Yearly Archives: 2024

When we come home after a day or week or longer of being gone, we need to create a space and some time to prepare ourselves before we walk through the door at the end of the day. We need to prepare ourselves for children who’ve been bad, a late dinner, and a frazzled wife. We can handle pretty much anything if we are just prepared.

(more…)

All of us come home.

Whether we’re accountants or programmers or teachers or farmers or soldiers, and whether it’s daily or weekly or longer, all of us have to step out of the fight and come home.

There’s a completely different set of skills we use when we provide for our families. We have to be decisive, abrupt, aggressive, firm, and for most of us, we have to go, go, go. There’s little rest and less calm, and to survive and perform well, we have to embrace the chaos, and by the end of the day, we’re physically and mentally spent. And if things aren’t going well in our professions, that stress drains our emotional energy as well.

And when we finally come home, at the end of the day or week or trip or tour, we just want some peace and calm and refreshment and consolation.

(more…)

The rubber tree plant in the driveway was the give-away.

When we first moved to Spokane back in 1992, I went to work for a software development company and we settled in for what we thought would be a long time.  But back then, when I was, believe it or not, a lot more arrogant and impatient than I am now, I didn’t stay very long at a job.

I was good at what I did, but lacked compassion, communication skills, and patience.  I’d work for a job for a couple of years, then start to get bored, and the boredom showed through in my attitude.

In July of 1995 I got fired.  Not laid off, not let go.  Fired.  And when I asked about severance or two weeks’ notice, they kind of shook their heads like they didn’t understand what I was saying.

(more…)

My boys are grown men, with wives and children of their own, so it’s a profoundly joyful time for me each year when they make it a point to visit me at the same time, and we go out to have dinner, drink beer, see a movie, and just be together.

One year we saw a movie together – martial arts, violence, etc., etc. – awesome bonding material – of course not much else in the movie was worth it – but there, right in the middle of it all a samurai warrior who is going off to die says this amazing thing to another, younger man: “None of us knows how long he shall live or when his time will come, but soon, all that will be left of our brief lives is the pride our children feel when they speak our names.”

But when I hear it, more often I hear it slightly different, and it is this:

(more…)