My life, in pictures

I'm working really hard to resist the urge to go into all sorts of backstory to describe and explain these four five pictures. Bottom line, they're really prescient for what goes through my mind regularly as I process my circumstances and then try to get myself to act. (Both are still big steps in and of themselves.)

I begin with a panel from Charles Schulz's "Peanuts", a picture I resonate with a lot:

 Below is the entire strip, for context:

I'm aware the lettering in the bottom-left panel is quite blurry. There, Lucy says to Charlie Brown: "You thought I was going to pull the ball away, didn't you? Why, Charlie Brown, I'm ashamed of you! I'm also insulted!" In the next panel, she continues: "Don't you trust anyone anymore? Has your mind become so darkened with mistrust that you've lost your ability to believe in people?"

We transition to "Calvin and Hobbes." Both panels are from the same strip. The first one immediately follows the second, but as I was processing these as standalone panels, it oddly made more sense to me to put them in this order instead.

I didn't intend for the final panel in this post to also be political commentary, but it feels like a rather apropos picture of our current climate. Spoiler: Hobbes takes Calvin's shoes off and tickles his feet. Calvin falls out of the tree and lands right on Hobbes.

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As of the posting of this post, this doesn't feel quite as apropos as it did a few months ago when I first wrote this. (I've developed a nasty habit of writing posts and then waiting a while before I post them. For topical posts it works great, but for "how things are going now" posts, not so much.) For a year I went through a sort of hell, which summed up basically was a crippling fear and uncertainty about my future, and feeling woefully unable to do anything to change them. (There was a series of circumstances, one after another, that fed into this.) But what was also true was that the answer to getting out of this lay in figuring out how to grow up, which, prior to therapy, I had zero help and zero understanding. Moreover, both the grueling process and the potential failure to grow up terrified me. Two of the key components of success, being able to develop healthy trust habits, and being able to take feedback and information from independent learning and turn it into gold, I have had to learn from absolute scratch, in part because I was never taught, but also in part because there were events that happened where the aftermath (no real processing of what happened) oftentimes was even worse.

I'm gratefully in a much better place now, largely because I've been afforded to shift my thinking and picture from a retrospective position to a prospective position. For a very long time, I've struggled with thinking that anything really good could happen in my life. The strips earlier in this post I felt illustrated what I was experiencing to a T. I'm still leaving this post as is, because I've been around enough to know that while growth and breakthroughs are not only possible but actually do happen, these old mental pathways that I've forged in my mind are still there, and barring divine intervention, will likely be there the rest of my life.

The below strip, also from "Calvin and Hobbes," is a pretty decent illustration of what healing and rewiring can look like. I am happy to say that I've gotten to experience plenty of moments like this over the last 7-8 years:

Random gratitude series: lessons about chess and friendship

I play chess regularly with a friend of mine. I don't recall exactly when we began, but we've been playing for a few years. We're about evenly matched, which I like, because it's just about impossible for either of us to get bored. Every victory is hard-fought. And even for the person who lost the game,  it still feels like a victory, 1.) because the losing player still made the victor work hard for his victory, and 2.) we both share in the victory. How is that possible? I will explain:

My particular friend and I have both gone through intense personal growth experiences at different times in our lives, and have found that playing chess where we match wits sharpens both of us. Our goal for this game is that the skills we hone while in strategic combat against one another will translate to the victories we hope for and go after in our day-to-day lives, as well as life goals. Both of us are musicians, and for a while, both of us have been self-employed, building our own careers from the ground up. But it's often daunting just to be the one man running the show, trying to make it work for each client, in the hopes of making enough to earn a living. In life, we have two options: 1.) lay down our arms, hoping that life will give us something; or 2.) get back up and do it again. That means the marketing: the website, the flyers, the phone calls; that means the meeting and assessing; that means the actual job itself; that then means the price negotiation and price description; that then means doing it all over again. This is not to mention the occasion delegation of tasks to another.

Just like in our careers and in life, every move matters in the game of chess. Sure, some moves matter more than others, and certain individual moves during the course of the game can make or break the strategy. But the best chess players are thinking 5 moves ahead, 10 moves ahead, 15 moves ahead. The best chess players not only think through every move between the current move and 15 moves ahead, but also anticipate as many possible different responses the opponent might deliver, and they adjust their strategy accordingly, based on all sorts of probabilities that they run through their heads. And then, each new move, the best chess players update their 15-moves-ahead strategy, either staying the course, or updating their strategy in case their opponent makes a move or employs a strategy that they might not have previously considered.

I'm aware everything I'm saying is coming across rather academically, so I'll cut to the heart of the matter: I'm grateful for my chess games with my friend. I'm grateful for my friend. And we know each other's game so well that, lately, the most adventurous part of the game is a race to see who can stay mentally awake longer than the other (we often play our games in the late evenings). Not only so, but even as we fade, it's a wonderful challenge to see if we can still make intelligent moves while we're fading.

In our experiences together, chess has been teaching both of us not only about strategy, but also about sportsmanship, translating the metaphors within the game into our lives, and encouraging one another during the game, just as we would in life. In Proverbs 27:17 (NIV) it is written, "Just as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." Whether it's in music, in our personal growth, in our faiths, in accomplishing our goals, or in chess, we choose to walk this verse out.