Got caught last week. I’m talking deer-in-the-headlights, flat-footed, let-me-know-if-I’m-drooling caught. All with a simple question.
I was having lunch with a friend to told me he got caught flat-footed with a question he didn’t have an answer for. “So I thought I’d ask you the same question.”
Gee, thanks, I think.
The question: What are you looking forward to right now?
Huh?
Say that again?
What are you looking forward to?
“Duh….”
“I know, right!” he said gleefully.
I was coming off a couple of weeks of intense work, up until about 2:00 every night. I was in head-down, just-get-it-done mode. Who has time to think ahead?
Precisely.
I had no clue how to answer that because I wasn’t looking forward to anything.
Enough about me. How about you? What are you looking forward to?
I’ve had some time to think about that question a lot since then. Especially since Cassie, my daughter, came over the same night with her planning notebook for the Disney trip we’re all taking this Christmas, adorned with vintage Mickey on the cover.
I should probably confess here that my “anticipation” of a Disney trip for 11 people somewhere has the words “legalized theft” in it. But that’s beside the point.
The point here is that she’s living the trip now and we’re still nearly four months out. She’s already picked out the restaurants where we’re dining, gotten detailed maps of the whole Magic Domain, logged onto the advice sites as to how to avoid the long lines and all that.
In short, Cassie has her A-Game – her anticipation game – at least when it comes to Christmas this year. And she was pretty inspiring to me to find my own.
Here’s the bottom line: [click to continue…]
This just in, in case you missed it. Christmas is less than a month away.
True confession: Yesterday I snarled in my journal, “I’ll just be glad when it’s over.”
But today, in honor of the late Zig Ziglar, who passed away yesterday, I’m “doing a checkup from the neck up.”
Every year, we have the same choice when it comes to the enchantment and the challenges of the holidays. Do we hunker down, sit tight, and hope for the best? Or do we seek to flourish? To make the most of our relationships, our worship, and even our painful experiences?
Survive or Thrive? It’s up to you. It’s up to me.
When it comes to being a thriver, here are five suggestions, for how you can come out of the bunker and actually have a season of delight:
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I spent 26 years in school. At each level I learned many things. I learned how to read, how to write, how to spell. I learned that Columbus really didn’t discover America, that the South was doomed from the beginning of the Civil War, and that we really don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews. I learned to parse a verb, to multiply polynomials, and to define “fallacious” and “facetious.” I learned more theories related to leadership than I care to count.
But in spite of all the things I learned, those 26 years failed to teach me four very important things – lessons that can determine my success or failure out in the real world, where bells don’t ring and (true story) traffic lights don’t control the noise in the lunchroom. Let me share them with you – with the understanding, of course, that I’m still learning. Next year’s list could be completely different. [click to continue…]
I was going to write a piece about words today; guess I’ll have to do that next week. Today it’s more about a wordsmith, and a great sense of loss.
It’s hard to put into words the significance of losing a public figure whose work or life has touched yours – an individual who became something of a fixture in your life.
That’s who Skip Caray was to me. He was a legend and an institution, and legetutions aren’t supposed to die. But people do.
I never met the legendary broadcaster for the Atlanta Braves. But he met me – again and again, first through radio, then through a cable channel humbly self-named The Superstation. Skip became a companion who, like so many other broadcasters in the 20th century, made the national pastime interesting, fun, and so incredibly human.
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Got caught last week. I’m talking deer-in-the-headlights, flat-footed, let-me-know-if-I’m-drooling caught. All with a simple question.
