If you could, what would you like to go back and start again?

“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” ― Meister Eckhart

I went to a rock concert last week. My first in a long time. Certainly since the pandemic has kept us all so isolated. It was like my experience at the ballpark a few months ago – the first game since isolation. All the people, and the little boys running around with their gloves. It made me think the world was right again.

Each time I go to rock concerts the audience always gets older and older. They always used to say that 11 am Sunday mornings was the most segregated hour in America. We all like to congregate by kind when we worship. I think that’s changing. I do notice the same thing with music styles. Classic rock tends to attract old white guys. Go to a RUSH concert if you want to see senior males and their sons. So, when I go to rock concerts, everyone looks like me, sort of.

I’m a social observer by training so I tend to look for “types” when I get around groups. At these rock concerts, there’s always two guys who keep getting up every five minutes to either go to the bathroom or get another beer. Then, up in the balcony overlooking the stage at many venues, there’s a lady who wore her Stevie Nicks skirt and wants to twirl and twirl and twirl all night long. I’m always afraid she’ll get too dizzy and pitch herself off the railing. I’ve been to some concerts with people sitting behind me that like to talk really loud (over the music) nonstop throughout the whole night. I can’t ever figure out why they came in the first place.

Sometimes, as happened last week, the band has saved up and wants to keep playing and playing. The lead singer has important thoughts to communicate. Lot’s of rifts to work through. As the audience gets older and older every year, once 10 pm arrives, they start looking at their watches. It’s getting late. Gotta go to work tomorrow. Need to remember to take my nighttime medications. With all that inflammation and a new hip, getting out to the parking lot is going to be a real chore.

Despite the current uproar about wearing masks again and the surge in new virus cases among the unvaccinated, I really do hope normal is around the corner. College classes are starting for me next week. I have been looking forward to this for a long time. Looking forward to that kind of experience that had been replaced by something foreign for the past year and a half. I’m making a list of what I’d like to do over again:

• Give more detailed feedback, sooner so it’s not too late
• Demonstrate that I’m on your side
• Find more ways to make meaningful connects
  (students tend to not remember the class, but do remember the instructor)

I spent a day this week in a professional development seminar led by a speaker full of tremendous ideas about how to effectively teach today’s college student. It was very inspiring and full of great ideas. Made me ever more eager to get started.

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” – Hermann Hesse

Time to get (re)started on something, isn’t it? Someone asked me today, how do you carve out the time to accomplish more intentional tasks? To get started on what you really want to do. I don’t think I had a good answer. Before the pandemic, I started to learn how to live more day-to-day and less long term. Career collapse and fighting cancer will do that to your perspective. I’m much better now. Much healthier, if that makes any sense. It’s easier for me now to pay attention to little things that really do matter more. Like people’s ordinary lives – people with broken hearts and dying dreams and faith that got lost and not enough relationships to fill up half a day. A note to a friend who’s spouse is heading off to a cancer screening.

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He’s a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn’t change, the story hasn’t happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ” ― Donald Miller

My friend told me recently that my blog is drifting a little dry. Probably a symptom of the locked down living and working arrangements around here. Very difficult to write about a made up life. But right now, I’m hopeful as next week approaches. A week with classes of students getting ready to start another chapter. That expert I heard from this week believes my students are probably extra anxious, full of pent up fears about the future. I’m planning to pass out some hope.

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” ― Graham Greene

I’m ready to to start something new as well, to be someone new, a survivor who is always being transformed by the good and the bad. What do you want to go back and start again? Where’s the next chapter in your story going?