The Importance of Showing Up, Even When You’re Not OK

Some mornings ya don’t wake up brave, some mornings you’re just exhausted.  Some mornings our hearts ache, our minds are scrambled from running all out, and our spirit is running on the battery we forgot to plug in last night.  And still, every morning when our eyeballs pop open, we rise thankful we got another day to make a difference.  Not because we’re unshakable, but because we have learned the importance of our quiet presence.  We must show up, be there for those who need us, even when it takes trembling courage because we know we are not OK ourselves.  That is the kind of courage that does not make speeches or pose for gold gilded pictures, it is the courage of those who know they are imperfect.  That is the kind of courage whose voice cracks, and steady intention can’t even find the words.  Those of us who can admit we are not OK, we sit down, take some deep breaths and let our presence speak the words we can’t quite get out – I am here.  I am doing the best I can with what, and who, I have.  And for today, that has to be enough and we have to be OK letting it be enough, because at least my eyeballs popped open.  

Lately we don’t get to show up on the hard days full of fire and fearlessness, ready to attack the day.  Lately we have to show up simply because our presence matters to those who rely on us, even at work.  We show up even when our strength and patience are running near empty.   That’s a quiet truth that most leaders learn the hard way, at least in my experience.  Disappearing, even for legitimate and valid reasons, can ripple through a team in ways we never intended.  For me that means making space for the team, even when I am angry and disappointed and my voice is cracking.  I still make the choice to support the folks in my care.  It lets them know that they are not alone, it lets them know we are here to support each other, even in the hardest of times.  I show up for them because I have a responsibility to do so, just like I showed up for my shipmates, no matter what.  Leadership is not a performance, it’s a presence.  Imperfect, human, sometimes raw and unfinished, but the constant is showing up.  It can be a gift, I know it is for me. 

It’s weird because those days I show up the most imperfect are the days that carry the most  hope.  Folks don’t want or need polished up quotes from whatever the latest leadership book they read, they need us real and they need our presence.  When we show up with tired eyes, an honest heart, even if angry and disappointed, it becomes permission.  Permission for them to stop pretending, permission to breathe, and most importantly, permission to bring their whole selves to the conversation instead of the curated version of themselves.  That is such a grounding force, authenticity is appreciated as it steadies the room without saying a word.  Just being there tells the team, we can keep going, even through the hardest things, especially the things outside of work they have no choice but to carry with them.  This act of care is a small but powerful signal that we understand them, that we believe in them, and that makes room for the possibility that tomorrow might be kinder to their soul.

Some days we simply have to admit the truth without letting it become our whole identity.  Not OK does not mean broken, it does not mean we are not capable, it means we are human in a moment in time where the world seems dead set on taking a bite out of us.   Funny thing, and it’s kind of like when a scientist watches an experiment and realizes the simple act of watching is changing the experiment, an unexpected variable.  When we stop trying to wrestle our feelings to the ground to get them to relax, they get a bit lighter, the whole thing changes when we let go a little.  We are allowed to be shaken by the goings on, I question those who aren’t, and regardless we can still be steady and a bit lighter about it.   Think about that wisdom that says home is still home, the porch light is on and we don’t have to prove to anyone we deserve rest, we just walk right in and plop down on the couch and Grandma brings ya a sweet tea and kisses your forehead, that right there is the good stuff.     

The simple truth is, none of us get through any season alone, even if we put up the façade that we are.  We are steadied by those we allow to show up for us, the ones that don’t need explanations or a bunch of words.  The ones who are simply present for us, maybe with a hand on our shoulder, or a longer than normal hug.  It might even be that random text from that person you needed to hear from, I got an email yesterday that filled my heart from a coworker, I damn near cried at the generosity of their soul.  These folks don’t try to fix us, don’t try to justify the world in any way, they simply make space that feels safe enough that we can breathe again.  That simple human kind of love reminds us that showing up isn’t something we owe the world, its something we learned from the people who never walked away from us, even on their hardest days.  That is who we need to emulate.

Some days the bravest thing we can do is let enough actually be enough.  This is a struggle I have, the intellectual part of me recognizes the need to let enough be enough but I have learned that my emotional part does not always give a damn about what the intellectual part is up to.  The dichotomy of that battle I find to be one of life’s less than humorous jokes.  Pretending when we don’t believe it is also one of life’s little jokes, one that can be cruel to our well being.  We must keep saying, this is what I got today, and that is enough, sometimes we have to add words, like God Dammit or for fucks sake.   That is our heart being humble and kind with ourselves.  Maybe when Tim McGraw sang the words don’t expect a free ride  from no one, don’t hold a grudge or a chip and here’s why.  Bitterness keeps ya from flying, always be humble and kind he was singing about that very thing.  We have to dig for our better selves, choosing gentleness when things are hard.  We have to work on not passing our hurt onto the next person in line.  And always be thankful you kept going without losing your humanity and inherent goodness – be humble and kind.

