Wow, it’s been quite a while! Tonight I decided it was maybe time to brush the cobwebs off this blog and start writing again – bear with me!

For a while I’ve needed to take time to stop and figure out what I’m thinking and feeling – and what better way than taking the time to write…at least once or twice a month (that’ll be a big improvement on once in almost four years!!)…maybe more frequently!

I’m not sure that there’ll be a light post anytime soon – but that reflects where I am…where I suspect may of us are. Things aren’t easy and the brokenness that we’ve tried to hide and not look at is fully on display. It’s time to dig in, listen to those who are experts in their fields, and then figure out the way forward.

The first thing that springs to mind is the COVID-19 pandemic – and it’s in someways the easiest to get riled up about (it doesn’t take much digging or self reflection!). It messed with our travel plans in mid-March to visit family, all of who we hadn’t seen for 2+years…and then it caused school to be cancelled for the kid at the same time as work got crazy…and this all erupted right after I was knocked out for a week by the worst stomach virus I’d ever encountered. So far we’ve avoided catching the current coronavirus, but it’s impacted our lives, continuing to change how we navigate things – although I’m well aware of how privileged my take on this is (more further down and most likely in future posts).

Now 4 months later life is still disrupted. The airplane tickets we’d rescheduled for October to visit the UK are looking less and less useful. School is starting in 2 weeks, but COMPLETELY online through the foreseeable future – and how the kid will interact and cope is still an unknown. In fact there is still so much unknown about COVID-19, and in this uncertainty listening to expert voices directly has been helpful – there’s a Town Hall meeting my friend hosted here with some really good information.

I’m thankful to have a job that pays the bills, is meaningful and currently is causing me to grow and develop – but it now has to be balanced with more ownership of my child’s education. And by education, I’m not worried about the academics…I want her to learn, sure, but I’m more interested in her learning HOW to learn and the importance of CONTINUING to learn throughout your life. When we (by that I really mean “I”, but I suspect/hope I’m not alone) get lazy about learning, we lean on our biases and blind spots as we view the world, we tune out the voices of those who don’t mesh with our worldview, we walk through the world looking like we’ve got it all figured out. And then when the cracks appear we try to patch things up quickly and on the surface, so we can just move on.

I want my kid to become a good person…an active and caring part of her community…and I feel I fail at that so often – being responsible for that direction is sobering. It’s been a luxury to delegate some core value development to the kid’s school and teachers as they talk about Community, Compassion, Courage, Creativity and Craftsmanship. In these next months it’ll be up to me to walk the talk more.

Community – right now that core value has me continually pulled to look outside my (very small at the moment) bubble. And with all that’s been in the news, especially with regard to race, I’ve found my self digging in, listening, reading, and looking for the path I’m called to tread. I’d been thinking that I needed to listen, learn more, get it all together before I started speaking (or writing) about race. But today, while running, I was listening to a podcast which reminded me of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. As part of the interviews on “The Bitter Southerner” episode I heard an exhortation from John Archibald (a journalist) to “overcome the great silence that exists in many of our lives” in regards to race. So expect thoughts on this to come. And I’ll finish with an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html