Category Archives: Just for Fun

The prompt for June 3 is: “A movie that makes you happy & why?” I generally watch movies that are serious, but I do have a few that I watch for the sheer pleasure they bring me. Most people who know me well, know that one of my favorite movies is What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams, but it isn’t a movie that makes me happy. In fact, the movie is very sad, and depending on how you take the ending can either leave you feeling despair or hope.

One of my favorite happy movies is Inside Out, and I think it’s the one I will talk about here. Let me begin by saying that my two favorite characters in the movie are Sadness and Bing Bong, for obviously different reasons. The scene *spoiler alert* where Bing Bong dies is probably Gen Z’s Artax drowning in the swamp of sadness, and I imagine many, many therapists in about ten years will have people spilling out to them how traumatic watching Bing Bong die was for them.

What I love about Bing Bong, though, is not that he dies, but that he exists. As I watch more and more students come through my doors, I wonder where their imagination has gone, I wonder where their curiosity has gone, and I wonder why they don’t just play as much anymore. Intellectually, I know the answers to all of these questions, but in my heart of hearts, I wonder why we as people have allowed ourselves to get to a place as a culture where having fun, being creative, using our imaginations, and playing have become something that we encourage people to grow out of as quickly as possible. So, Bing Bong’s mere existence, and the fact that every single student cries when he dies, makes me hopeful that we can, in some way, sense that we need innocence, we need playfulness, and we need rockets made out of wagons and silly songs to power them.

My other favorite character is Sadness, and I love her because, in much the same way that we drive play out of people at a young age, we also drive the ability to be sad, to lament, to be sorrowful out of people. Have you ever watched a small child mourn something? The emotions are deep, the sorrow is full, and the tears are real. Now have you ever watched an adult interact with a child who is mourning? Many, many times, because the adult is uncomfortable with their own sadness, they will project that onto the child, telling the child to dry their tears, telling them that everything will be okay, asking them why they are making such a big deal out of such a small thing. We are robbed, at a young age, of our ability to be sad. We’ve lost our ability to, the art of, sitting in sackcloth and ashes with each other.

Feeling Sadness is essential to feeling Joy, as the movie illustrates. Emotions, in many ways, are dependent upon each other to work. Brene Brown has a great quote where she talks about how drugs and alcohol don’t just dampen the emotions that we don’t want to feel, but they dampen all of our emotions. In much the same way, only limiting ourselves to one set of emotions, leaning toward happiness, dampens out ability to feel happiness, joy, and all those other positive emotions. There is also a lot of pressure in trying to keep that smile on, when our bodies and brains are telling us that we should be sad, or thoughtful, or frustrated, or any other “negative” emotion.

So, Inside Out makes me so happy, because in the end, we learn that we need all of our emotions in order to thrive as humans. We need to feel deep sadness, we need to feel anger, we need to feel disgust, we need to feel fear, and we need to feel joy. All of them are valid, all of them should be expressed and supported, and all of them help us interact with the world around us.

Also, here’s an emotion wheel to help you describe the emotions you’re feeling in a more precise way:

Today’s prompt is: ” What is one of your best traits?” Anyone who knows me knows that this will be a very difficult thing for me to write about.

I’ve written here before about the public shaming I received from some people at a Bible study when we had to go around the room and name our strengths. When it was my turn, I named my intellect as my strength, and they all laughed big hearty belly laughs, and one person even said, “And humility, clearly.” I was really confused, because the whole purpose of the exercise was to name our strengths; it wasn’t an exercise designed for humility, and it took a lot for me to put myself out there like that, so being shamed, then, for participating was a really difficult experience.

Anyway, a few days ago on the sobriety app that I use, the quote or challenge had something to do with looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself three things you love about yourself or that are good about yourself. And they can’t be physical. I still have yet to look at myself and tell myself the three things. There are things about myself that I love, for sure, but the act of looking myself straight in the face and telling myself what I am good at or that I love about myself is really difficult.

So, to answer this prompt, one of my best traits is that I love people. All people. So much.

I do my very best to look at the person in front of me as a person who contains a divine spark, who is created in the image of God, who is loved by God and who should be loved by me. I try my best to make sure that I don’t make people feel like they have to earn my love, to let them know that they can’t avoid or break my love, and to let them just exist in love and light without expectation.

And, even in this, as I write this down, my brain is racing through all of the times when I haven’t achieved this in the way that I would like to achieve it. I think of all the times I’ve fallen short, all of the times when I’ve encountered someone while bringing my own expectations to put upon them, all of the times when I have had to set a boundary around a person for my own safety or well-being (physical or mental), and all of the times when I have walked past someone who needed my love. Whether my excuse was that I was too tired, or they were too much, or I didn’t want to be bothered, or I didn’t they fit my agenda, these were just excuses, and bad ones at that, to shy away from what I know is the right thing to do.

I know that I am human, so I am bound to get love wrong sometimes. I am thankful for grace when I do mess up. So many times I have had to circle back with people and make things right, and I am so grateful for second chances and the opportunity to learn from mistakes.