Showing up when you’re not OK is not weakness, its love with dirt on its hands.  It’s refusing to let the hard season turn you into a hard person.  I have said various versions of this over the years but folks don’t always remember what ya said.  But they do remember how they felt when you were there.  They will remember that you didn’t disappear, even if your eyes are tired, even when your day was shitty.  We have to make room and share space to help the room feel a little less lonely, for both of us.  The wild part is, it does not require grand gestures to make an impact.  More often than not, it is the smallest things that tell the loudest truths.  sharing a lifesaver, holding a door open when you don’t feel polite, letting someone in who stayed in the lane we both knew was closing a mile ago, or simply paying for coffee fort the person behind you in line at Starbucks, which happened to me today, I paid that forward and rode that wave of joy all day.  That joy was an unexpected gift from a stranger, and I am grateful for it.    

So maybe that’s the whole thing.  Learning to come home to ourselves the same way we went over to Grandma’s to feel safe and loved.  On nights where you’re running on fumes, let enough be enough.  Be deliberate about putting the bitterness and hurt down, because that shit is heavy and you deserve to breathe.  If all you did today was stay human and offer one small kindness, then believe me when I tell you, that counts and it matters.  That is courage.  That is hope.  That is perseverance. And most importantly, the porch light is on for you - always! 

More War - again

So, it seems we are adding to the tally of years our country has been at War.  Over our country’s 250 years nearly 230 of them have been spent fighting one war or another, or over 91% of our entire history as a country.   The latter seems the craziest to me, 91%.  They always say how important it is we learn from history so as not to be doomed to repeat it.  From my perspective, the only thing we seem to have learned is that we don’t, or can’t learn from history, no matter what or no matter how recent the history.

In the 20 years between 2001 and 2021 the United states alone has spent $1,637,297,000,000 in total in the wars against Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.  These numbers don’t include the classified costs for the military and other agencies.  Those could easily be that much again.  Yeah, that is 1.6 trillion dollars that we the taxpayers footed the bill for.  Here is a link to our Governments own data on this Cost of Wars and I would say those numbers are WAY low, but that is just my opinion. 

There are other costs that come with war as well, most importantly our brave young Men and Women who volunteer in service to our country.  The average age being 28 for enlisted and 34 for officers (2023-24).  Over 7,000 have made the ultimate sacrifice between 2001 and 2021, the number we can verify.   I absolutely certain many did not get counted due to being on classified missions.  In those countries over 800,000 folks were killed, that number is comprised of combatants and non-combatants using the available data, which I am sure skews way low.

I wonder how many of those US troops had a spouse, kids a dog and I wonder what the long term impact on them is?  How many hours of counseling are needed?  How many bankruptcies happened as the result of that?  How many parents lost children, how many friends and loved ones now simply have a hole in their heart where their friend or loved one should be?   And beyond those numbers there is real human fallout, what about all those folks who knew and loved those 800 thousand people, can we even calculate that impact?  How many now and how many generations to come will hold the US in a very dim view?  How many may be radicalized to carry out further attacks?

For me, when we strip away the dollar signs and the line items, what’s left isn’t strategy or national interest, it is human wreckage.  No one wants to tally it, because it doesn’t fit neatly in a spread sheet or a Pentagon power point.  We throw around numbers like they are abstract concepts, I’ve even done that here.  But behind each and every one of them is family that got their entire world blown apart so some Politian could thump their chest, or as I see it measuring their dicks to see whose is bigger.  It’s childish and frankly repulsive and disappointing.

The disconnect between decision makers and the people who pay the price is infuriating.  It should infuriate every single American.  They are clearly not serving our interests or representing us.  If I am being honest, it is not hard to look at it all and wonder if anyone in Washington has actually learned a damn thing over the last two decades.  It also makes me wonder if learning was ever the point, because it sure as hell does not seem like it was or is, at least to me.  These things have always been about rich people protecting their interests by sending poor or lower class folks to do their bidding.  It is about who is being enriched by the actions.

Behind each of these actions are brave men and women.  They are real humans, not action figures, not avatars from a war game but people, our parents, our kids, our friends, our neighbors, loved ones of all sorts.  There will be dogs pacing nervously while they wait for their human to return.  Cats will be acting like cats do when their Human is not there for them to torment.  For what?  Another war we will we eventually pretend didn’t happen?  For another batch of unanswered and ridiculously hollow thoughts and prayers?  The emotional debt we pack on the backs of our military families is fucking obscene, and somehow, we act like it is just the cost of doing business in America and that makes me question whether we ought to be in another business instead of this one. 

So where does this leave us?  Do we keep repeating the cycle, like we are trapped in some nauseating national ground hog day of bad decisions?  At what point do we stop letting those elected to represent us wave off ambiguous outcomes with polished platitudes focused on patriotic soundbites?

What will it finally take for us to hold those fuckers to account, really hold them to account not in just a slap on the wrist.  Or easily passing it by at the speed of the news cycle.  We need to have an accounting of our tax dollars.  We should get that as a matter of course from those we elect to represent our interests, which is not currently the case for me and my interests.  

If we don’t hold them to account, nothing changes and we sink billions into this test of whose dick is bigger,  There will always be someone who is sure theirs is, and we will be left mourning the loss of another generations dead while the people who sent them continue on with their lives unaffected by the problems of the little people.

