Reflective Saturday

It’s amazing how my blogging comes in fits and spurts. I’ll post ten entries in three days, and then go three days with absolutely nothing. I’m not sure how you as a reader feel about that, but it’s a bit freeing as a writer to not have to care about that. That’s just the way it is. So there.

I’m feeling introspective this morning, so we’ll be doing a bit of rambling. I’ll just jump to the extended entry now since I doubt much of this will be very interesting.


It’s been an interesting week. My wife stayed home sick for four days this week, and was just finally getting over it on Friday. Last night I felt the beginnings of yuck in the back of my throat, and felt it full on this morning when I woke up. It has little effect on me, but that’s apparently how it starts. So I have impending illness to look forward to. Joy.

I also found myself being somewhat productive the past week or so. I’ve found that it’s hard to be productive when you work at home, or at least to feel like you’ve accomplished something at the end of the day. Most days I get plenty of work done, but it just feels like moving e-mails around and not getting a lot done. But thanks to a few billable projects and some time sunk into larger projects, I had that reassuring feeling of being productive. It feels good.

I also had a minor crisis at work this week. It’s more or less a clash of characters. I hate dealing with conflict like this. I over-analyze and I draft ridiculously long e-mails and I have a hard time seeing it for what it is. My wife made the comment that I let it become a crisis, and I think that’s probably true. It’s in my nature to avoid conflict, and I think when conflict comes up I just spend too much time and energy dealing with it. In the end it will probably all amount to nothing. That’s how most of my crises end up.

On the plus side, this conflict did spark an idea for a truly vindictive book that would probably get me sued, or at least blacklisted. So I’ve got that going for me.

Finally this week, I woke up early this morning to join a men’s group at church. The concept of a men’s group always sounds so weird. A bunch of men sitting around and getting in touch with their feelings–or something like that. That’s the mental image anyway, though I don’t know why it has such kooky connotations. I blame it on the name. A men’s group just sounds dorky. When you’re just hanging out with a bunch of guys it’s the exact same thing, but you don’t have to call it a men’s group.

Anyway, I’ve been mildly interested in the group for a while, but haven’t had a ride to get there or enough motivation to go. One of the guys took me out to lunch a week or two ago to pick my brain, talk, and encourage me to check out the group. So I did. It’s amazing what a personal invitation can do.

And I’m really glad I went. It wasn’t anything intense. There were 15-20 guys there and we sat around and ate breakfast and went around the room with guys telling what they did. That turned into an update on where they are in their lives that lasted about 5 minutes per guy. We didn’t make it all the way around the room.

It was just amazing to hear all these guys talk about where they were at. Some of the guys I knew, some I just recognized from church, and a few I didn’t know at all. You really got a sense for what was on people’s hearts, whether it was indecision about a job situation, or anxiety over children, or not being able to have children, or feeling adrift, or something brutal like finding out the day before that your wife has breast cancer. And that’s about all we did. Ate and talked. Originally we were supposed to give our names and say what we did during the week (happily avoiding defining ourselves by our vocation), but as the first guy shared for well over five minutes, and the next guy followed suit, it was amazing to see just how badly all these guys needed to share. I think we so rarely have a chance to honestly share with someone (other than maybe a spouse) and you could just see how helpful it was for each guy to get those words out and share their specific situation.

And it wasn’t a counseling session. It wasn’t an accountability group. It wasn’t my deepest darkest most uncomfortable secrets. It was just this is who I am and this is what I deal with on a daily basis. I met people I didn’t know, I learned new things about people I already know, and I got a huge insight into the lives of people who had been just acquaintences.

I was also easily the youngest guy there, which is part of why I was sought out and invited to the group. It seems hanging out with other men, or even business networking, is something people my age don’t know much about. There’s a tendency to have the men’s group be guys 35 and up. Though as the lone 25-year-old in the room, I found it eye-opening to hear all these stories and see so many guys dealing with things I deal with. There’s a sense of belonging in that, a sense of help and that you’re not alone.

As we went around the room we never got to me, though I kept wondering what I would say. Part of me wanted to comment on being the youngest guy there, and encourage them to personally invite the other guys my age and younger. Most of us just need that personal invite. I also wanted to talk about working with the youth group–dads of seven or eight of the kids were there, and it helped to see a different side of those teens’ lives. I also wanted to talk about my writing business, how staying home and writing all day makes me crave human interaction. How I sometimes feel adrift and schizophrenic with so many far-flung projects. How I wrote my first novel a few months ago and am struggling to know what to do with it now.

I don’t know. Sometimes you struggle to summarize your life in a few words, a few sentences–though it does help you to see what’s really important.

I think my favorite aspect of the whole thing was how I got there. My wife does dog training on Saturday mornings, so she usually has the car. I e-mailed a friend and asked about a ride, but he had to work. He offered to let me use his car, but I said I’d ask some other folks before it came to that. Before I even had a chance to ask anyone else our rector called and said he’d heard through the grapevine that I needed a ride. I don’t know if the friend I’d asked had passed the need along (how or why I don’t know), or if the guy who invited me to the group knew I’d need a ride and had asked around. I don’t know how it happened. I told the rector that it was one amazing grapevine. But I’ll take it.

So it’s been an interesting week. Not much blogging, but still lots of disjointed stuff happening. I’m thankful for a Saturday morning not of sleeping in (though I do miss that), but of connecting with other people and having a chance to reflect. Sometimes I need that.

I also have a need for speed, which I think I’ll satisfy for the next hour or so. Mmm… GameCube.

One thought on “Reflective Saturday”

  1. Great post.

    I realize this wasn’t the point of the post, but I had to reply to your first paragraph, about blogging frequency. I sometimes feel guilty, in a strange sort of way, when I happen to go a few days without blogging, and I often wonder whether my small circle of readers notices or cares.

    I think part of the answer to that depends on how people read the blog. Back when I manually surfed to blogs, I would be disappointed to look up one of my favorites and find no new update. But now I use an RSS aggregator, and no action is required on my part. So now I can follow a slightly larger number of blogs, and it’s not as big a deal whether blog X had a new post today (or this week).

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