Those were the Goodyears®.

We now had a four-wheel drive with five tires and three flats.  In winter.  As a blizzard approached and night was setting in.  And all of this was in country where it could easily hit -40°F as night descended.

I bring this up to say that we had a mission.  Our mission at that point in time was to get home.  There were several challenges, and I’m pretty sure if most people were in the backcountry as a blizzard was descending that the last person they would choose would be a 12-year-old boy to be a guy on the team.

Which is sad.

Children can have missions.  Children can face danger.  Children can do important things.  We forget that because we’re in a society that doesn’t give children important things to do, mostly.  Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were as young as 14.

I hear the Russians just canceled their Penguin Army program.  Now all they have left is Navy Seals.

To be clear:  Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were 14.  A midshipman is an officer.  If you were unaware, the Royal Navy wasn’t a social club, and often those boys fought in wars.  As officers.

So we forgot that boys can be given real, substantial responsibility.  But there’s also the chance that we forget something else:  that each of us is on a mission.  And each of us has a role to play.

We currently are in a place where freedom is an increasingly precious and rare commodity.  It’s not just in the United States – Trump may have said, “Make America Great Again” but down under they seem to be following the “Make Australia A Prison Again” plan.  And Canada?

I love our Canadabros that come by regularly (Canada is the second-largest readership here), but Canada seems to be determined to become the Soviet Above the 49th Parallel, led by that Tundra Trotsky, Trudeau.

Pictured in background:  the only two Canadians Justin’s mother didn’t have sex with.

It seems like in this day and age we all have a mission.  Just like 12 isn’t too young, 80 isn’t too old.

Frankly, we need all hands on deck.  The size of the mission is the largest on the North American continent since 1774.  I almost wrote that the idea was to preserve the Constitution and the Republic.  Seriously, I’d love nothing more than to write that.

I’d love for that to happen.  I’d love for us to come together.  I’d settle for the laws to look like they did 90 years ago.  Heck, even 70 years ago.  That would be preferable to today.

A reversion, sadly, is impossible.

Whatever will come from tomorrow will not look like the past.  It may be a shadow.  The Holy Roman Emperors weren’t Roman.  And the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Empire.

And I hear that soon enough he’ll be sending ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire, too.  Can’t you just sniff the leadership?

Or it may be something entirely different.

I think it will be entirely different.

And that’s where you come in.  Yes, you.

You have a mission to create a new nation here.  It won’t look like what we have today – it simply cannot, since we have created a situation that is at the far end of stability, but more on that Wednesday.

I assure you, you play a part.    The initial conditions of what happens are crucial to the final outcome.  If George Washington had wanted to be King?  If Thomas Jefferson had been a Martian Terminator Robot like the one that keeps triggering my motion detector lights at night even though the sheriff won’t believe me?

Things would be entirely different.

And you are important.  Your actions in the next decade are critical to the creation of what will come after.  Do we want a nation that will be based on slavery, control, and that eternal boot stamping on a human face?

I’d vote no.  If you’re a regular here, I’m betting that’s your vote, too.

I think everything he wrote was Orwellian.

If so, let me shout as loudly as I can:  You Are Not Done.  This is Not Over.  What is it that you can do to create a world where freedom beats slavery?  What can you do to create a world where children can run free from the indoctrination of an all-powerful, all-regulating state?

There’s a lot.

Our nation was, thankfully, built on the consent of the governed.  Most things that local government provides, we want.  To quote Python, Monty:

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

To be clear:  the Federal government does very little to make anything in the list above better, and often does a lot to make them worse.  Except for the interstate highways.  Those are actually pretty cool.

But I will tell you – you are the seed of the future of this country.  You are the seed of the future of this continent.

Never cross a Scrabble® player.  They’ll send you threatening letters.

You are the seed of the future of this world.  It doesn’t matter how old you are.  The time is coming, and coming quickly where great injustices will be attempted.  And you are the seed to make what comes after better for humanity.  Would the world rather live in 1950’s America or 1930’s U.S.S.R.?

The choice is stark.

Your mission is clear.  How will you act to make your county, your state, your country one where free men can walk?

It’s up to you.

Back to the mountain.

For me, it was a game.  That’s the advantage of being 12.  Pa Wilder and my older brother (also named John due to a typographical error) and I wheeled the tires so we had two good ones in front.  We locked in the hubs on the four-wheel drive.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drive up a mountain path in a car with only two tires in a snowstorm as it got darker every minute.  It doesn’t work very well.  The flat back wheels couldn’t push the Jimmy® up the hill.

