Taking care of yourself

I will admit to being afraid of doctors. The whole idea that might find something wrong that is worse than what I am currently experiencing really plays games with my head.

I will also admit that I have a sanctimonious attitude in making sure that my wife and kids are treated for any ailments before I am. That means if they are sick or have a complaint, I wait.

Over the last 8 months I have had to come face to face with the stupidity of the positions I hold toward my own health. It has been a costly lesson but one that I hope I have learned. The lesson can be summarized as

Take care of yourself now. You will never get a second chance at this life.

Refusing to let go of summer

I know fall doesn't start for another month, but in the last week temperatures have dropped nearly 20 degrees. For example, it is only 48ºF right this minute. Not bad if it was November, December, January, or February. But it isn't and we are refusing to accept that summer may be over this year.

Which is why we are sitting at the breakfast table in shorts and tee-shirts wrapped in blankets.

Quality time

I wonder if we over think quality time.

In 1952 were Chevys all that the special? What about Model T? Today they are both considered valuable. While the original owners may have valued their vehicles, the vehicles were not necessarily considered "exceptional" in quality.

It we apply the same principle to our time spent with family, then maybe the real value is not in the quality, but in the memories of time spent together.

Connecting

My wife has nieces which means I have them too. I have enough trouble connecting with my own daughter making it pretty interesting for me when we have a family get together. As the girls have gotten older I have found points of shared interest with the older girls. The youngest though is still … young.

Turns out she like to throw things. Not a malicious thrower, she just thinks it is fun. This is great if you are playing ball, not so great at the dinner table. Or at my desk. With the computer. The one I use to make money. The real expensive one.

Just so happens that last time she was here she came to visit me in the office. Where I was pretending to work. I noticed she kept staring at the birds just before she would think about throwing something. Something like a hard drive array. In a moment of desperate inspiration I asked

"Do you want to help me feed the birds?"

Which involves throwing and birds.

Uncle Jaysen wins.

When dad is sick

Men like to fix things. Maybe not just "like to" but we feel that we need to. That is our job, right? And sickness is just the body broken, isn't it? Thinking of my reaction to when the kids or the Mrs is ill, I see it just this way. I want to fix them and get life back on track.

What happens when the man, the husband, the dad is the one that is sick? Do we try to fix ourselves? Do we pretend that nothing is wrong? Do we expect others to wait on us hand and foot like we are gods? I think how we deal with sickness is pretty telling about who men really are.

Let's look at me. I have a tendency to pretend that I am fine. Keep right on chugging along until the engine is completely wrecked. I might take an aspirin, but I don't really stop. As a matter of fact I have a flu bug while I am writing this. While I don't think I expect this from the kids or the wife, I think evidence would prove me wrong. Which means that instead of fixing, I have actually destroyed. May be just a few lung cells, but sill, something has been destroyed.

Big deal.

Actually it is. Here is why. Sin is spiritual sickness, right? And if my attitude toward physical sickness it to pretend that it doesn't exist, then why would I expect my attitude toward spiritual sickness to be any different? And even worse, wouldn't I expect others to put on a similar front, a false cover, on their spiritual sickness?

Which means that first I lie to myself about my state of health, then I demand that others lie to me about their state of health. In either the physical or spiritual realm, I demand hypocrisy from myself and others. I want to look healthy while I slowly decay from sickness.

I suspect you are reading this saying "I sure am glad I am not you!" I would ask you to look at yourself, a real long, hard look and make sure that you really are different. The "fixer" and "wait on me" have their own problems but I don't want to comment on them. There are more attitudes out there, and somewhere there is the attitude of God.

What I really want to say is I think we, as men, need to do a much better job of being honest with ourselves about how we deal with sickness. Both the physical kind and the spiritual kind. We need to be certain that our attitudes change inside us first so that the outward demonstrations are not those of a hypocrite. And we need to make sure that what is inside is really God, not just another work of ourselves.

Counting costs.

I am a technical person. I run systems, design server farms, get woken up at 3AM to save a late night release. Yet I find myself more unwilling to spend time fooling with personal technology. The cost just seems to high.

Take my "conversion" to Macintosh as an example. I wanted a *nix based system that I could use for multi-track recording and code/admin work. I spec'd a nice Dell and a Lenovo, figured out the vendor to do the Linux install, but at the last minute decided to look at Apple. When I thought about the need to do any actual maintenance I decided that Apple was the way to go. I wanted to spend my time recording not patching linux kernels. May be I am getting old. Maybe I am lazy. Could be. I wonder though, if the realization that I only have 6 years left till I am "childless" is the real reason. God I hope so.

When the little girl stops being little.

Today she decided that it was more important to win than to have fun. Her goal is in her mind and she is attacking it. No more stopping to pick a daisy. No more "pretty things" in her pockets. And she asked me to push her a little harder.

When did my little girl grow up? Where was I? Did I miss it all?

It springs on you suddenly. Your child is no longer an object you direct but a being that isn't ready to go it alone and your role is more as an advisor or councilor than dictator. Your input is no longer gospel, but more the unsolicited advise of a distant relative.

And if you blinked you missed it. The butterfly has left and is soaring away on the breeze.