Maybe the first step is our own, maybe we can admit and stop pretending this is all somehow normal or necessary or inevitable.  It feels like a curse that says America must always be at war.   Dwight Eisenhower warned us to guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex.  We didn’t.  I feel like that is played out in real time in front of our very eyes, who is benefiting the most from war?  Perhaps it is the ones with the best lobbyists.  Every time we let political leaders skate by without a single real consequence we embolden and empower them, we ourselves have normalized this bullshit.   

We should be demanding transparency so aggressively that it makes them squirm in their chairs.  Every penny tracked, every classified program scrutinized but people who don’t owe their careers to the same defense contractors writing the check for favorable legislation.  We need decision making in the daylight.  If they can’t face Gold Star Families and explain why the sacrifice mattered, they don’t get to send anyone else.  And we should ensure when we send Americans into harm’s way, it is absolutely clear that it is an action of last resort.  And that should be made clear to all Americans, we deserve no less from those we send to Washington to represent us.  

We could start redirecting war fighting budgets, even if it is just a sliver from the endless river or trillions.  We could spend that actually taking care of people.  Imagine what would happen if we treated the root causes of conflict the same way we treat defense budgets.  As a tech dude I spend a lot of time thinking about root causes.  In today’s case, as with many before, it seems to be an unwillingness to learn and engage in dialog to find resolution to conflict.  I guess that is unrealistic for the 542 elected federal officials, so it seems impossible for that to work on a larger global scale.   

We could invest in diplomacy that isn’t a photo op.  In education that teaches critical thinking.  In communities that give young people options besides enlisting because they cannot afford college or health care.  We could hole public hearings where decision makers don’t get to hide behind closed doors, as we see them doing with the Epstein circus.  We could build a culture in our country that is more focused on collaboration, that values life over profits and that see service members as people, not pawns.  And that stops treating war as some kind of recurring subscription that we forgot to cancel.  Maybe a national Rocket Mortgage check that can cancel them for us.

If we want a different future, we’d better put down our devices and find the spine to demand one.  It’s obvious no one in Washington is going to magically hand it to us out of the goodness of their heart.  If we do not start demanding better, making it louder and harder and more relentlessly than ever, then we must admit we are simply bystanders.  We are then complicit in and actively supporting our own demise.  And at that point, we should stop pretending we value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or that truth means something or anything else worth having a flag to stand under.   

Growing Up Inside Sameness

I grew up in a tiny little, mostly agricultural community in west central Ohio, one of those places that looks almost identical now as it did when I left 43 years ago.  Mostly homes stayed in the family, and in rare cases when one came up for sale it usually went to someone who had grown up in the area anyway.  My Sister actually purchased my Granny’s house and renovated it, and then passed it along to someone else.  I lived in that purple house in Millerstown for nearly all of the four years of high school.  It was one of those towns that if you’ve never been there, you really haven’t missed much.

I went to a small rural school district established in 1957, the Graham school district.  Back in my youth I went to Graham South elementary.  Prior to becoming part of Graham Schools, it was Christiansburg-Jackson School and was originally built around 1907, finally closing in 2007.   Later it was torn down, along with Graham North and East.  The school carried the name of A.B. Graham, yes the founder of the 4-H youth agricultural program in 1902 that later grew into  the modern 4-H global program focused on hands on learning, leadership and agriculture.  

There was a sameness in the looks of all those elementary schoolhouses, and even the fields around those schools looked the same.   The small towns in the district shared that same sameness, Rosewood, Terre Haute, Carysville, Millerstown, Westville, and Thackery.  All familiar places filled with the same small town hard working men and women whose collars were mostly blue.   What I didn’t notice then was a deeper sameness, the near total absence of diversity of any kind.

In my entire childhood and young adulthood there, I cannot recall going to school with a single person of color.  Maybe there was one kid, but they were not in my circle.  My world was built out of sameness, and sameness became normal, and sameness became my truth.  Looking back, I can see it more clearly, the quiet but ever present “you ain’t from around here are ya?” energy that is so common in small towns, at least in my experience.

I can recognize now that the sameness built a certain level of blindness in me.  What I recognize today as casual xenophobia that was just in the air we breathed.  When a kid from California moved to our high school, we were brutal.  He wore an earring, a boy with an earring, in his right ear no less and we were 100% convinced that meant he was gay.  That tiny detail was enough for us to mark him as “other.”   Anything outside the script of sameness felt disruptive, and disruptive felt dangerous and scary.  I know now it was a moment in time that is long gone, but it still sticks with me.   

I also remember going to a diner with my Sister when I was back one time and the server asked where I was from, commenting on my accent.  I said Millerstown, to which she replied without hesitation, “no you’re not.”  I had to run through my graduating class and the folks I went to school with before she’d believed me.  I have seen a version of that play out in nearly every place I have been.  In smaller communities where everyone knows everyone else, the xenophobia is not intentional at all, it’s inherited.  We humans are literally wired to protect ourselves from the unknown, and in places with limited exposure, the unknown can be nearly everything.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to unlearn the idea that sameness equals safety.  In a homogenous place, everything reinforces itself, beliefs, expectations, the rhythms of life, nothing interrupts the script.  I was not raised to reject difference, I was simply not taught to recognize it, appreciate it or engage with it.   Stepping out into a world where people looked different, loved differently, worshipped differently, or simply lived with different perspectives and opinions left me more confused than hostile, boot camp helped with that.  It created a confusion about the great big world and how it worked, in all the ways I never even contemplated.   The world was expanding faster than my ability to keep up with it or my understanding of it, and in many ways, that is still true to this day. 