That’s where I came in.  It was my job to take the winch cable, run up the hill, and loop the cable up the base of a tree.  Pa would then use the combination of the winch and the two front tires to pull the Jimmy© up.

Tree by tree, cable length by cable length, we worked pretty flawlessly as a team to get the Jimmy™ to the top of the hill.  Thankfully, for the most part it was downhill from there.  Although Pa was driving on the rims, we got it home.

Don’t let the jack slip on your foot when you’re changing a tire.  You might need a toe.

Was there danger?  Certainly, there always is.  We had snow, so we had water.  Ma would have called the Sheriff not too long after dusk, and even though the mountains were a labyrinth of roads, people had seen us.  We also had matches, hatchets, wool blankets, gasoline, and a mountain’s worth of firewood to keep us warm.

But we also had a mission.  Each of us served our purpose, and we got home.

Pa was a bit raw about having to buy two new rims and three new tires for a day’s worth of not seeing any elk, though.  For the record, I never saw a single elk when hunting with Pa.  I’m telling you, that man knew how to hunt.  Finding?  Sometimes I think he just wanted a good drive in the woods and hike with his boys, teaching them about living.  Teaching them about missions, and the part that they play, whether they know it or not.

In this life, we all have a mission, and we all play a part in it.  I can assure you that your part is not done, because you’re above ground, breathing, and reading this.

I hate to repeat something so trite, but in this case, it’s true:  you are not done.  This is not over.  And the whole world depends . . . on you.

It’s up to you.  You will create the future.

So, go do it.

Emotional Bank Accounts – Another Form Of Wealth

“I’m yours, Lurch.  My heart.  My soul.  My bank account.” – The Addams Family

If it’s 2% milk, what’s the other 98%?

I generally try to be an upbeat person.  I’ve got good reason to be.  So far, at least, most of the worst things in my life have led to most of the best things in my life.  And it seems the worse the initial event is, the better the final outcome.

The track record is pretty good.  I’m optimistic.  Heck, with a small thermonuclear war, who knows how good things will get for me!

Optimism is one of my personal keys to life.  And it’s key to my relationships.

One thing I’ve learned (besides the fact that cats float but don’t like it) along the way is this:  what I get out of my relationships is just like my job or any other aspect of my life.  The more that I put into the relationship, the more that I get out of the relationship.

“I have become Fluffy, Destroyer of Worlds.”

Stephen Covey called this the Emotional Bank Account®.  I put the little ® there in this case because Stephen Covey ® almost everything under the Sun.

The idea of the Emotional Bank Account™ is simple:  every relationship that you have is one where you’re either doing the things that build the relationship or doing things that cause the relationship to fade faster than Johnny Depp’s career.

A ramen noodle warehouse burned down.  Dozens of dollars in inventory were destroyed. 

This is a simple and important concept.  In my career I’ve worked in lots of different office environments and seen lots of different characters that quickly developed an overdraft situation with me:

  • The Complainer: There’s a problem with everything, in the view of a Complainer.  It’s like working with Goldilocks, but the porridge is never, ever the right temperature.  There is no topic that isn’t complained about.  Heck, if they were the manager of the Tesla® plant, they’d complain that the place smelled musky.
  • The Helpless: Helpless people simply cannot do any particular task, and need help each and every time they do it.  If you allow it, they’ll pawn off as much of the task to you as they can, each and every day.  What’s the name for a collective parasitical group of people like this?
  • The Woe-Is-Me: This is a perennial victim.  Everything in their life that’s bad?  They’re not responsible for it.  How bad is their life?  They have to shop at Wal-Martyr®.
  • The Untrustworthy: Think you’ve told them a secret?  Soon enough the entire office knows.  And untrustworthy people who use marijuana are worse.  They’re guilty of high treason.
  • The Emergency Room Doctor: Everything has to be done now – it’s all urgent.  And there’s a sense of criticality about even the most mundane tasks.  I mean, if your parachute doesn’t open, why panic?  You’ve got the rest of your life to fix it.

Those people are draining.  Don’t be one of them.  How do I know this?  Once I was going through a rough patch, and was slipping into Woe-Is-Me.  I could sense from my friends that I had ridden that pony a little too long, or maybe I needed to up my deodorant game.  I decided to stop complaining.

