My father and I never had one of those father-son pissing contests that so many seem to have. Growing up, I thought (and still do) that the sun rose and set upon my dad.
Mom would often go to bed early, to lay in bed and read (I got that from her) and Dad would stay up and watch the news. I would stay up with him – just to be in his presence, uninterrupted. And sometimes, not often, and you could not plan a thing so important, but sometimes, we would get into a discussion after the news that might go for hours. The best memories of my childhood are of us sitting up late at night, discussing things – the future, my hopes and plans, how things work.
He would sit in his recliner and I would lay on the floor and I felt so proud to sit at his feet, to learn from this man who showed me that true greatness comes from serving others. He seemed ancient to me, but he was actually only 36 or 37 – four years younger than I am now.
The summer I turned 16, we sat up several times to discuss my job hunt. I had been offered a job at the grocery store in the nearby small town for minimum wage ($3.35 an hour in those days) or a job on the right-of-way crew for the power company, clearing brush away from the power lines for $4.50. I had a preference, and it revolved around the money.
Dad, however, advised against it. He told me that if I took the right-of-way job, at the end of the summer, I would know the other two guys on my crew really well, but that would be it. But, he said, if I took the job at the grocery store, I would meet a wide range of people. I would make some people really happy and upset others. I would see people at their best and at their worst, and I would know a lot of people at the end of the summer that I didn’t know now, and make lots of friends.
“And the only wealth in this world is friends,” he said.
So, I took the job at the grocery store. And it was a good job, and I stayed there until I graduated high school. But none of that is the story I wanted to tell you.
See, it was near the end of that summer, and I had been working at the grocery store for a few months. I had just gotten in from work and Mom was in bed and Dad was watching the news. So I sat on the floor at his feet and watched with him. And I knew, just knew, one of those treasured conversations was about to happen.
He turned off the tv when the news was over, and he asked how work was going.
“It is going great!” I said. “I am finally at a point where I know who the important people are.”
His whole body changed – I don’t have the tools to describe it. He looked overtaken by a wave of sadness.
He got out of his recliner and sat down on the floor next to me. He looked me in the eye, put his hand on my leg and said “Son, they are all important people. Every single one of them. Don’t ever forget that.”
It was January of 2008. I had been doing this work for about five months or so, and I was already burnt out. I had no money. None. I was surrounded and overwhelmed by the immense amount of need I was confronted with daily. There was nothing I could do to fix any of it.
In a meeting with an intern a while back, she complained that the things she was studying in school didn’t seem relevant to our work.
“After all”, she said, “how often do we use algebra here?”
I told her she was missing the point.
You don’t go to school to learn things. Not really, anyway.
You go to school to learn how to learn things.
Most of the ways people make money now did not exist when I was in college. There was no way, for instance, they could have taught me how to make iPhone apps – the average person had never even seen a cell phone, and the iPhone was years in the future.
Change is the only certainty, and in the world of the future, you have to be able to learn new things. Because if you don’t, you will get left behind.
As an example: right now everyone says the future of the internet is video. I love writing, and hate being filmed, so it would be easy to ignore them and keep on writing.
But if they are right, then I will one day be as obsolete as a computer programmer who hated all languages other than C++. People who do not change get left behind.
So I am trying to learn how to edit video. I’m not good at it, and the learning curve is steep. But I will get there.
Those of us who are in the helping professions seldom end up having 40 hour, structured workweeks. Instead, we are often responsible for creating our own schedule, which always involves other people’s schedules, which can lead to long, unstructured days.
For instance, I have an office, but am only in it three to four hours a day, with the rest being nighttime meetings, breakfast meetings, coffeeshop meetings, or time spent out in the field. And I still have paperwork to do and writing to do, and all the other sorts of things people expect me to do.
If I’m not careful, I can end up having a day where I have a breakfast meeting at 7:30, get to the office at 9:00, have a lunch meeting at 1:00 PM, spend time in the field until 6:00, where I grab something in the drive thru on my way to a seminar I am supposed to teach at 7:30 PM, and finally get home at 10:00, exhausted.
And for many of us, this sort of thing happens all the time. It is really easy to have a workday that spans 12 or 14 hours, and we wonder why we are exhausted and burned out.
Or maybe we are really good at sticking to eight hour days, but we end up giving up our days off to “just catch up”.
A technique I have learned that has really helped planning my days and weeks. It goes like this:
Your day is split into three units: Morning, afternoon, and evening. You have two goals – don’t work more than two units any given day, and don’t work more than 12 units in a given week.