Even when I don’t always get it right on the first try, I will say that one of my best traits is loving people. And, when I do get it right, loving others is the very best thing I have to offer.

I am going to continue to use the journal prompts from this website, because I really enjoy them, and they make me think about a variety of topics. Today’s prompt is: “If you could offer yourself one piece of advice for the next month, what would it be?” I have a couple of bits of advice for myself for this next couple of months of summer. As a teacher, I really use the summer to unwind, regroup, and heal before starting again in August.

First piece of advice: Live in the moment. No, really live in the moment.

Living in the moment doesn’t mean that you can’t plan, it doesn’t mean that you can’t look forward to other things or back to previous times. What living in the moment means is treating each moment with respect and gratitude. Living in the moment is listening to learn; living in the moment is recognizing the beauty if your current situation; living in the moment is seizing opportunities to make a difference in the life or lives who are right in front of you.

Second piece of advise: Be open to whatever comes your way. If what comes your way turns out not to be for you, that’s okay, but don’t send things away without really considering them.

If you had told me a year ago I would be where I am today, I would have laughed in your face. Sober, vegan, moderately happy, attending a church and a Bible study, regularly going to therapy and having days that are more happy (content, joyful, okay) than sad (angry, depressed, anxious), running again, setting healthy boundaries, and knowing when to say yes and when to say no. For real, a year ago I would have just belly laughed. But if you seize what comes your way, you may find that the unexpected leads to something you never imagined could happen for you. And that something may be the absolute best thing.

Third piece of advice: Live by a consistent ethic. Living by a consistent ethic doesn’t make you better than anyone; I don’t feel better than others, but I can look at myself at the end of the day and feel good about the choices I make.

Most people don’t know that I am pro-life. They don’t know this because I don’t really talk about it much. I am pro-life in a way that is consistent for me: I do not believe in taking any type of life, unless absolutely necessary, and even then, is it really necessary? My pro-life status extends even throughout species, as I am vegan, as I try to use organic products, and as I don’t kill insects. And it extends throughout humanity, as I don’t believe in the death penalty, as I don’t think abortion should have to be a thing because I think we should provide services to eradicate the necessity of it, as I am not a fan of firearms because I’ve never been in a situation where a gun would’ve made me feel any safer, and since I don’t eat animals, I don’t need to hunt, and as I try to love the person who is in front of me.

Last piece of advice for today: Love and grace and truth and more love and more grace.

When I think about how many times in my life loving someone, giving grace to someone, being honest with someone has hurt me, I don’t come up with many examples, if any at all. When I think about how many times being hateful, spiteful, condemnatory, and dishonest with someone has come back to hurt me, I have countless examples. I firmly believe that how we treat other people is, at the end of the day, how we treat ourselves. What we sow, we reap.

I guess summer is time for slowing down, for thinking deeply, for meeting myself in the mirror every morning, and reflecting on who I want to be and who I really am. What piece of advice do you have for yourself? What piece of advice do you have for me?

For the month of May, my writing prompts have been taken from this website. Today’s prompt is: “One thing you wish you could do.” There are so many things that I wish I could do better, but that isn’t what this question is about, so I guess I will talk about something that’s been plaguing me recently. Something(s) I wish I could do.

*Buckle your seat belts, this post is a lot.*

I recently started going to therapy with a fabulous counselor named Angie. After my mom died, and after I had COVID for the third time, and after I realized that this school year was incredibly difficult, I decided that I might need someone to help me through, and that someone couldn’t be a person with whom I regularly interact.

Here’s the killing part of this, despite our oldest son and his wife and our middle son all being therapists, my friend and I used to talk about how therapists were for people who didn’t have good friends, but now I know how wrong I was. I have the best friends of anyone I know, but I am an expert at keeping secrets when I think someone might think less of me if they know something about me, and I am an expert at allowing everyone else to tell me things about themselves—I know some pretty deep and intimate things about my friends—but then I turn around and tell that same person that I am fine, refusing to share the deep intimacies of my life.

When I say I am expert at these two things, I mean I am very talented at faking being okay. I faked being okay for well over 30 years and was fully prepared to keep faking it. Thankfully, another friend of mine said to me at lunch, “You’re not okay, and you should probably talk with someone.” She’s awfully pushy, but I love that about her.

Long story short, I started looking for a therapist sometime last fall, and got on Angie’s waiting list, then I quickly swore that when she contacted me, I’d just say I found someone else, I was feeling better, or some such nonsense. Basically, I got really brave about my mental health for a minute in September, then figured out how I would sneak right back out of it if she ever called. Well, in December, just after mom died, I received an email from In the Midst Counseling Services that Angie had an opening, I begrudgingly accepted the appointment, and here we are.