I also find a certain irony in all of this.  Folks from rural areas pride themselves on being grounded, self-sufficient, practical and grounded, and they truly are in ways city folks cannot ever fully understand or appreciate.  The sameness that supports those attributes also creates a fragility.   It prepares folks for continuity, which is essential.  At the same time it does not prepare folks for the complexities that exist in the world.  I learned a lot from a lot of amazing people, people who loved me, but they simply couldn’t teach me things they never had to face themselves.    

There were so many answers I needed and I did not even know what questions to ask.  My world was so small I didn’t even realize what I wasn’t seeing, and that’s the part that humbles me now.  I think back to that kid from California, all the shit we gave him because of an earring.  The irony is, I ended up getting one decades later and I put it in my right ear because of him, and I don’t even remember his name.  It makes me laugh now, and it also makes me think about how each of us carry little moments like that, unresolved crap from our childhood when we weren’t leading with our best selves.

And now when I look back at that tiny Ohio town with its sameness and the long gone purple house, the familiar fields, it’s not my prison and it’s not my promised land.  It’s simply where I started this crazy journey called life.  I see the beginning of a story, one that took years to understand and one I am still learning how to interpret.  I will be forever grateful for having had the childhood I had, it was stable, predictable and full of people who took care of each other.  And I’ll always hold myself accountable, for examining the blind spots that came with it, so they never define the path ahead.  I am imperfect and flawed so I have no expectation of perfecting myself altogether, and I am ok with that.   

Pretty amazing place Millerstown

The Navy Years, where the foundation of who Smitty is was forged

I didn’t know it at the time but that frigid late December day in 1984 when I boarded my first ship, the USS Stump was the start of the most amazing journey.  Sitting cold and completely out of its element because it was in drydock, was the day the forge that would form who Smitty would be got lit.  I was young, loud in the way that only an inexperienced dumbass can be, carrying a mix of false confidence and cluelessness that probably made the old salts roll their eyes.  Everything smelled like metal, fresh paint, fuel, and of course salt.  I did not understand anything about honor, dignity, respect, responsibility, or even how to be a man yet.  And somehow, I knew I was standing on the gangplank of life that would eventually shape me in ways my young cocky self could not even imagine, even in my wildest dreams.  And that certainty is something I’d not yet felt in my life, at that stage anyway,  I was ready for a bosun whistle and “underway… shift colors” piped over the 1MC, and at that moment I did not even know that that meant we were tossing off the moorings and headed out to the great blue.

Here is a picture of my first ship in drydock after some repairs on the sonar dome.  If you look closely you can see those two .

Those first days felt like living inside a machine that could not care less about me.  It was however my home now too, and my shipmates were my family and in a weird way it was the safest place I had.  That was true of the drydock and the ship, they both had a gravity to them that held me tight.  I learned quickly that the work had a sort of monotonous rhythm to it, and I liked it.  Shipboard life had its written and unwritten rules, and those standards were not up for debate.  I was still running on bravado, bad assumptions and a cockiness that ended up bumping me into the UCMJ, that is the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  It also led to not fully meeting the Chief’s expectations about how I was to show up, regardless of any event, situation or location and regardless how much I had drunk the night before.   Those hard lessons stuck and are still sticking.  Eventually young Smitty learned it was better not have the Skipper rip the stripes from my uniform,  then take half of  my pay for a couple of months and to add insult to injury, keep me on the ship with a lot of extra after hour duties for 45 days, not that I made any money to go do anything anyway.  Those lessons learned the hard way have never faded.

The Navy has a not so subtle way of putting a man in his place without ever raising its voice.  You learn quickly that nobody owes you patience, nobody owes you respect and nobody is impressed by the loud kid.  They have expectations, and a lot of them, and one of those is that you meet those expectations.  I had to earn my space by showing up, taking my knocks and finding the lesson, do the damn thing you are expected to do and not make the same mistakes twice, that was also a clear expectation.  As a cocky young kid, that was an expectation I struggled with and paid the price for.

Little by little that false confidence was replaced with something sturdier.  The forge wasn’t just hot.  It was steady, it was deliberate.  It kept hammering the same spots until they got stronger.  The forge was about repetition, discipline and the humbling realization that doing the right thing is more often the quiet struggle and almost never convenient.  This was the beginning of becoming a man who could hear “underway… shift colors” and understand that it meant so much more than the ship getting ready to move.  It was the realization of my responsibilities, to the ship and my shipmates.  I did not have words for it back then.  Now, it could not be clearer.

