It was long decided before I went to bed last night, that this morning was going to be an early-start trip to the lake.
You see, today is my Dad’s birthday and with some of his ashes occupying the waters of Lake Parker, it was always going to be the best place for me to visit with him.
I brought a candle (together with my cup of coffee and camera, of course) so that I could shine the light for him to see. Lake Parker is a dark place, pre-dawn, and I wanted to make sure he would see me.
When I arrived, there was of course no-one else there. Just me and the ghosts of my past.
It was so quiet, the little grackle in the distant reeds must have felt embarrassed for breaking the silence with her gentle chirp.
I lit the candle and sat on the end of the dock for a few moments while it was still at its darkest and I remembered the man that took a huge chunk of my heart with him, the day he left this world.
I recalled vaguely a saying about standing on the shoulders of your father and how you can be properly launched in life. Me, I was standing on the shoulders of a giant and from this height I could almost see forever. He was a truly amazing human being.
A measure of how much we love someone is the amount we grieve for them and I don’t see my grief abating any time soon. But I have tried to find soft memories of him to soothe the edge of the wounds carved into my soul by the loss. And lately it is beginning to work.
Memories are how we reclaim our past and if we are lucky, we can find happy ones that make our past worth having lived in.
At the end of the blog are a number of images from this morning. I hope you enjoy.
It was as I was driving out of the parking lot by the dock that my thoughts for this blog began to take shape. I realized that it was still a good five or ten minutes before sunrise and I wasn’t waiting around.
Why was that?
Was it the mosquitoes? Or the fact that there was a boat in the water now? Or did I have something pressing that I needed to be doing?
No. It wasn’t any one of those.
I realized that it was really down to the principle of diminishing returns. People who invest or engage in research will understand that in the business world there is always a point where diminishing returns on our investment (or effort) should make us question whether we continue on our path or take a new one.
While this approach doesn’t affect our decision of a simple choice of A or B, it should help guide us to whether we move on from something or stay put in our chosen path.
So, in personal life, we should also apply a similar principle in deciding on a change of course. If something we are doing has begun to produce less of the reason we were doing it in the first place, then we should invest ourselves in something that gives us a better result.
For example, this morning I could have stayed there taking pictures but the truth is, the clouding wasn’t photo-friendly and anything I might have shot, I have probably shot a hundred times before. So, I thought about the little furry faces that were waiting for me at home and I decided I would get more joy by being around them than I would if I were to stay at the lake.
In all of life we follow paths that we commit to early on based on a set of expectations. It might be a career, a relationship, or even an adventure of some sort. A key aspect of being on the right path is measuring the performance of any path in meeting our expectations and then adjusting our direction based on whether these expectations are being met or not.
I can’t tell you the number of people that I have met over the years that have stayed in a relationship many years after they realized it wasn’t for them. Or stayed working in a career that didn’t really light their fuse, the way the imagined it might. There are enough disappointments that happen in our lives, self-made ones shouldn’t be part of our life story.
As I continued the drive home, the wise old words of Confucius played out in my head: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away and know when to run”.
Beyond the catchy melody, the words are startlingly simple … knowing when to stay or move on is a very simple concept. In the vast majority of instances where we experience less of a life than we figured on, we know well enough when it is no longer viable.
So, knowing isn’t the only important aspect here. It is the action that should follow … the walking away (or running, as the case may be). This is what defines us in our life’s journey.
Are we destined to live out our life fully to our capabilities, or do we languish in something less?
Some people live in fear of change and that fear paralyzes them and they stay rooted to whatever spot they find themselves in. And they become stuck. And nothing changes until they die. Or if it does change it’s because their partner leaves them or the boss fires them.
Embracing change is an alien concept to those people.
And while all change is not good, change that is driven by diminishing returns is almost always a good move. While no move guarantees success, moving is what reminds us that we are alive and, at least partially, able to drive the direction that our life is taking.
When we settle for something diminishing, it should not surprise us when we, in turn, become diminished.
… just a thought.
