I have tried to teach you, my young souls, a lot of things.  I want you to learn to work hard.  I want you to be humble.  I want you to be a good person.  Most of all I want you to love.  Love what you do.  Love who you are, and Love those around you with no filter,  no boundaries, and no regrets.  I need you to know that in the midst of the fairy tale it is easy to love, but remember that life is not all sunshine and rainbows.  When life gets hard, loving gets hard.  I hope I have taught you how to love.  Now I need you to learn how to be loved.  It is easy to be loved when you are sitting at the end of the rainbow.  I need you to know how to be loved in the middle of the storm.  You know that sometimes you just have to love someone through it.  Just the same, sometimes you have to be loved the same way.  We all get tired, stressed, weak, or are hurting.  Sometimes the person that is wanting to love us is giving us all they have, and it is just not enough for us.  We have to know that we are loved through it.  If they don’t have enough love to give, then we have two choices.  We can choose to love less or we can choose to fill them back up with love.  I hope you choose to be the raindrops that fill their pond and not the wind that blows them down.

THE GAS TRUCK

Me and my four-year old went for a walk the other day and we were just shooting the breeze like any father and son might do. Talking about rabbits and frogs and what we might do.  When out of the blue he asks me, “dad why is mom so grouchy when she gets home?”  I was kind of taken aback for a moment and didn’t know what so say, so I said, “well that’s a good question.  Let’s sit down here and talk about it.”  I knew trying to explain this to a four-year old was going to be difficult, so I had to come up with something good.

I thought for a few moments and then said, “You know that picture book with all the big trucks in it?”  He said, “ya I know it.”  I said, “In that book there is a gas truck right.”  He said, “Yep.”  I said, “What does the gas truck do?”  He thought for a minute and said, “Well it drives around and fills people’s gas tanks when they get empty.”  I said, “That’s right, and when the truck is empty what does it do?”  He said “well, it goes home to get filled back up again so it can go fill more tanks.”  I said “exactly right.  You see son, your mom is a teacher and she is very much like that gas truck.  She goes around every day and fills people up with love.  She helps them learn things, and makes them feel important, and just makes sure that they know that somebody cares about them.  But when the end of the day comes her tank is getting pretty empty and so what does she do.  She acts just like that gas truck and goes home to get filled back up with love.”  I asked him, “Who do you think are the lucky people who get to fill her back up?”  He thought for a minute and said, “Well I guess the only people who are at home and that would be me and you.”  I said, “You are exactly right.  Sometimes we have to fill someone up with love before they have enough to give us some back.”

Thank you all for the birthday wishes and comments.  I have had a good day and am looking forward to watching basketball tonight.  I hope you have enjoyed the beautiful  day we have had in Kansas!

A Life Without Fairness

Fairness – noun – the state, condition, or quality of being fair, or free from bias or injustice; evenhandedness.

I have been told many times lately that “life just doesn’t seem fair sometimes.” Of course they are talking about Tammy’s cancer, our life, and how we respond to it.  I have written a few times that I do not believe in fairness and have wanted to take the time at some point to elaborate on what “Living a life without fairness” means to me.  I decided that my birthday would be a great time to take that on.  Maybe I can help you understand what my thoughts are on this, and maybe you will see the, “why” to my madness.

I would like to start out with saying that “fairness” is a human Idea.  There is no fairness in the natural world.  In order to have “justice” there must be a fairness component.  So I have some issues with “justice” also, but that would be a whole different topic.  Humans have evolved enough that we have decided that in order to have order we need rules to live by and somehow we have to decide how to be fair to everyone involved.  My problem with fairness is what happens when our human rules don’t supersede natural rules, which happens a lot more that we think.  Our everyday lives are filled with issues that we have no control over.  These issues are guided by natural rules.  These are things that no matter how hard we try we cannot change.  We say that life is unfair, we get upset, and want to set up more rules to make life fairer.  The most obvious example for me would be cancer.  Cancer has been unfair to us; life has been unfair to us by hitting us with this.  Another example would be who my parents are.  If life was fair, I would be moving into the White House as we speak.  Maybe if I was Italian I might not have to worry about getting a sunburn as much because my skin tone would be a little darker.  Maybe if I didn’t have such a heavy bone structure I would not have to worry about all this weight I’ve been packing on the last few years.  You get my point.  Most of the things in our lives we cannot change, nor control.  Fairness is an Ideal, not a reality.  So I choose not to believe in it.  I choose to believe that life will never be fair to me.  What I believe is that I will be fair in life.  That is my Ideal. That is something that I can attain, it is something real.

