i’m walkin’, yes indeed, i’m walkin’

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

It’s funny how we measure our lives.

Until you go to your high school reunion and some friend from the fringes guilds the lily and tells you that he started a software company, or she tells you she’s the queen of the world, or he tells you that the inauguration ceremony is going to be televised (“and you should really watch it!…oh, you don’t have cable?  Nevermind…”)…until that happens, you’re just as happy as a clam because you got the chimney leak fixed and the house warm.

Who knew there was something missing from a pretty good, simple life?

I think that Winston Churchill also had a great quote (among many) about never giving up.

There are so many times that we don’t have to give up…because we never start.  It’s a safe way to avoid failure.

New thoughts about what we should be can be real mood busters.

I’m not thinking we should rest on our laurels (what the heck is a “laurel”?) and never try anything new or never reach for anything better…it’s just that I wonder if we don’t miss something pretty great if we feel like we turned down the “wrong fork in the road”…and now all we can think about is the fork.

We don’t see what we’ve left behind…and we don’t see what positive outcomes could be down either road the fork provides. It’s like we were sleep walking, but in our mind we’re sitting somewhere far back down the road…crying at the crossroads.

We visited a college yesterday.

It was a college that was a couple of hours away…high up in the mountains, beautiful campus…looked like it might be a good option.

It looked like it might be a “good fork”.

I’m not sure when we began thinking that college was supposed to be some kind of ultimate fulcrum….like if you didn’t launch yourself into the stratosphere with the right college choice and the right job following the completion of your studies and the right choice of spouse and the right…you were pretty much done.

What a lot of pressure for somebody working on figuring out how to get through their young life in the moment.

I hear people say things like, “I know a bunch of people who know some kids who went to college and they never amounted to NOTHIN’!  COLLEGE IS A WASTE!!!”.

Makes me think they need to get to know a broader range of people.

It’s kind of like the people who say, “I read a book in High School.  I’m done with reading”.  To say “completion of your studies” is a sad thing…”I’m done with the collegin’…what a waste of time that was …can’t get no job or nothin’ “.

I think our young student is curious about a lot of things… school and non-school related.

That’s a good thing.  It’s a hopeful thing to see a child have an open attitude about the world.

I want to make good decisions….I want to make decisions that make things better and easier for my family.  I don’t know that I’m always really good at doing that.

A friend’s parent told me, “You could do anything” when I was getting set to go to college for the first time.  It was pretty great to hear…I trusted my friend’s father…he wasn’t a flatterer and if he had confidence in me, it was something that I took seriously.

I ended up doing a little of just about everything.  He did say “you could do everything”, didn’t he?

I guess that you live your life.  Your life.  Some of it’s going to be right, some not right…but you keep walkin’…keep trying…and hopefully the percentage of right to “not right” ends up on the positive side.

I guess that “nest pushing” is part of the whole plan, too.

You just have to try and figure out the softest place you can find for a landing spot….and then try not to look amazed and relieved when it turns out that they could fly after all.

About Peter Rorvig

I'm a non-practicing artist, a mailman, a husband, a father...not listed in order of importance. I believe that things can always get better....and that things are usually better than we think.

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