It’s hard, in dreary February when the ice won’t melt outside, to remember days when it was all green and the breeze was warm, not lethal cold, and the sky was just as blue as this but it all felt alive and bright and comfortable or — actually — even uncomfortable because the heat made you sweat bullets.
No. It’s not hard after all. I just remembered those days. That’s the beauty of memory.
The trick, I suppose, is to remember the opposite — to be enjoying a warm sunny summer day and pause to remember a chilly, dreary winter day when staying outside would give you frostbite, and to think just then, “I should fix this and fix that while I can do it comfortably.”
And then, while enjoying the fixed this and the fixed that a year from today, you can lean back and think, “I’m glad I did that in July because it would be a pain in the butt to fix it in the cold.”
Memories comfort, generally. Memories can sting, but the good memories are the ones that last and keep you warm on a cold winter morning.
Intention is a big deal. Under the law, “intentional” homicide is a more serious time than “reckless” homicide. Reckless homicide means you did something so stupid or foolish that someone died. Intentional homicide means you meant to kill someone. The intentional murderer usually gets put away for life.
The two words work in a positive way, too. You can live your life recklessly, careening from one day to the next, or you can live your life intentionally, always aware of what you’re trying to accomplish and focused on what needs to be done to get there. That does not mean following a boring plan that structures every moment of your life, but it does mean having a sense of how and why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Of course, it’s not as either/or as all that. We all have our reckless moments and our intentional times. I would argue that living life as intentionally as possible is better for us in the long run. Even the reckless person knows that, for after accidentally doing something that turns out well, she may joke, “I meant to do that.”
May we live in such a way that when we look back and reflect on the best of our lives, we may be able to say, “I intended this.”
OK, no food after 7 p.m., that should work. Dang, I had all those snacks watching “Jesse Stone” last night. And while I was watching the noon news. Wait! TV is the cue! I always eat in front of a TV screen! Either I need to disconnect the snack habit from the TV or turn off the TV altogether.
I’ve been having thoughts like that all week as I listen to Atomic Habits, the audiobook, in the context of “Why am I having trouble losing weight?”
I am late to the party over James Clear’s little book, which has been out there for six years and kept showing up and staying on Best Seller and Recommended Reading lists until it finally registered that I should check it out.
Wow! Here is an easy-to-understand explanation of why we have those annoying destructive habits — and also our good habits — and how to fix the former and develop more of the latter. It’s so easy to understand that I think even I — the king of procrastination and slovenly housekeeper — conceivably could get things done and clean up my cluttered life.
Ah, I have been here before and been distracted back into hibernation by the quotidian. How will I fare against inertia this time? Only time will tell, along with developing some of the accountability habits that Clear talks about. Using his techniques I’ve managed to do my journaling and get out of my pajamas at a reasonable hour two stay-at-home days in a row, but those are the easy challenges. Beating the TV-food connection will be the real breakthrough.
Atomic Habits describes how our routines become our routines. The hows and whys of the process of habit-forming are helpful. Some of it I already sensed and even put into practice — I set the rule about not eating after 7 p.m. before I read the book, I just didn’t know why I kept breaking the rule.
And it’s full of common-sense brain explosions.
In achieving goals, “I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.”
Or “Every little action you take is a vote for the person you want to be.”
The “cue, craving, response, reward” explanation of habits. Wow! Of course!
My journaling this week has been packed with thoughts and ideas about how to implement the concepts in this little book. I understand why the guy has sold 15 million copies of Atomic Habits and it keeps showing up on those lists.
Add my recommendation to your “I want to read these” list if it’s not there yet. I suspect you won’t regret it.
Once upon a time I was such a fanatic about the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball team that I bought season tickets for more than 10 years.
The radio station I worked for broadcast the UWGB games, and so we were able to attend for free. I became interested in the Fighting Phoenix when they fired their coach after a 4-24 season and hired a guy named Dick Bennett, who had taken UW-Stevens Point from a below-.500 program to the 1984 NAIA title game, where they lost to Fort Hays State 48-46.
I was intrigued by Bennett partially because he graduated from Ripon College 10 years before me in the Class of 1965, and partially because I loved his teams’ style of scrappy and tenacious defense, as exemplified by the final score of that championship game.
The radio guys and our friends usually sat about six rows behind the visitor’s bench in Section F at venerable Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena. As Bennett’s teams started getting good — 5-23 his first season in 1985-86 evolved into 18-9 by his third season as coach — the paying customers started pushing us to other parts of the room, and so a handful of us bought our own seats in Section F.