I’m sure you are thinking what is the difference Casey?  Well, for one thing my ideal is action not reaction.  In other words, I can take actions to make sure that I am being fair to the situation or I can react to the bias and injustice of the situation.  Cancer is unfair!  So what, everyone’s life is unfair.  My choice is to believe that no matter how hard life beats me down, how unfair life might be, I will be fair to you in how I talk with you, interact with you, help you, touch you, and love you.  That is my human ideal for “fairness.”  That is something I can control.

I haven’t written anything but updates for a while.  I have had so many emotions running through me that I didn’t know what was going on.  To say that November and December have been interesting would be an understatement.  For some reason the strongest emotion that I have been feeling is anger.  Why, I am not sure.  The only reason that I can think of is that we have been locked in this purgatory of good news followed by bad news followed by bad news, by more good news.  You get what I am saying.  Our bodies and minds are not made to do this for very long.  They get tired, I get tired, we all get tired.

I am not angry that we were chosen for this,  It is who I am, I am a caretaker.  I am not angry because of fairness.  I don’t believe in fairness.  Life is not fair.  We all have our troubles and trials and have to work through them, sometimes willingly and sometimes we are forced.  Sometimes our path is easy and sometimes it is hard.  It doesn’t matter which one it is, our trials will leave a lasting impression and hopefully we learn something along the way.  Living life eventually molds us into who we are.  To me, living life means that you live through everything, and more important, you feel everything along your path.  If you choose not to feel all of your discomfort, you will never fully understand your peace.

I am an analyst at heart and so I try to find reasons for what I am feeling.  I run it around until I can find a suitable answer to my questions.  I need to know the why, or at least, I need to try to understand it in my own way.  Most of my writings are me trying to answer those questions.  I usually end with how I am going to fix my problem.  Sometimes the answer can be as simple as belief. sometimes it is very complex.

So here I am stuck with a question.  Why am I angry and how can I fix it.  For some reason “glass ceiling” popped in my head a few days ago.  So I started to think about how you break a glass ceiling.  “Glass ceiling” has a different meaning to all of us.  For some it might be that you are the first to do something, like being the first woman president. For most of us it is something a lot less spectacular.  It could be a new job that you never thought you had a chance for.  Falling in love with the person you thought was way out of you league.  It could be as simple as loosing that weight that you have worked so hard to put on.  For us it is getting Tammy healthy and cancer free.

I have been angry because of all of the ups and downs of our journey. In order to understand this and fix it I have to remind myself how we break a glass ceiling.  You have to fall though enough floors before you have enough rubble to climb up to the glass ceiling.  For most of us life is not about how many time we broke the ceiling.  It’s about how many times we fell through the floor.  I am angry because we fell through again, But I need to get over it.  I can shed my tears and scream at the top of my lungs, but then,  I need to get up.  knock the dust off, and start building life back up.  Every floor that we break through makes us stronger.  We will only get to the ceiling when we are strong enough to break through all of the floors.

I am going to start stacking my rubble instead of laying on the floor looking up at the ceiling.  I hope that you keep stacking yours too.

I guess I have been spinning around in the excavator a few to many times a day lately.  For a while now I have had a question in my head.  It started with work.  I am currently in the middle of a very large project that has me tied up or maybe fit to be tied.  I don’t know which.  Even before it started and even when I bid on it I knew that it was going to test me.  It is not the biggest project or the most complicated that I have ever done, but I knew that with everything else going on in my life it would take
a lot out of me.  I began to ask myself, Casey why are you doing this?  Besides the basic reason that I have to work to make some money, why even bid on it much less do it?  I mulled this around in my head for a long time and decided that I needed to do this.  I needed to do this for a whole lot of reasons, but the main reason was hope.  I needed hope that tomorrow was going to be a better day.  I needed hope that maybe in six months things would be back to normal.  Maybe I would be back to normal.

So here we are halfway through the project and guess what, nothing is back to normal.  That is okay.  I will get through this, but I am sure I have many people around the job site scratching their heads with the same question that I had, Why?

I write a lot about hope.  I think it  is very important that we have hope everyday.  We hope for rain, we hope for good report from our boss, we hope that we will feel better tomorrow.  Hope gets us through a whole bunch of things, but as I was deep in the midst of my project and things we not going to plan, I started to question myself. One day the question popped into my head, what is the cost of my hope?

Over the course of a couple of weeks I would mull the question around in my head and came up with what my costs could be.  I am not talking about monetary costs.  I was contemplating what I myself had lost so that I could still maintain my hope for just a little while longer.  I had never really thought of hope in this context before,  everything has a cost. What are mine?

As I ran through my balance sheet for hope, I realized that to me my cost for hope are pretty high.  So after feeling sorry for myself for a while I decided that maybe I should compare my costs to someone else’s.  So I started thinking again.  Rolling it around in the mud I was playing in.