The loudness that comes with being a NUB, non usable body, started to fade, not because anyone told me to quiet down, but because I was learning to listen.  I started to see the difference between talking and communicating, listening more, asking more questions, and being humble enough to admit I didn’t know, that was hard at first, and I learned it was a superpower.  I also learned the difference between showing up and showing off, the men I served with were not interested in my bullshit, any of it.  They expected and demanded consistency, effort, contribution, and a willingness to learn without excuses, even learning shit I had no idea I would be expected to learn.  

Every small task, sweepers, and waxing the passageways, I freaking hated that, underway replenishments, standing the midwatch when I was exhausted was a reminder, honor and integrity is not earned in grand moments with grand gestures.  It is built in the small, consistent, mostly invisible and unnoticed actions that contribute to a greater good than my dumb ass understood at the time.  That realization came slower than it should, but the lessons have remained core to who I am.  It was also at this time that I started to understand accountability is a gift to be cherished.  When someone corrected me it was not to knock me down, it was to lift me up, push me towards my better self.  It was to keep me aligned with expectations of a crew that depended on each other to stay alive and hear those words, moored… shift colors when got home safe.    

That kind of responsibility was not theoretical, it was immediate.  It was real and with its quiet pressure was shaping me faster and harder than any mistake or punishment ever could.  The forge wasn’t just hot, it was precise, it was deliberate and with a consistency that knew exactly where to heat the metal to get the desired product.  Looking back I realize the subtle shifts were creating momentum that was driving real change in who I was.  I was a little less dumbass, never none, but at least less, and a little more dependable.  A little less of I got this and a little more teach me so we all get through this.  I didn’t see it then, but the Navy was pushing the boy out of me one layer at a time.  As those layers started to fall away they were replaced with the stronger layers of a man who could carry the weight without complaining, someone who understood the value of the mission and the man standing next to me.  those early days did not just prepare me for service in the Navy, they were preparing me for every day that was to come on my journey through life.     

With all the goings on in the world I find myself reflecting back on those lessons I learned as a young man, and the ones that came after my service, more often than I expected to.  Not the technical or the rigidity of it but the deeper truths about steadiness, responsibility and choosing integrity and doing the right things, even when it is inconvenient.  My last couple of posts were me trying to process the noise, trying to find a place to drop anchor that will hold fast so I am not just drifting or being pulled around by the current.  I have not found a strong anchor point yet, that is a big part of writing about it is the search for that anchor point, where it will hold fast.  Those lessons from my youth are helping me in the chaos of the world, reminding me that I am part of something bigger than myself.  Thank goodness those lessons didn’t fade, the forge hardened them and they stuck.  They are the compass I use to set my course, even when its foggy and I can’t see shit.   

The world feels unmoored, drifting, and dragging anchor.  The news feels like that time the Navy shot an Exocet missile at our ship to test our missile defenses- scary as shit!  Sailors as a default learn a lot about navigation, for the obvious reasons, those lessons are helping me navigate the world while we are in a hurricane, which I’ve been through by the way.  Those words, underway… shift colors have also taken on a new meaning, something broader with different context.  It still means we are headed out to the big blue, to accept new responsibilities, new expectations and those are choices we must make, regardless of whether it is scary or even terrifying.  Maybe that is why typing these posts matter so much to me right now.  Maybe it is my way of tossing off the mooring lines that have held me tight to the pier.  Maybe it is honoring that kid who walked up the gangplank all those years ago not knowing anything.  Maybe it is applying the lessons learned by the man who walked back down that gangplank with a foundation strong enough to weather what came next, including whatever the hell this moment is.

I am not pretending to have answers, but I know the next right thing to do is toss the lines, blow the bosun whistle and shift colors and trust myself enough to step up, lean in and keep moving forward. 

I Wasn't Ready for That Question - Seems Normal to Me

I had a completely unexpected conversation today at Hy-Vee checkout, the kind that gets stuck in the grey and drags ya into pondering a question that came out of left field.  I was wearing a tee shirt, because it was finally in the 50’s today.  Nothing fancy, just the one word across the top and four more below it in two more lines.  I have several with similar themes from over the years, sort of my silent statement on the goings on in the world that I feel need attention.  Nothing I have not done a thousand times over the years, although today’s world feels more tense and maybe needs even more light shined on it.

As I wandered the aisles gathering up the things on my list, I saw mostly that quiet sort of stoic Nebraska nice folks here have.  A few nods of appreciation, a couple of murmured approvals, and one guy who just stared before blurting out “100%.  I wish I saw more people saying that”.  I also saw just as many folks faces tighten up or that sideways stink eye glance that always seems to say more than any words could.  None of those really bother me, if it did, I would not wear shirts like that.  Hell, I would not fly the progress pride flag with the American flag on my truck for Pride Month and I would not wear my Portland frog hat, that also says “resist”.  I do not have a problem exercising my constitutional right to free speech and my general sentiment if fuck ya if ya don’t like it.

At least until I met the checker as I was paying for my stuff, I will call her Alison.  As I always do, I asked how her day was going, she provided the perfunctory “fine”.   She then looked at my tee shirt and without missing a beat asked, with totally genuine curiosity “What does your tee shirt mean?”  I froze.  I was totally unprepared for the simplicity of that question. Unprepared for the absence of heat or agenda.  She asked the question in the way someone might ask about the color of the walls.  She asked with the clear eyed honesty we see in most youth, that kind of simplicity us adults seem to forget how to use.   