At therapy, I have been working on something that I would love to be able to do: I’d love to be able to hear about people’s difficulties, situations, problems, joys, accomplishments, and all of those things without holding them and carrying them as my own. I’d like to be more of a conduit of God’s love and grace, than a repository for people’s emotions. I would also like to be able to share more of myself with others—so that they may fully know me—without me being afraid that whatever I have hidden from them will some how drive them off. I have a lot of things I’ve kept tucked away for a lot of years.

Don’t hear me wrong: I am not blaming others, nor do I want people to stop sharing things with me, but I find that when people share their stories with me, I hold on to them in a deeply personal way, absorbing their emotions and making them my own. I am especially prone to doing this with negative emotions, so much so that I have a hard time experiencing my own long-lasting joy.

Anyway, in therapy, we’ve talked about a backpack analogy, which has been really helpful to me. In this analogy, backpacks equal emotions, situations, thoughts, experiences, and whatever else people carry around with them. Basically, when the people around me tell me that their backpacks are heavy, my common practice is, without hesitation, to pick up their backpack, put it on, and just carry it for them. So, in the practice of not doing that, I have learned to accept someone’s backpack, look around in it with their permission, maybe help them rearrange their baggage so it’s lighter and possibly more well organized and easier to carry, maybe take a thing or two that I can help carry, and then to have them take back their own backpack. By doing this, I am able to see what others are carrying with them, maybe help them with some of the items, maybe liberate them into throwing some of their garbage away, but I do not carry the weight of their pack on my own shoulders.

When I first learned this technique, I thought how silly, but I can tell you now a few months later that, that one analogy was worth my $100 for that session! I have found that when I am in a sticky situation, people around me with whom I have shared this bit of wisdom will say things like, “You’re carrying their backpack,” or “Did you forget to give their bag back to them?” or “Let me help you carry your backpack.” That last one is the most difficult for me.

I am completely humbled when people say to me, “Let me help you carry your backpack.” Humbled is maybe the wrong word. At first, I feel more humiliated and indignant. “How dare that person insinuate that I can’t carry my own backpack! Grumble, grumble…” as I stumble under the weight of the baggage… I am not a person who is accustomed to letting others carry my back pack. I am not even someone who is accustomed to letting someone see inside just the front pocket of my backpack (those are my lovely wife’s words), but I am sometimes now letting others see in that front pocket, I have maybe even let a couple of people see inside the pack itself. I haven’t let anyone really get in there and dig around, but I am trying.

So, in a nutshell, my two things I wish I could do are:

1. Not carry other people’s burdens in the extreme way I have for most of my life, to remember to give them back their backpacks, and to
2. Allow people to start seeing the inside of the compartment of my backpack, not just the front pocket. And maybe if I get really brave to let people help me rearrange the things in there.

I really wish I could do these two things well enough some day to experience longterm joy, instead of being weighed down by intense sadness. I know I will get there. I know I will. But for now it’s still a wish.

Also, if you are worried about after this post, please don’t be. For the first time in 48 years, I am learning some tools to cope with the way my brain works, and I am doing the best I’ve been doing in a really long time. I just process through writing. So here we are.

For the month of May, my writing prompts will be taken from this website. Today’s is: “Do you make decisions quickly or slowly?”

In my day to day world, as a teacher, I make a million decisions at lightning speed all day every day, so in some regards I make decisions really fast. Those decisions are one that I have to make, but decisions that I need to make about things that may cause lifelong consequences, there isn’t really a speed at which I make them.

For example, the decision to ask my wife to marry me took forever. I kept shuttling back and forth between every possible ramification of asking her. Would she say no? Would she say yes? Would her kids think it was foolish? Would they be angry? How should I ask her? Why get married when it wasn’t legal? Would her family be supportive? On and on my brain raged and anguished over the decision, until I finally decided that I would, in fact, propose to her.

The decision to quit my PhD was an important decision I made pretty quickly. I knew I wasn’t progressing forward anymore on my dissertation, because I was working so hard teaching middle school and high school, and though it was said to me that I could put off my teaching commitments in order to successfully complete my dissertation, I knew I could not. Teaching is my greatest joy—grading not so much—and I knew that it would be unethical to be a subpar teacher in order to complete a degree that I ultimately wouldn’t use. So I quit.

Other decisions take a moderate amount of time, like deciding to trade in my Jetta for my van turned camper. I knew I wanted to be able to camp safely anywhere I needed to go, so I weighed and measured and looked for the perfect small van that would fit the things I needed to camp comfortably. Once I found the Nissan NV that would become Maude the Minivan, I made the plunge. In all, that decision took about two months to make.

A friend of mine and I talk a lot about people who make decisions like different brewing techniques for coffee: the espresso decision maker who takes a very small amount of time and is good under pressure, the drip coffee or percolator decision maker who sort of lets things ruminate for a bit and then decides in small increments eventually completing the decision once all of the pieces are in place, and the French press decision maker who mixes everything together and thinks about it for a good long while then applies some pressure and decides. I can be all three of those in any given situation, and I am not sure which I think is best, or if there is one that’s best.