I started by just asking the question, “What is (pick someone)’s cost of hope?”  What does it cost a soldiers for his hope in a brighter future for his people?  What does it cost a seven-year old, whose father beats him, to have hope?  What has a young widower lost in herself to ensure that her children grow up with hope for a better tomorrow?  What is the cost of hope for a mother in an inner city who is a prostitute so that she can feed her kids?  What has she lost in herself to have hope for a better tomorrow?

I decided after a short time that maybe the cost of my hope really wasn’t that bad, but I decided to keep going.  What is the cost of people’s hope around the world.  What does it cost a father in Iraq to be hopeful for a better future for his children?  What is the cost of a protester’s hope for freedom and peace in the war-torn areas of Africa.  Most of us here have it pretty easy.  Our hope can not get us killed.

So after a couple of months of all of this bouncing around in my head I have come to a conclusion.  Before I judge someone I first need to look at what their cost for hope is.  Then I need to ask myself if I was in their shoes, would I do the same thing so that I could hope for a better tomorrow.  For a whole lot of people around the world their hope is very expensive.

It seems weird to think of hope in this way.  Here is the thing though,  Hope cannot be bought.  Hope cannot be sold.  You can make me hopeful and I can give you hope.  Hope is valuable, but there is no currency to pay for it.  In this country our leaders have a tendency to believe that they can sell you your hope.  Most of them don’t understand what your cost of hope is, and they sure as heck don’t understand the cost of hope around the world.  They need to understand that there are somethings that money can’t buy.  Hope has no boundaries.  Hope has no color.  Hope has no race.  Hope has no gender.  Hope has no lifestyle.  Hope has no income bracket and hope has no price!

Hope, is what brings us together.

I wander the the half light of the dawn and the twilight as the sun sets.  Lost between the world of light and a world of darkness.  Lost between what is righteous and that which is indignant.   Lost between my will to never look behind me and the pull of what I fear at my back.  I choose to look toward the light and ignore the darkness, but by choosing I mark myself as one who reflects light, but who must soak up the darkness.

If only I could chase the light all the way around, but it is not so.  By day I follow it as it arcs across the sky reflecting it as I go.  Shining light into the shadows.  As the light fades I gaze until the last drop has gone.  Holding my weariness at bay, but knowing that as my reflection dims so shall our strength.  By night I wait for the light to return.  Lost as the darkness surround me.  Lost to what my mind knows is false but my heart can not hold back.  My fear catches me from behind and I slowly fall into the depths of my sadness.  Slowly I wither,  slowly I fall, slowly I decay  only to be reborn as the half light of dawn returns.  I am drawn to the first drops as it ascends higher and higher.  I gather and hold  it.  I fill my mind with warmth and heal my soul as I start to follow the light.  Reflecting once again.

A teacher was going around the room showing objects and the kids had to identify them.  She held up a banana and said, “Molly what is this?”

Molly giggled and said, “Well that is easy, it is a yellow banana.”

The teacher continued around the room with other objects with other students and then she came to Johnny.  She held up a red balloon and said, “Johnny what is this?”

Johnny thought for a minute and then said, “it’s a red dog.”  

The teacher was surprised by his answer and said, “Are you sure it is a red dog?”

He said, “Yep, it’s a red dog,” and proceeded up to the front of the class and took the balloon and started twisting and folding the balloon until a long red wiener dog appeared. He said, “See its a red dog.”

I have been kicking around this idea of free thought for a couple of years.  I am sure that it is not something that is new,  but it itself being a product of free thought I don’t know where else it might have been used.  My idea of free thought is that in order to innovate you have to stop paying attention to conventional wisdom and start charting your own course.  We can know everything about something and be called an expert, but that really only means that you are an expert in what we know about one thing or another.  Innovation happens when you have learned enough and start questioning everything that the experts say and start thinking for yourself.  I would even go so far as to say that questioning the experts is not enough.  Sometime you have to forget the conventional answer so your mind can come up with a new one.

A good example of someone who did this is of course Bill Gates and his fellow world changers.  They were smart enough to get into MIT but found that the experts could not teach them anything and chose to leave.  They created because they probably didn’t know all of the answers so they created their own answers to questions.  They didn’t rely on what the answer was supposed to be in the book.  They had questions, found their own answers and wrote their own book.

So what do a Johnny and Bill Gates have in common?  Well, they chose to see what no one else choose to see.  Sometime in our past, someone was holding a red balloon and saw that red dog that has been entertaining kids ever since.

If you look though history you will find that many of the people who invented things we labeled with some type of learning disability or were just called dumb.  This made me start to wonder about a few things.  Especially about how we treat our kids today that are mentally challenged, learning disable, or what ever fancy word they have come up with to tell us that they are different from us.