We were enthusiastic and merciless on the opposing teams. We had our own nasty routines; one of my gentler and favorite habits was, when UWGB got on a scoring roll, to scream, “You might want to call a judicious timeout, coach, before it gets completely out of hand!!”
I toned myself down after one night, when I brutally taunted a player who had missed a crucial shot late in the game, we made eye contact, and I saw the hurt in his eyes after he let down his team. Fanatics tend to forget the other side has feelings, too, and for crying out loud, it’s just a game. From that time forward I tried to make my taunts more good-natured than mean.
They built a new palace to replace the Arena in 2002 and sent season ticket holders a letter that said our seats would be assigned not on the basis of our enthusiasm for the team but on how many dollars we contributed annually to the Phoenix Fund, the booster club for the elite. As a solid member of the lower middle class, I was offered a chance to purchase a seat 20 rows up.
And so ended my storied career as a stalwart fan of UWGB. I went to a couple of games at the new palace, which has none of the charm of the old Arena, but the school had let me know what it valued from its fans, and I was unable to deliver what they wanted.
The program fell on mediocre to hard times, hitting rock bottom in 2022-23 when UWGB went 3-29 and was rated third-worst among the 363 Division I college basketball programs. While the best teams played last year’s tournament, last March UW-Green Bay hired an assistant Wyoming coach, Sundance Wicks, who immediately caught my attention with the enthusiastic optimism he exuded at his first press conference.
Going into Wednesday night’s home game against Northern Kentucky, UWGB was 17-9 overall and holding first place in the Horizon League after a five-game winning streak that brought their conference record to 12-3. The Phoenix are also leading the league in opposing team scoring, which is my kind of basketball.
Wicks’ team is flirting with the all-time record for turning a program around in one season, held by Towson, which went from 1-31 in 2011-12 to 18-13 in 2012-13. I decided to check out this year’s squad for old time’s sake.
I’m afraid to say I did not bring my Phoenix good luck. They lost by one point to drop into a tie for first place. But I had a good time. Remember when I said I admired scrappy and tenacious defense? The final score was 58-57.
OK, it’s Sunday night, Kansas City just won an entertaining Super Bowl in OT, and holy cow, I never did write a blog post for Monday morning. I’m tired, so I checked the archives to see if I wrote anything interesting, let’s say, 10 years ago.
I found this from February 2014. I had forgotten about this night, and it’s worth remembering. This is from a time when Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, was a 6-month-old puppy.
– – – – –
I’ll just tell you what happened and let you decide what happened. I think I know, but we may look at these things differently.
Red took Dejah to her first obedience class Monday evening. Dejah is a remarkable puppy, but like all puppies the concept of what we call “minding” needs to be instilled. From all accounts it went swimmingly for a first time.
On the way home they stopped for gas. Here is where things began to happen.
First, the darn dog took advantage of the brief interlude where the door was open to allow the driver to get out. Whee! Puppy all over the parking lot with the opportunity for vehicles to attack from multiple directions.
A young man at another pump heard Red’s desperate entreaties and nabbed the fugitive when she got near enough. He received grateful thanks from Red and a chorus of “Way to goes” from the tribe of young men inside his car.
A somewhat flustered Red packed the puppy back in the car, filled the gas tank and got behind the wheel of her old car.
Several times this winter, the starter on the car has reacted badly to the cold. In the deepest, darkest 10-below moments of the season, she actually took to warming her key with matches before starting the car. But the car had been performing so well recently, she nearly forgot about the problem.
Certainly she never expected the key not to work after the vehicle had been running fine all evening.
She tried the match trick. This time, utter failure. She called the wrecker. Then she called me.
I had just finished making the spaghetti and had the bottle opener poised over a 12-ounce brew when the phone rang. I put a lid on the warm spaghetti, tucked the unopened bottle back in the fridge, and disappeared into the night.
The car still was parked next to a pump, it still wasn’t working, the puppy was still jumpy, and Red was extremely frazzled when I arrived. “You have to take the puppy home, the tow truck has two more stops before me, and I don’t trust her outside with all of this stimulation.” In times like this, someone has to be the happy and helpful one, so I packed the pup and hit the road.
It would take about an hour for me to get home, let the dogs out, and drive back. I tried one forkful of spaghetti; it was still warm, but I had to get back.
The tow truck still hadn’t arrived when I returned. Desperate, Red had sprayed some sort of de-icer product into the ignition, but that had seemingly no effect and now she couldn’t try the matches again because the product was flammable. So she sat forlornly with a cup of coffee staring out at the car that has faithfully taken her well over a quarter-million miles.
“Why don’t you give it a try?” She handed me the keys skeptically. Why not?
