I get to!

It has been great reading all the Thanksgiving RSS feeds coming into my Reeder these last few days. Just listening to all the ways different people experience thankfulness and gratefulness is very rich, no matter what walk of life they come from or live in. Three really stood out to me. I really liked what Laura Vanderkam said she learned by keeping a journal of thankfulness and gratitude for a month, leading up to Thanksgiving. The best take away for her was that it was creative and forward thinking, "I’d remember that I was committed to finding three wonderful things to write down that night. Rather than sift through the crappy things that happened earlier in the day for something vaguely positive, I’d try to engineer something cool in the remaining hours before I went to bed." She really made me stop and think with that observation/action. It was a slight epiphany that I can MAKE something good out of this day, even if it has been totally in the crapper otherwise.

The second was an excerpt from Oliver Sacks' book, published posthumously, "Gratitude" and what he wrote about dying is rich: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure." It makes you want to cry with the depth of what he wrote, but most of all it makes you want to LIVE!

Finally, the one that has been occupying my mind the very most today is what James Clear posts each Thanksgiving Holiday that one of his coaches taught him in college, about how to be a thankful person. Change just one word in your life says Clear, you "get" to. Not "have" to, but "get" to. And folks, that changes everything. I get to get up early and work out, I get to work, I get to provide, I get to create value, I get to change the world, I get to stay faithful and true to my bride, I get to serve God, I get to live the truth, I get to work hard and make a living, I get to work in some of the craziest places on earth, I get to meet some of the most lost people on the planet, I get to see some of the grimiest places known to man, I get to experience jet lag more than anyone I know, I get to love this one wild beautiful life that I have been given. I am thankful.

Last day of warmth until May probably

Last day of warmth until May probably.

It's been a great three weeks in Asia, so productive, so restorative, complete detox! Today is the last warm day until Spring for me most likely. Kimmy told me it was 27 and very frosty there in York PA this morning :-(. Don't get me wrong, I try (and mostly succeed) to maximize Winter to its best as well, but cold weather begs for different things than warm weather does. Warm weather begs me to sweat, and the more I sweat, the more water I drink and the less beer I want and the lighter I eat, etc etc, it is such a natural detox place to be. I have often said that I feel 10 years younger in Asia, and for someone who regularly acts like a 12 year old, that is saying something! Truthfully, I feel as good here, as I did in college, and that was a lot more than 10 years ago. 

Cold weather can be a rush, as you fly down the slopes on skies or a snowboard, or sit in a pub with friends drinking some local wizardly created beverage. But I don't sweat, I don't get outside nearly enough, I don't have blazing moments of creativity or inspiration.

Today I am sitting here on the rooftop in shorts and a tee. Tomorrow before the day is over I will need wool socks and a jacket at the very least. I clearly need some new strategies for making the most of the wintertime and not making any excuses for the slow down of my brains and my success. What about you?

Post crash thoughts

Post crash thoughts

I have had a number of amazing things happen to me over the course of my life, but perhaps none as wild as walking away from getting hit by a car while on my bicycle 48 hours ago. It goes without saying that life is a fragile thing, and can change in the blink of an eye, through no fault of our own. Although in this case I do bear all the responsibility of making sure there is nothing zooming through the intersections regardless if I have a green light or not. Needless to say, I have been much more vigilant in watching the traffic!

I recently had a close friend bemoaning the need for diligence and vigilance, but he got little sympathy from me, and would receive even less now. If we are to have any choice in our destinies and any say about what lives we lead, then diligence and vigilance and faithfully choosing the most important actions that produce the results we want, rests squarely on our own shoulders. Leading lives that are at the capricious whims of others is the very last thing a thinking man wants. While my friend may be correct in that this can be exhausting, the other options are unthinkable. No thank you.

All the life any of us have is this moment, there are no yesterdays and there are no tomorrows yet. Have a care, make this moment count, do what matters now.

Hit by a car

Hit by a car

Hurts like hell. Just so you know, I am a very careful person, even though I do dangerous things. I manage risk like no one you have ever met in your life, but I made a classic mistake today and am fortunate to have lived through it. The mistake I made was thinking like a westerner when in Asia.