Then The Mrs. complained that I don’t buy her flowers.  I have no idea when she started selling them.

I decided that if I had a problem worth complaining about, I’d deal with or shut up.  Even my best friends have a max tolerance level for dealing my emotional complaints.  The Mrs. is even more direct.  When I whine, her only comment is:  “And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?”

Oddly enough, though, I found that (in most circumstances) when I’m a positive person, people like to see me around more.  They ask me for help.  They offer help.  My account balance is full.

It’s not just at work.  It’s not just my friends.  It’s my family, too.  If every interaction that I have with them is negative, people aren’t exactly happy when Pa comes home.

Hopefully, this knife joke wasn’t too edgy. 

Being a positive, productive, trustworthy person?  When times are good, it’s important.  When times aren’t good?

Maybe even more important.  And when we talk about wealth, being surrounded by good, trustworthy people is wealthy, indeed.

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it.  Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.  Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals.  The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England.  Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years.  I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears.  The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy.  And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that.  NO!  Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral.  Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime.  Or the lifetime of your child.  Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation.  Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral.  One motivational mistake is to aim too high.  When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners.  Third place isn’t so bad.  Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage.  They did really well.  Were they close to winning it all?  Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal.  But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place.  If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better.  So, third isn’t so bad.  They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him:  what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week?  What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room?  The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night.  Second place is tantalizing.  It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates.  Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist?  It depends.  In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right?  But what happens when the dog finally catches the car?  What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history:  Buzz Aldrin.  It will all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class.  He went to the USMA at West Point.  He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did.  He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing.  What was it?

Oh, yeah.  He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool.  But there appears to be a downside to that.  It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up?  Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up.  That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake.  Imagine:  Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked.  Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes.  Then a month passes.  Then a year passes.  The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew.  How do you move forward?  How do you top yourself?  I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes.  Dang.  That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped.  He had fame.  He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle.  Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars.  Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate?  The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk.  He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars.  He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision.  You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him.  Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars.  A worthy goal for mankind.  A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity.  He had found his cathedral.

Again.  Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers.  Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up.  But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that.  Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building.  You start building something more important than you.  I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching.  Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure.  Neil didn’t really say.  He seemed happy that the attention had passed.  My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong.  And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one:  have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build.  Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through.  Make it something that you can care about.  Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts:  you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

The Greatest Game

“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn

I have a friend who has a trophy wife.  It wasn’t first place.

I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys.  I have always raised my own children by a simple rule:  if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were.  A related rule was:  if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something.  Especially if it made my life easier.

Five-year-olds can do drywall.  I mean, through the tears, that is.

Obviously, this got mixed results.  The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older.  When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM.  Right into the house.

Live and learn.  Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet.  Was I irritated he ran a car into our house?  Certainly.  But, independence has costs.

Learning is never free.

I promise to stop using police-related puns.  I’ll give them arrest.

When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting:  most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft.  Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them.  It made sense.  We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.

In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple:  building a fire.  To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever.  One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour.  In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire.  Finally, he got it going.

Me:  “Okay, good job!  You can put it out now.”

He didn’t.  It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered.  And, for him, that was true.  He kept that fire going for hours.

There was a fire at Goodwill® today.  No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.

I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me.  In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life.  When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge.  He didn’t need a medal.  What did he need?

Nothing.  He had struggled for an hour to make that fire.  His reward wasn’t anything outside of him.  His reward was the skill.  In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.

Give that a thought.  Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt.  I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic.  The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.

When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.

A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal.  They don’t need outside affirmation.  They are who they are.

Arnold was a great gardener.  They called him the Germinator.

That’s the rule of the Greatest Game.  Struggle.  Learn.  Master.  Repeat.

Missing?  A trophy.  Why is it missing?  It’s simply not necessary.

We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle.  I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss.  Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere.  The calories to feed a person are plentiful.

So why are video games popular?

They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat.  Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.

Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human.  To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time.  The game has to be worth playing.

No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse.  He broke all of the Commandments at once.   

I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines.  Our technology has changed our culture.  Our culture has changed our roles in society.

These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology.  Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on.  That led to independence.

The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t.  He was free to succeed, or free to fail.

What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.

We’re still here.  We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there.  Each day we have the chance:  Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.

Me?  I’m still learning to make a fire or two.