I settled in behind the wheel, looked across the parking lot at Red with her cup of coffee behind the glass, said cheerfully, “Thank you, Lord, for this most wonderful day,” and turned the key.
The engine jumped into action as if it was still on the lot with 14 miles on the odometer.
The look on Red’s face was worth the night of frustration. She literally jumped up and raised her hands in surprise and relief when I pulled away from the pump and drove the car into the parking stall next to my car.
She ran out to make sure I wasn’t silly enough to turn the car off before we got it home, then went back to call the tow truck off. I saw her waving to the driver over my shoulder; he had arrived a minute later and was pleased that his day was finished.
Your choices are to believe that the de-icer just needed to sit in the keyhole for a while before the car would turn over, or to believe that all the situation needed was a pile of faith and a grateful attitude.
There’s a way to get past the anger and the sadness and the rage and the madness — listen with an ear to understanding.
We are different from each other by definition. We are snowflakes (You, in the back of the room, I heard that. Quit it!) — each of us is different from every other.
You can try making assumptions based on gender, skin color, creed, religion, politics, or some other grouping, but you’ll get it wrong every time.
Each of us came to this moment from a different place and along a different pathway, so stop trying to put each other in boxes.
Just listen to your neighbor with respect, and try to understand.
The minute you think, “I can’t respect anyone who —” or “I’ll never understand anyone who —” then you close your mind, which is your fault, not theirs.
I have made a bit of a pledge to abstain from beer while I try to re-lose the weight I lost last year but have mostly regained.
I was a ridiculously skinny young man — 6 foot 1 and 155-175 pounds. I lurched over 200 in my forties and kept bulging. My most humiliating moment was when I peered over my belly and saw “263” peeking back at me from the scale. My frame is not built to carry that much weight.
A year ago I decided enough was enough. I had trimmed down to 248 from my awful max, but I now got serious and set a goal to reach 220 by summer. Over the next six months I knocked it down to 225, but then I started creeping back up.
This morning I weighed in at 244. When I hit 245.5 the other day, for a net loss of 2.5 pounds after more than a year, I decided to get serous again.
Once upon a time I quit drinking beer for a month and dropped 10 pounds without making any other conscious changes. So I decided my new regime will include no alcohol — that is to say, no beer, because I rarely drink any other alcoholic beverages. I have long been a two-beers-a-night guy, maybe three sometimes.
Here is where it gets interesting: I really miss beer. I got ready to watch TV the other night and was alarmed to realize there’s no beer in the house. The temptation to go make the 5-minute drive to the gas station/convenience store was palpable.
I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. I just like beer. It’s a comfort food, if anything. I quit and start up again all the time. But on this go-round I seem to miss it a little more than usual.
That’s the power of habits and addictive substances. Without my morning cup of coffee, for example, I can feel disoriented — that may be overstating the case, but I definitely feel the difference once that caffeine fix is coursing through my veins.
Even if I’m not a certified alcoholic, it’s very interesting to feel that tug. It’s like my body is calling out to me, maybe even a little anxiously, “Hey, buddy, where’s my beer?”
I didn’t put my shoes back on or grab the car keys or otherwise make a move to go on a beer run. But the urgency of the impulse convinced me I’m on the right track.
I’m definitely abstaining from beer until I hit 220, and at that point I’ll decide if I want to have a celebratory drink. Maybe I’ll even make that my compass — I will allow myself to drink beer when I weigh 220 or less. 219 — beer OK. 221 — have some water.
Things got even more interesting on Thursday. It was a work-at-home day, and while I put some hours in for the day job, I also spent time tinkering on my guitar, took a good long nap, and filled five pages of the journal with song ideas, reflections, and thoughts about moving furniture around, removing clutter, and otherwise re-making the house I shared with Red into a home for me and the two golden retrievers.
“Or maybe I should just sit here writing and petting Summer with my left hand as she leans in,” I wrote. “Contentedness — happiness? — washes over me. I am slowly healing, although the grateful tears that come, as I remember my love, promise that I will never be fully healed. I think of Merry Clayton’s song ‘Beautiful Scars’ and consider that I have beautiful wounds, where my heart has been ripped out and inexpertly replaced. I am not meant to forget, only to move on and to give the love that once was hers to those I meet along the way, just as I love Summer in ways that are different from Willow’s but as real as I have to give now.”
And I found myself wondering: How much of my clearer mind today is a result of my body and mind beginning to recover from years of two beers a night, sometimes three? The habit is almost the very definition of moderation, but a moderate amount of poison is still poison.
I have 24 pounds to go before I will allow myself to think about going back to my old friend beer, but in the meantime I have to say the early results are very … interesting.
