A few stray wisps of Tanzania Peaberry waft across where I sit.  My cup is empty, but no matter.  Sometimes I think the aroma left behind is just as good, if not better than the draft itself. 

I get the urge to write sometimes, when I know that really it might be better to let what has briefly crossed my mind sit a while. 

This morning is one of those mornings.

***** 

Is it ever okay to be lazy?

When does lazy cross over to being a sluggard, or are they one in the same?

There is bindweed that could be sprayed, a fence taken up, grass to be mowed, and a plethora of other things vying for attention.  (I considered writing on the word plethora earlier; now that I used it here maybe you’ll be spared of it.)

When it came to selecting something to write on this morning, a status that my friend Dean had set ruled over the rest of options. 

His status, quoted from a Shane Parrish said “Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.”

For some reason, my mind trekked back immediately to a certain evening about ten years ago.  We sported the new title of Youth Leaders, had carried said title for two whole days already, and were invited to join the youth and their current Youth Leaders to help get Christmas candy made for the upcoming Christmas activities.

I was enthusiastic about joining them but came home from that evening totally depressed. 

It was unmitigated chaos.

Guys were using the tubes from wrapping paper to play baseball right there in the church fellowship hall.

Girls were shrieking at the antics of the guys and generally flirting instead of working. 

(Okay, I used some hyperbole in those previous two sentences.)

(And no, you don’t say it hyper bowl, like I have for years, but you’ll have to google it to find out how it’s pronounced.)

Eventually the gifts that needed to be wrapped, and the food that needed to be made, got finished by the youth leaders and all the youth went home extremely happy and fulfilled.

I told Mama Jan on the way home that there was no way I was surviving this for the next two years. 

I don’t remember what she said, but it must have had wisdom in it, because not only did I survive the next two years, but I supremely enjoyed them, and to this day, I will take a stand for what the young people do in our lives.

I think one key takeaway is that I determined, from that evening on, to name at least one thing as a bright spot in each time we were together. 

I hated English in school.  Except I loved to diagram the sentences.  You know what I liked about diagraming? 

I got to use a ruler, and act like I was actually doing math, precisely measuring each line of the rocket and all the appending lines, making it as perfect as possible in a way only numbers can. 

I hated teaching English when I was a schoolteacher.  Except I loved the last half of English class because I had made them a deal.  If they could get their English lesson done in half the time it normally took, and their grades didn’t blip, then we would spend the last half of English class singing.

I don’t know if this thought process holds together or not. 

Did I follow my friend Dean’s advice in each of those scenarios?  It really didn’t seem like work, and it really didn’t seem like such a long time.  Was I a success at any of them?  I hardly feel like it. 

I still don’t feel like I succeed when I try to write something, so I guess you could say I failed at English in a way.  And yet my good wife will tell you, with frustration curling at the edge of her voice, of how often I’ll stop a book I’m listening to and say, “Hear how they wrote that?  It’s perfect!”  And I’ll replay it enough times until her frustration begins to smolder into wisps of flame. 

I think what I recognize in those perfectly framed sentences I replay must be the result of something called work, done in an earlier day. 

I had hoped this would turn out to be something useful for the younger generation as they grappled with the thing they called work. 

I think it turned into a Saturday morning lazy kind of thing that sort of blathers.