For the days, you shouldn’t work all three units in a given day. So, if you know you are going to have night meetings, schedule your day so you are not working that morning or afternoon. If you have a full day packed from 9-5, don’t schedule anything that evening.
For the weeks, if you know you have to work Saturday morning and have a presentation Tuesday night, you are already starting the week with two units filled. Throw in a Thursday night meeting and we are up to three, which means, if 12 is our goal, that we can’t work full days the rest of the week.
I find this much more helpful (and realistic) than counting hours. It is easy to wrap my head around, easy to plan around and imposes structure. It turns your calendar into more than a device for recording your appointments and meetings, but rather a framework for structuring your life.
Take some leftover chicken bones, add the tops and trimmings from a carrot, the peel of some onions and the broccoli stalks you aren’t going to eat and put all that in a pot. Add enough water to cover it all, bring it to a boil and then put it on a very, very low simmer for six hours or so.
What you just did is make broth. Really good broth, actually, and it didn’t cost you a thing. You were going to throw all of that away.
You just made something amazing… out of trash. Well, trash and time.
I know one thing about you – you have been through some shit. We all have. And you have survived the shit that you had to go through. But now there are the pieces to pick up. Now you have to face being a 40 year old woman who is wanting to be in a relationship, or you are a 50 year old former account executive you learned how to sell everything, but mostly ended up selling his soul. How do you live with that? What do you do with that?
You see, the Universe is inherently frugal. No wasted effort. Rocks fall in straight lines, after all. And so the Universe need not go to the effort of finding new ingredients when she is fully capable of turning the trash you bring to the table into broth.
It’s easy to think it’s all wasted. The time, the effort, the pain. But it isn’t wasted. It’s all ingredients for your broth. To make something amazing, all you need is trash and time.
Once upon a time, we humans mostly did work that fit into discreet time periods. Land was measured by the amount a man could plow in a day. Craftspeople worked on one piece at a time – if you were a furniture maker, you made a table, and you worked on it until you were done, and then you might build a chest of drawers or a cabinet. Days had rhythms to them that were dependent upon the amount of daylight available to you, and at the end of the day the sun went to bed, and then shortly after that, you did too.
We don’t really live in that sort of world anymore. With the advent of electricity, we can work around the clock, and sleep is a biological necessity rather than part of the rhythm of the day. Because of technology, I can work for a person in another state, interact with her daily, and never have seen her in person, or know anything personal about her. We have close friends who live all over the world, and yet we do not know what shoes they prefer, whether they have bad breath, or if they have dandruff. I am emotionally close to people whose legs I have never seen.
And our work has changed as well. Many of us work on projects that, if they have endings, are long in scope, and when they are done, there is nothing tangible to show someone. If you make soap for a living, you can show your mother the bar of soap you made yesterday. Not so much with a database. For those of us in the helping professions, there is all of this, but more so. Jim was an addict yesterday, and will be an addict at the end of the day today when I go home, and will probably be an addict tomorrow. It’s hard to point at a finished product and say, ‘I am done.”
It all feels like a treadmill, endlessly turning, and because it feels like one could hop on or off at any point without changing the outcome, it is easy to feel disconnected from the world around you, and to feel as if you are not needed, and would not be missed. Because who the hell understands what you actually do, anyway?
Which is why I like making things in my spare time. When I set out to make something like a cutting board, I know it will take me a few hours, and then I will be done. I make one of them at a time, and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I can finish one before I go to sleep at night. Even if it is a bigger thing like a table, a thing that will take more than one day, I still can look at the work I have done and it has obvious progress – I can point to the pile of materials that is smaller than it was at the beginning, and the table carcass that now has turned legs and a glued up top waiting me to plane it.
I get the same feeling from gardening, which ties me to the seasons and the environment, or cooking, which ties me to people and pleasure, and which allows me to make low-risk bets that teach you something, usually in less than 30 minutes.
So if you feel disconnected from the world right now, I encourage you to carve out time to make something. Maybe a table, or whittle a piece of wood, or maybe just an omelet for yourself or someone you love. Something that has a beginning and an end, something that when you are done, you can point to it and say, ‘I did that” and that you can know would not have come into being apart from your work.
A few weeks ago, pandemic isolation was getting to me. But then again, the dead of winter is always hard on me. First there is the lack of sunlight. Seasonal affective disorder is real, and does my depression no favors.
Then there is the damp cold weather that I feel in my joints, reminding me of my misspent youth. I just ache all winter. I ache less in Central Mississippi than I did in North Carolina, but I still ache.
My primary depression management strategy has always been making. Whether gardening or cooking or building a chicken coop or deck, turning a pile of chaotic parts into an ordered result hits my soul in all the right places.
