Category: Life

Reminder to self… plan ahead.

At one intersection in downtown Denver, what were once beautiful street names are rendered in sunken brass letters.

As you can tell, most of the numbers either got stolen or simply knocked off through wear-and-tear.

The solution would have been for the street-name sign creators to have made the letters about three times deeper, so the surrounding concrete could have more firmly held onto the letters. Or for the letters to be made of a different material that would wear at exactly the same rate as the surrounding concrete.

But they were thinking the concrete was sticky enough and permanent enough to hold the letters in place for years to come.

No.

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The obvious analogy is for me and you to build our efforts and things to last.

I recently took the plunge and bought my first new bicycle since eighth grade.

Electric.

Though many consider electric bicycles “cheating” (when they zip past regular bikes on a trail), I had many reasons for venturing into this new category of cycles.

1. In October-ish, my office is moving from 7.2 miles one-way to 11.4 miles one-way. The difference in my regular bicycling commute will be roughly another 40 minutes out of my day. A commute on this bike is close to the time of driving. And with the typically bad traffic along the new route, the electric bike might actually be faster!
2. Every time I ride the electric bike rather than drive, I’m preventing a significant amount of pollution. (I plan to ride as many days as I can.)
3. It’s still exercise… the motor won’t go unless you are pedaling. (It’s a “pedal assist” bike.) Even though it doesn’t provide as much exercise as a commute on my road bike, I am still getting way more exercise than I would be behind the wheel of my small automobile.
4. It’s a lot cheaper to charge the battery than pay for gas (once you factor out the cost of the bike).
5. Upkeep expenses will be undoubtedly less than for any of our cars.
6. It can only go 20 miles per hour, so it’s pretty safe.
7. 50% of the bikes sold in Belgium are electric (source). They must know something.
8. Ironically, the frame color is very similar to that of my road bike, which I had custom painted a million years ago.
9. It was a super good deal, via Performance Bicycles – like less than half of what most electric bikes go for.
10. It’s fun.

We love open houses. Visiting a home that’s for sale reveals a lot about the people selling the home. Their lives are on display for guests to see.

Some homes are time capsules – nothing has been changed for twenty years or more. Other homes have been cleaned up and fitted with the latest accessories and appliances so they could be in almost any community of the same demographic in another part of America.

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Our latest open house visit was to an immaculate farmhouse that was never a real farmhouse. The owners recreated a country home in the heart of suburbia. The matron of the home had impeccable taste – every room was perfect.

The Victrola room seemed a little excessive to me. Though the collection was small, each of these music players was not functional in the face of today’s entertainment landscape.

But that wasn’t the point. The owners most likely enjoyed the beauty of their hand-crafted machines and the era they represented.

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Then I had to reflect on my own collections. Many would say that I have too many small toy cars or pairs of headphones. But at least I don’t have a room dedicated to any collection – like the Victrola museum.

Collecting things can be fun or reach a compulsive addiction level.

Collections are a good way to enjoy human creativity through variety and also experience the spectrum of form and function.

It’s easy to put up a front.

It’s harder to bare your soul.

We like to appear competent, knowledgeable, accepting, loving and kind (or most of us do). And we are those things, to some degree or another.

But we can’t be everything that everyone needs.

There’s a spectrum between hiding our weaknesses to revealing inappropriate levels of personal frailties. We must learn when and where to reveal our true selves.

Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. I don’t have any deep secrets to reveal to whoever can read this. But one-on-one, I’ll be trying to stretch my boundaries by going deeper.

We know so little about the people around us.

Even though I live with my wife and daughter, I realized that I know so little about their day-to-day lives.

Rachel is a junior in high school. I am not sitting in class with her, listening to teachers talk about math concepts that I have forgotten a long time ago. I am not in the school cafeteria during her 15-minute lunch with friends. I’m not in her Bible study when her girlfriends open up about life struggles.

Heather works in an office about 5 minutes from me. But I’ve only visited her office once. I hear tales of the joys and challenges that each day brings, but I’m not in the room when she discusses the latest design challenge of the big project that she’s tackling. I’m not at the chili cookoff with her colleagues.

My two sons, Jay and Ben, have rich and full lives too. And so does everyone I work with, hang out with and know from the past chapters of life.

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My challenge to myself is to ask those around me a question that will uncover something I don’t know already. (And there’s a lot.)