It seems like today we are fixated on trying to get these kids mainstreamed into our classrooms.  We want them to fit in as much as possible, I feel like the experts believe that they want them to be able to think just like us.  They want them to try to be able to fit into society as best they can so that they can have the best life they can in our world.

Maybe that is the problem.  Maybe the experts have it backwards.  Maybe instead of trying to make them fit in our world we should open up our hearts and try to understand theirs.  I’m not talking about scientific understanding.  I’m saying that we understand that they see the world different from us and that is awesome, and maybe, just maybe, we could learn something from them about how to live our lives, if we stopped trying to make their lives just like ours. Maybe we have more to learn from them than they could ever learn from us.  Maybe we don’t understand the depth of their thoughts because we are so entrenched in ours.  Maybe, we are the dumb ones.

It happens. Yep, everyday.  It always brings me back to the famous scene in Forest Gump when he is running and steps in “it.”  The bumper sticker guy doesn’t know what to do.  Forrest just says, “it happens.”  So what is “it?”  In the movie it was very specific about what “it” was, but for me it is more broad.  For me when I say “it happens” I mean that life happens.  Most of the time we are not ready, and no matter how much control we think we have, we really don’t.

This picture is case and point.  It was two years ago and yes they are both stuck in the mud, it happens.  I decided to write this for my benefit.  This week has stacked up and is a doozy.  I am trying to convince myself that “it” happens and it is okay that it does.  I don’t have any control over most of it, so just move on down the road.

Monday started off muddy.  It rained pretty good on Friday and didn’t dry over the weekend.  I am having to meet compaction requirements on the job I’m working on and the dirt that we dug out was wet to begin with, so it’s a lot of mud.  Drying mud is about as fun as watching paint dry and takes about four times as long.  I don’t have any control over the weather so I just chalked that up to it happens and keep stirring my dirt with hopes that it will not rain again for a while.

I decided that I needed to get a skid loader out to the job site so Monday morning I go and get my trailer and pull into the pasture to get it.  I don’t know I must have had a little too much rolling around between my ears.  As I backed it on the trailer my track came down on the wheel well of the trailer, smashing it.  AAAAHHHHH,  I spent the next hour trying to pull the metal off of the tire so that I could pull the trailer 30 miles to the job site.  It happens, I guess,  fix it and move on.

It now almost noon, I stir my dirt and get a little bit accomplished but I have to leave at three-thirty because Kylee has a doctor’s appointment at four.  Two weeks ago she got a concussion from being dehydrated and standing up to fast.  Who knew, something about vessels not constricting and pushing the blood back up to your head fast enough.  She blacked out and must have hit her head on something.  She doesn’t remember, so now concussion protocol here we are.  She had a good appointment and is on her way to a full recovery.  We drove separate vehicles because she was coming from school and me from work.  As we are walking to our cars I hear someone yell at me.

He is waving and says, “is this your truck.”

“Yes,” I say.

He says, ” a little while ago a guy in a brown car pull in here and grabbed an orange case out of the back of your truck, it looked like a chain saw.”

I look in the back of the truck and sure enough my chainsaw is gone.  A nice thousand dollar bill down the drain.  It happens.  I just hope he feeds his kids with the money or maybe gets some jobs trimming trees to help support his family.   We can hope right.  I take a deep breath and head on down the road.

I guess I was living right on Tuesday because besides the mud I don’t think I broke anything.  That brings us to today.

I get to the job site and am visiting with my inspector.  I happen to look over at the excavator and the pile of rock that is next to it.  I don’t know what switch went off in my brain but I blurted out, “someones been in my excavator.”  I walk over and sure enough someone had been in it.  Started it up and helped themselves to some of the rock on the project.  It’s interesting because I had the keys in my pocket.  equipment keys are all the same, but still, come on guys.  It happens, at least it was still on its tracks, still had fuel, and the batteries were still there.

So where do I go from here.  Life has definitely happened this week.  I can’t say that I’m all that excited about it, but it is what it is.  I suppose I could have paid a little more attention as I came up on the trailer or locked the chainsaw up.  I suppose I could have done a lot of things different, but I didn’t.  So it happened.  I suppose I could start to lose my faith in humanity, but really, is a chainsaw or a little bit of rock really worth that.  I suppose I should start to lock things up tighter and not believe that people are good, But I won’t.  People are good and for what ever reason these people evidently needed my stuff a lot more than me.  I will still probably be day dreaming tomorrow so please don’t stand on the wheel wells of my trailer.

In all reality what have I really lost.  Nothing.  I have what is important to me.  I have what really matters.  I have my family, a roof over my head and food on the table.  I have people who let me love them and they love me back.  I have all I need and you know what.  That happens too.