But the reality is that pretty much everything I love to do is off limits in December and January, except cooking. And this year, I’m cooking for two of us, just like I do every damn other day of my life.
Add a global pandemic and political chaos into the pile and you get a perfect shitstorm inside my head.
So I was racking my brain trying to find a way to make things that I can do inside (where it is warm and well lit) and that challenge me, yet are not projects so huge I lose interest in them. I decided to try making some spoons.
Why spoons? Well, they are relatively quick to make, and yet require a bit of skill to do. And it’s something I’ve never done before, and if I were to do a number of them, I would probably get better over time. And, to satisfy my Protestant guilt, they are useful to boot!
I had a nice gouge to carve out the bowl, and bought myself a sloyd knife for the hand carving. I will write a post later on the technique, but to begin with I watched a few YouTube videos and was on my way.
The first one turned out OK (that is it up there at the top), especially for a beginner effort, so I did another.
Spoon number 2
And then another.
Spoon number 3
Then I decided I would make a spoon a day for 30 days. Today is day 12, and I’m posting each day’s spoon over on Instagram.
In the last 12 months, I wrote exactly 2 blog posts on this website, so, if nothing else, 2020 taught me that lack of time to write is not my biggest barrier to writing. However, I did write many sermons and more than 90 newsletters, so it wasn’t a total loss. But still, long form writing is something I want to be better at, so I need to do more of it.
I learned some other things about myself in 2020 as well, some of which I talk about below. The way I have it set up is the thing I learned is in bold, and the action I want to take as a result is in italics.
As I plan what 2021 will look like, I am trying to optimize around these seven things:
I crave variety
I like to mix things up. I like to have a week where I fly to a different city to give a talk, then come home and work in my garden, then have a meeting with city leaders, then write my newsletter, then work with my interns, then go watch a movie with my wife and eat in a nice restaurant.
Instead, for most of last year I stayed home, had some zoom meetings, cooked almost every meal I ate, and sat at my computer. Every day felt the same. I hated that.
I crave variety, and have always felt a bit ashamed of that. Seeking variety is a typical ADHD symptom, and people (like me) who have lots of interests appear flighty to the rest of the world. But now I know it isn’t just that I like variety, I need it. So, expect Hugh’s public life to look a lot less focused.
I need a schedule
A friend once said that ADHD is the craving of structure and the inability to create it. I feel this in my soul. If I don’t have a schedule, I can literally sit on the couch all day, lost in a book on whatever my current interest is, or doom scrolling on Facebook, or pursuing whatever current passion project I am curious about rather than doing work people actually pay me to do.
So I need a schedule. But a loose one, because I crave variety, and if the structure is too rigorous, I will rebel and abandon it.
I do my best work when there are ways I can integrate it into a routine. I think this is one reason I like newsletter writing so much – Every Monday and Friday, I have to hit send on that day’s letter. That deadline, and that it happens every week, brings a routine with it. In 2021, I will try to work to schedule more.
Daily practices are good, but I hate to meditate
One thing I added in 2020 was the habit of going for a 2 mile walk every day. It’s a brisk walk – a bit above leisure, but not a race-walk pace, either. I usually use that time to listen to an audio book that I only listen to during the walk, as a reward for doing it. I refuse to beat myself up if I miss a day, and so I get my walk in perhaps 95% of the time, which is good enough for me.
I tried really hard to pick up meditating this year, and tried all the methods I could find – apps, guided meditation, breath, lovingkindness, and so on, and while I liked some of them better than others, and see the value, I just can’t manage to keep it as a practice.
I like practices other than daily, too. Church on Sundays is a practice, as is the practice of my writing on Mondays and Fridays for the newsletters. I have high rates of compliance with those as well. In 2021, I will try to tie things that I find meaningful to regular practices.
Everybody is too many
My projects I worked on this past year that meant the most to me were my newsletters. I have tried to think of why that is and I have come to understand it is because of the intimacy of the medium – I am writing directly to you, and you can reply directly to me, and nobody is looking on, like they would be in a Facebook post.
But also, I just like the idea that I am doing a project for a select group of people. This is the same reason I like having my work supported via Patreon. Less than 80 people finance all my creative work, and so I don’t have to make everyone happy – I just have to make things that appeal to those 80 people.
But the freeing thing is that the converse of this is also true – I don’t have to make everyone happy. Some folks are gonna get pissed off. Some folks won’t like me, or what I write. That’s fine. If I had 250 folks that supported my creative work at the levels those 80 do, I could literally accomplish every financial goal I have.
So I don’t need to make all of the 7.8 billion people on the planet happy – I only need to find 250 of them that my work resonates with enough for them to support it. In 2021, I will try to pander less, and find more ways to make my audience narrower.