I stumbled for a moment, caught off guard by how plainly and unburdened the question was.  Not hostile, not loaded, just a young person looking at five small words, Resist, This is not normal.  I do not believe she saw the implied context, no emotional freight, no history behind them, for her they were just words screen printed on a cotton tee shirt.  I managed to fumble out some words about traveling the world and seeing many different cultures gave me a perspective, what it feels like when something is off kilter and what normal feels.  And being 60 also gives me a sense of what normal has meant in the context of our country.  She nodded politely, considered her response for about half a second and said, “Seems normal to me”.      

 And there we were, me flabbergasted, her completely unfazed.  That answer, seems normal to me, was so utterly sincere, agenda free and hit me in a way that no stink eye, nod of approval and no aisle comment had.  She wasn’t agreeing, she wasn’t disagreeing, she was simply describing her world as she knows it.  In her world the things that feel tense, jagged and out of alignment to me, aren’t deviations for her, they’re the baseline, it’s the water she grew up swimming in.  A world I experience drifting, she experiences as the default setting. 

So, I ask gently, “do you mind if I ask how old you are?”  She said 20 with the ease of someone who hasn’t lived enough decades to understand why I am wearing this tee shirt.  I told her, the next time you see your grandparents tell them you saw a guy wearing this shirt, just to see what they say.  She smiled at the thought of her grandparents and said she would.  And that was it, the whole exchange taking about a minute.  But as I pushed my buggy to my truck there was a weight settling on me that I did not expect when I left the house. 

On my drive home, a sadness started to seep in, coming from the realization that the things that alarm the shit out of me are simply normal life through the eyes of someone younger, or at least through Alison’s eyes.  Not because they support them, or even understand them, but because they have never known anything different.  They don’t have any other point to reference in order to see this is not normal.  They are inheriting the world mid-stride and absorbing it as the only version they’ve ever seen.

It made me think of the Oratory I wrote about Micro Relationships  How the smallest, mostly forgettable moments can end up reverberating the longest.  Today, there in the Hy-Vee checkout line, I was reminded how true that is.  We don’t just pass down our stories, we pass down the shape of the world, its tone and temperature, its sense what’s ordinary.  We have been doing that since people were scribbling stories on cave walls.  Maybe normal is supposed to evolve, but for me when normal drifts this far I fear the next generation won’t realize how far out of whack things are.

I felt an anger growing towards Alison as I processed that 60 second interaction.  Then I realized she was not wrong at all.  She was just describing “her normal”.   That realization left me wondering, what obligation do we have to those who come next?  We owe young people more than silence about what’s drifting out of alignment.  We owe them memory, we owe them contrast and we owe them the courage to say “the water was not always this muddy.”  Never having kids, I never really thought about the obligations of the adults in the room.  We are supposed to teach them what danger looks like, we are supposed to preserve the shape of possibility, because when a generation normalizes things that were once unimaginable, the loss is not just cultural, it is slow demagnification of our collective compass, leaving us adrift and we get to watch it all in real time.

Her question was as simple as flicking a light switch.  But sometimes the light reveals the dust and the roaches scattering.  And sometimes the youngest amongst us ask the clearest questions.  And sometimes, like Alison’s question today, they uncover a grief we may not have even recognized we were carrying.  Maybe that’s the lesson for me today.  Scrape away my biases, strip the story to its bones, and ask myself the simplest version of the question, “what does your tee shirt mean?”  And as I sat with that, a line from Marcus Aurelius floated in, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts”.

Alison’s answer hit me hard, so now I’ll ask y’all - what did you say to your checker today?

How to measure signal to noise ratio (SNR)

The world feels loud these days, too damn loud for me!  It is the sorta loud where everything starts blending together.  The anger.  The misinformation.  The constant outrage cycles.  The hot takes.  The factions all yelling at this, that, and the other things, each dead certain they’re right.  After a sustained bombardment of noise, a sort of positive feedback loop kicks in.  For the non techies, that is like when you yell into a bad microphone and it just keeps winding itself up, shriller and the louder the shrill, the louder it makes itself.  The thing about the noise is that if you are exposed to it long enough you can start forgetting what the actual signal sounds like, you become acclimated to the noise.  When we hit that point, we can easily forget that truth has tone, dignity has tone, humanity has tone and right now those tones are being drowned out by all this damn noise.

Working in technology for my entire adult life, especially my experience with high power transmitters, situates me to understand and think about signal to noise ratios more than most folks.  Not in some abstract way, in a way that only 40 years of experience with signal to noise can give a person.  I see everyone contributing to the feedback loop, in ways we may not even recognize.  Some of it big, like what we share with others, how fast we react, whether we read past the headline, whether we treat people like avatars or people from the protection of distance and the buffer of our devices. 