Westerners look at the lights in an intersection. Asians look at the traffic. Usually when I am at the top of my game, I do both. However today, at the very last intersection in my 53 mile ride, less than a block from my rooms, the light turned green, and maybe my mind was mush by this point or something like that, but I just started pedaling through the intersection because the light turned green. I did not look at the traffic obviously because . . . 

Late model gray Nissan, barreling through his red light, smashed into me broadside and sent me flying. Now in Asia we always say WHEN you are in an accident, not IF you are in an accident. And it finally happened to me. Did I tell you it hurts like hell?

However, any accident you walk away from is good in my book. Nothing broken, although I have road rash and a huge raspberry on my hip, sore as bear, and I am sure the aches will be especially loud tomorrow, but I am alive and that makes it an early Thanksgiving! Lesson of the day? When in a different culture, take extra care to pay attention to the details, they really matter. After 21 years of living abroad I should know this better than most.

Robbing people

Robbing people

"DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS I am not saying we should never help people. We should serve, and love, and make a difference in the lives of others, of course. But when people make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling them. Once we take their problem for them, all we’re doing is taking away their ability to solve it" - "Essentialism" by Gregg McKeown

I am consistently astonished by how many people want my input primarily as a problem solver, an obstacle remover, a resource of taking their problem and carrying some (or all) of that weight for them, the solution, the short cut, and the one who will become co-responsible for the problem. Stop. Right. Now.

It was a pivotal and epic moment in the life of the Aderholdt family, Fall of 2008. I gathered everyone around, my wife and my three young adult children, and I told them that I was through, I was finished, I was no longer the solution to the challenges that they faced in their lives. I still loved them, perhaps more than ever, but no longer was I the answer to anything.

Within a few years I expanded that audience to all my working relationships. The freedom is profound. The results for them empowering beyond what I could have ever imagined. The emotional balance is astounding. Try it. Your need to be needed is crippling you, and those you love and work with each day.

To Mark and me

I was reading a novel on my flight to Asia this past weekend, and while it was not a leadership book or a business book or even an important book, (I was just chillaxing) there was a powerful line or two in there. "Most people aren't really living. They are just planning, remembering, or regretting." 

I thought that to be powerfully accurate. While there may be more than the three listed options of what people are really doing, I find far too many of my associates, neighbors and acquaintances, not really living. Too I find myself horribly guilty of those three tasks far more than I am guilty of living.

Living means being here now, living in this moment. Not in the future because that is planning. Not in the past because that is remembering. And not in the negative because that is regretting. Well there is certainly a place in life for all three of those things in different measures, but I rob the present of all that it is and could be, when I focus excessively or obsessively on any one of those three (or others).  

So I am practicing being all here right now for the majority of each and every day. And I am flabbergasted at how difficult it is proving to be.  I have always labored under a "destination disease" cloud. As a young boy even, I remember how I would escape from the present by dreaming of all the different places, worlds, cultures I read about in books, endless books, I think I read for 15 hours a day some days. Then as a teen trying to plan, dream, scam my way out of that small town I grew up in and the life that my parents had built for themselves. Then in college where the dream was cast over and over to go and win the heathen at any cost (or some variation on that theme) and I drank the koolaide all the way to the bottom of the glass. Then in ministry, grad school, ministry again, all the time resolutely looking toward "the field" never realizing (or perhaps just not acknowledging) that some really wonderful things were happening along the way. I missed the impact and significance of about 80% of each of those days, because I was always planning something greater, reaching for more, in such a way that I lost all of those immediate, those present moments, those irretrievable nows, that will never be quite the same again. And I could go on indefinitely with this confession, as it reaches far deeper into my existence than this short paragraph can communicate or bear.

Long story short, I am still practicing this one diligently. And while I still have far far to go to call myself a success at this, I can honestly say I have done more living in the past three years, than I did in all the previous 50 years combined. I am not proud of that, but it is a great deal of progress for me. Three years ago this month a dear friend killed himself. He is no longer living on this plane of existence, but neither was I. Now I am determined to change that every single day. Here's to you Mark.