I like parenting
We had four different foster kids in our house in 2020, and one of them stayed with us for nine months. I loved all of it.
I like the routine of it all. I like the stolen moments with the kid while you are in the car together, the conversations you get when you hear how they view the world, the opportunities to pass along what you know, the chance to shape another life, the whole new perspective they give you. I like it all.
I would love it if we could adopt a kid. Or two. But adoption is hella expensive. So at the least, fostering another kid long-term is important to me in 2021.
I am a maker
My dad died in 2020, due to COVID. I will have more to say about that later, but among everything else he was, Dad was someone who made things. He liked woodworking, metal working, auto mechanics, computers, electronics. He was truly gifted in his ability to figure things out.
I was a clumsy kid, and as a result, felt like the “making” gene had missed me. But some introspection last year has shown me that this is not true. After all, last year I made a workbench, a chicken coop (two of them, actually), added flower beds to the house, built a swing and arbor for the yard, a deck, and a fence for the side yard. And that is just the “big” stuff.
I like making things. I’m decent at it. In 2021, I will embrace my identity as a maker more.
I’m OK not being a big deal
Let’s get one thing straight – I was never a big deal. But over the last 10 years, I turned down book contracts, traveled around the country lecturing, wrote for national publications, and was interviewed by national media. I was a subject matter expert in my field, and was paid to consult with organizations, colleges, and churches.
None of that is true right now, and wasn’t true for all of 2020. and hasn’t been true really since 2018. I have spent a lot of time and ink wondering who I was if I wasn’t all of that. But while 2020 was a dumpster fire in so many ways, it was also a year I began to feel comfortable in my own current reality as a pastor, director of a tiny non-profit, publisher, home owner, organizer, and parent. I don’t have big goals. I’m not a “thought leader” anymore. I’m just Hugh. And in 2021, that will be enough.
* * *
2020 was horrible, and I am happy to be shot of it. But if I can take things I learned from it and make 2021 better, at least it won’t be a total loss.
One advantage of being older is that you see ebbs and flows – you remember Friendster, MySpace, Twitter back when it was fun, and Google Reader.
Social media sites come and go. Websites come and go. It is popular to tell young folks that, before they post all their business online, to remember that the internet is forever.
But it isn’t. Not really.
I spent a few years in the middle of the last decade making websites for folks who wanted to maximize their appearance in search results. I can’t find any of those sites now. I can’t find any of the phrases I wrote, that I invested hours and hours of labor to craft. It is as if they never happened.
This is why you need a spot on the internet that you control.
And no, I don’t mean a Facebook page.
I know several activists who have been put in Facebook Jail – where they wrote content that offended someone, and as a result, were blocked from posting to Facebook for 30 days and in some cases, banned all together. In addition, multiple times this decade Facebook has changed its algorithms for how posts show up, especially posts from pages that represent businesses or organizations. Posts from pages like that get a fraction of the regular reach, in an attempt to get you to purchase ads to promote your page.
This, of course, privileges organizations that have the budget to do that, and not small nonprofits, activists, and bloggers.
The answer is the same as it has been for at least 30 years – you need your own website, and your own mailing list. Another day I will talk about your mailing list, but today, I want to focus on why you need a website.
You need your own website because you need a place where you control the images, the text, and most importantly, a place where you own the content. All the hours you have spent writing Facebook posts, all the contacts you have made, all the emotional labor you have invested in that platform can disappear anytime they decide.
So you need your own website. This is your permanent home on the internet. It doesn’t mean that Facebook or snapchat or Instagram are bad – they aren’t, per se. They are just tools you use to point people to your permanent website. Tools change. But your website is your space. You have control over what it looks like, how minimal (or maximal) it is, and, for the most part, you can write whatever you want.
The other thing about having your own website is it is platform agnostic. Have you ever written something on Facebook, and wished you could have shared it with your friend who isn’t on Facebook? By writing it on your own website, you get a permalink, and anyone in the world can link to it and share it on any platform they want.
I know it’s easier to post directly to Facebook, but the price for that is that now you gave up control. One way I have combined the informality of Facebook with the permanency of my own site is what I call backposting. When I write something I think I want to keep and be able to share later, I cut and paste it to my blog on my website, thus preserving it and making it shareable, should I so desire.
So you need a website. The bad news is that it will cost you something – but the good news is that it is less than you spend right now for an Amazon Prime subscription.
You need a domain name, and a blog hosted using WordPress software. You can do all that at a place like name.com for less than $50 for the year. I think it’s worth that to control your own space.