Then there is the small consistent actions we take, noticing when a coworker is off and handing them a pack of lifesavers or texting that friend back right away vs leaving it unread, or even taking a breath before we ad one more opinion or hot take to the already burning pile.  Being a helper is signal amplification work, not noise amplification work.  The small stuff may seem small but it is what changes the room.  Choose to be steady when everything around you is trying wind you up.  I got this tattoo to be my constant reminder to pause,  think and check in with my values, which I hold in my heart, and then determine if I am feeding the signal or the noise. 

 
The more I think about this the more it actually feels like we are living in world with bad filters.  When stray harmonics are introduced into things they contribute to the feedback loop as noise and we install filters specifically to remove those frequencies, for example if you are old enough to remember the 60hz hum in your fancy wood sided Kenwood receiver when the caps started dying, you understand what I mean.  When filters go bad, or drift off frequency, the downstream signal chain gets fuzzy or distorted. 

The signal is still there but what comes out sounds like hot garbage.  In today’s world the filters are no longer mechanical and inert.  Todays filters are the algorithmic automatons running our feeds, they are far from inert and designed to keep us scrolling.    This is evident when half baked headlines of outrage of one sort or the other out runs the truth of things and it seems the collective we have the attention span of a Bolivian fruit fly, and the algorithms know it.   We can see how easily distortion becomes our reality, the algorithmic engagement engines work hard at that.

Some days it feels like we are compressing our humanity just to fit into the feed.  In audio, and video when you compress too aggressively it strips out the warmth, the nuance and all the things that makes audio feel alive and full and the things that make video so dynamic.  The compression on the old analog TV is a good example, that looked washed out and lifeless.  I feel like our habits now drive us to do that to each other.  We flatten folks to their worst moment, their loudest mistake and pretend that actually describes the original signal.  The world and those who live in it are not binary, we are magnificently complex and quirky individuals who all have something to add to the greater good, foibles, skeletons and all.  Humans are not MP3 files, we are not meant to be reduced until all the good frequencies get lost in the noise.

And then there is interference.  Every engineer has dealt with that as some point, some spurious source bleeding into the wires, some device screaming on the same frequency or that blasted 5^th harmonic or some trash noise signal bouncing around inside the chassis.  We got the same damn thing happening in almost every aspect of our lives.   Everyone broadcasting all the time, the damn ground is floating and the power supply hash is  wreaking havoc.  Half the time we are reacting to cross talk from folks we don’t know, will never meet in places we will not go, and this is on issues that both of us barely understand in the first place.  No wonder clarity feels so scarce.  We need a faraday cage to block out the interference.  

While this almost sounds like me waxing philosophical, I want to be clear, I am no Saint in this.  I am not walking the noble eight fold path with the discipline of a monk.  I’m stumbling along like a drunken sailor, who just won’t stop trying.  I very much contribute to the noise, I recognize this posting is part of that noise.  Sometimes I react to quickly, sometimes I let my frustration lead instead of my better self.  But the older I get, the more I realize my noise footprint matters, no more cranking it up to 11.  All of us contribute, we have obligation to each other to file the STA, that is Smitty speak getting permission to crank that transmitter down to low power.  Reducing the power does not mean shutting it down. Cranking it down is a choice, and intentional act to ensure our better selves lead, in all situations.  Asking ourselves is what Im about to feed into my transmitter adding signal clarity or am I injecting noise.  That little pause, that check in, that is signal work too.

Over my life I have noticed a constant, every helper I’ve ever known or seen is basically a walking signal amplifier.  It’s a special amplifier, it allows to spin off more positive and good into the universe than we do negative and bad.  They always seem to show up calm when things get chaotic.  They offer presence instead of gas for the fire.  They tune in the quiet stuff that everyone else misses.  They say the hard truth in a way that folks can actually hear it.  Helpers don’t crank up the volume or the power, they improve the fidelity.  They help everyone in the room hear the parts that matter. 

Look Y’all, at the end of the day measuring signal to noise is simple, we measure what comes through clean vs what just adds static. You look at what you’re putting out into the universe and you ask yourself, does this make the signal clearer or just louder.  If its noise, crank that shit down.  If its signal, power it up because truth, dignity and humanity still cut through when we the stop feeding the freaking feedback loop.  If ya wanna remember what the signal sounds like, find a helper or better yet, be one.

Then again, at the end of the day I am not trying to win the internet.  I am just trying to stay human in a world that has gotten really loud.  Measuring SNR is not a fancy thing, it’s a gut check, is  what I am spooling into the universe going to help someone hear the truth, or is it just more static?   So here is what I am choosing.  I am choosing the pause.  I am choosing the small acts of kindness.  I am choosing to be the kind of person who improves the fidelity in the room instead of creating a feedback loop that does nothing but screech at us.  I am going to keep checking that tattoo like its my own SNR meter, and keep trying to make the music cleaner instead of louder.  It’s a reminder, pause, check the meter, and don’t feed the noise.  Maybe, just maybe the most radical thing we can do is to be steady in the turbulence.  Send the strongest signal you can with the simple message, they are not alone and that you are here for them.   

