About a month ago, my wife got a call from our 18-year-old daughter on her way home from hockey practice (two hours away from home) around midnight on a Monday, telling us the car broke down on the side of the interstate just north of Muncie, Indiana. I had just gotten in the hot tub when my wife came outside, telling me that we needed to go right now. I jumped out of the tub, willingly, about as fast as possible, threw on some sweatpants and shoes, and hit the gas as we headed south. I had no idea what to do, other than to get to my daughter as fast as possible and figure it out along the way.
I read once that a man’s worth is measured only by how useful they are, and I’m over here thinking to myself, “damn, I don’t know what to do right now.”
I’m not sure how to build a house, fix the sink, do my taxes, or help my kids with their math homework. Honestly, I’m not convinced the teacher does either. On a side note, I may have gotten into it with my daughter’s math teacher on the qualifications of a marketing degree requiring calculus as part of the core curriculum....um okayyyyyyy.
Point being, if my worth is based on how useful I am, hopefully my inability to diagnose my engine trouble, or redo the drywall in the bathroom, isn’t the deciding factor. Then again, if they are, I’m in even more trouble, considering most of my time spent being useful has more to do with cooking meals, taking kids to and from practice, taking out the trash, switching laundry, letting the dog out, running my company, while everything else comes with an emphatic sigh as I whisper to myself under my breath, “it’s fine, I’ll just figure it out.”
Lately, the thing I’m most trying to figure out? How to print to my wifi-enabled-but-never-connected POS, HP printer, because the BMV needs a physical certificate printed so my son can get his license instead of, “hey, here’s a pdf I can email you you file.” A close second would be how to fix my grill after the wood pellets got wet and clogged the auger (Only took me four hours on Super Bowl Sunday, but hey, I figured it out, and we had wings). Everything else is anything that is just sprung on us last minute without notice. I’m not sure about anyone else, but at 45 years old, if it’s not in my calendar, it doesn’t exist because I don’t have time.
I’m not sure when it started for everyone else, or if it’s even that common outside of my circle, but “Just figuring it out” seems to have become the norm for most men I know (and no, I’m not going to speak for the women), only it’s not “just” figuring out how to fix the car, the grill, the printer (POS), or the drywall. It’s figuring out all of it, on top of navigating the schedules of everyone else in your life, including your own, so that God forbid, you don’t become useless in the eyes of others. I’m not only referring to the eyes of your family, your kids, your wife, but your friends, your clients, your peers, anyone, and everyone that needs you to do something for them.
The irony of this is that being useful is essentially in the same arena as “being used,” and from what I can say from personal experience, no one wants to be used. Not me, not even in the slightest, but then again, there’s always another perspective, one that I’m not sure many of us take into account as we consider ourselves useful, and that’s the concept of being used by God.
Oh, wait, now I don’t mind. Now, I want to be used. I’m sure that when we turn our perspective of our usefulness from “feeling useful for someone else” to being used by God for His glory, things start to change. All of this up until this very moment screams of some whiny guy, complaining about first-world problems, doesn’t it? Yes, yes it does, because that’s exactly what it is, but I would be willing to BET MY LIFE ON IT, that if you’re a family man, running your own company, in your mid to late forties with a family, you can relate.
I’m a cynic, a self-proclaimed cynic, and not because I want to be, but because it would be so easy to call my bluff if I were trying not to be.
About six months ago, I got into something called “stacking.” Have you ever heard of it?
It’s the practice of processing emotions in real time. You start with the negative viewpoint and work through a series of questions that force you to challenge the story you’re telling yourself.
Take the night my daughter broke down on the side of the interstate. My first reaction was irritation. I had to get out of the hot tub, drive an hour each way, and fix something I had no idea how to fix. I was getting mad about a situation I couldn’t control. But when I slowed down and examined it, there was no real evidence to support that irritation. Nothing had actually gone wrong yet, beyond an inconvenience.
Stacking, for me, is catching that spiral before it compounds. It’s taking a thought that would normally stack negatively and flipping it. It’s shifting from “I don’t want my value tied to how useful I am to everyone else” to “I want to be used.”
Considering, of course, that I’m no expert by any means, but I’m working on it, or should I say...”figuring it out.”
Thanks,
Derek