When my Mind Is Full but my Mouth Freezes

I have this habit that seems weird to me, I watch myself in real time.  But not in a mystical out of body sort of way.  More like I’m living in the moment and narrating it simultaneously.  Almost as if there’s a second version of me standing a few moments of time behind my little universe with a notepad taking notes on my facial expression, timing and tone of my voice.  It’s sorta like self reflection, but sometimes feels more like an annoying surveillance van whose inhabitants are passing judgment.  As for what that looks like.  I’m in a meeting, someone asks a question I’ve actually thought about deeply and I can feel the fullness of the answer in my head.  Up there my answer is complete, layered with nuance and connections to dozens of other ideas that matter, it’s all there, sharp, alive and crystal clear.

Then the uneducated hillbilly in me kicks in and what tumbles out seems more like a bad sketch of what was a detailed blueprint, “as builts” included.  I hear myself speaking in partial sentences, safe sentences, watered down sentences that don’t match the architecture I’m carrying in my head.   So, there I am, blathering and I get to watch myself do it, which somehow makes it even worse.  It’s a punishing dichotomy, the tension between struggling to say that thing in my head, and the harsh judgment I place on myself for not being able to effectively articulate the thing – even though people say I did.   

That looks a bit like this

As I’m sure everyone has done, I replay the conversation afterwards.  And then thought, that is not what I meant, not really, you know that feeling.  Your mind writes the director’s cut later, with better wording and pacing, better clarity, better courage.  But in the moment, you get the theatrical release, supposedly edited for safety, rated PG, and sometimes missing the best scenes.  The frustrating part isn’t that I am short on thoughts, I am drowning in them, about everything.  Sometimes I have nothing to say, and sometimes I have too much to say, and I can’t always translate it fast enough into a language that makes sense.  Sometimes I think my CPU is underpowered and my RAM is gummed up with memory leaks.  And yes, the more I examine it, the more it stacks, exponentially.

The torturous part is, intellectually I see it so clearly and my emotional self doesn’t give a shit.  And of course I know what that battle between Id, Superego, and Ego is called, intrapsychic conflict.  In less clinical terms the Id is instincts, impulses and desires.  The Superego represents rules, morals, should/should not, and guilt.  And there right smack in the middle is the Ego, trying to keep the peace between these competing factions, the referee if you will.  My ref is old and worn out, but still stands back up every day.  I think he has started taking supplements because I feel he is doing a better job as I get older.

I’m not sure where in my journey I started to notice that perfection wasn’t helping me, it was choking me.  I saw this more clearly in my work life but it was present in my personal life too.  My overthinking brain kept trying to craft fully formed thoughts in moments when all that was needed was honesty and forward motion.  In all of that I realized the struggle wasn’t communicating, the struggle was with my own expectations of myself.  Somehow I expected my words to arrive clean, properly ordered, debugged and ready for prime time.  What in the hell kind of standard was that, especially when the best conversations are the ones that are simple and free flowing. 

The kind you have at dining room table, or in a hallway at work with that trusted coworker, or even under an old Jalopy while you’re changing the transmission with your best friend.  The places where nobody expects a perfect sentence, from me or anyone else for that matter.  And yet there I was, drafting white papers and developing formulas when all the people or person really needed was the Smitty version delivered with honesty and compassion.  Perfection isn’t a virtue, it’s a fucking traffic jam the likes of what we see on the 5 in LA at rush hour.  It just sucks!

Learning to speak without fear has been less like flipping a switch and more like walking a long arduous path to the top of a high perch.  While at the trail head the path looks flat and easy but once ya get going you realize it is full of hidden obstacles and blind corners.  My intellectual self keeps trying to sprint ahead, convinced the faster I move the faster I’ll get to perfect.  Meanwhile my emotional self is chugging along at a much slower pace and less worried about beating the time but learning to be OK with wandering aimlessly and enjoying myself. 

I used to try to outthink the journey, engineer it into a straight line.  I was missing the point, its about the journey, not the destination.  That’s where the learning happens, the acceptance of what is happens.  That’s where the texture of our lives is created.  And  somewhere along that winding path, I realized the journey wasn’t about finding my words at all, I already have those in my head.  It was about finding a different way of treating myself.

Talking, it turns out, isn’t a performance, it’s a draft and we need to give ourselves permission to speak in drafts.  It’s supposed to be rough the first time, and it gets worn smooth over time with practice and patience with ourselves.  When the words are messy, wrinkled and sometimes without a flow, I have found people understand me better, not because I polished it but because it was real.  I am still learning the little narrator in my head does not always have to be a real time critic.  He can be a partner, someone who can learn to say, good start instead of you blew it.  And I want him to learn how to say the only way you fail is if you stop trying so, please follow Mr. Rogers three keys to success - be kind, be kind and be kind, only ensure you are being that to yourself too.

Maybe the words will never arrive fully formed and polished.  Maybe for me they’re meant to meet me halfway, there between Superego and Id firmly in my Ego.  Maybe that’s the work now, letting the three parts of me sit at the table without trying to outshout each other.  Letting the words come when they are ready, asking all three to be human and kind with each other. I guess that conversation is also part of the ride.  And maybe this is why I so much more like typing, when I’m doing that, it feels like all three of us are finally in concert with each other.