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| Fear the beard. |
by Ben Howard
I shaved my beard yesterday.
That may not mean a lot to you, but it means something to me. The only time I shave, or get a haircut for that matter, is when I'm in need of some kind of emotional catharsis. And lately, I've needed that kind of emotional release.
Let me explain. I'm terrified.
I'm terrified by this endeavor and how it's become such a huge part of my life.
I'm terrified by how much it has grown. I track my page views daily (which I realize is crazy narcissistic, but it's part of being a blogger), and I honestly can't believe how much the place has grown.
I'm terrified by how I feel things have matured, both in terms of other talented writers joining me and the way I can see my own writing improving.
But what I'm really terrified of are none of those things. I'm terrified of failing. The better I feel about this endeavor, the more I realize that it would hurt if it all turned south and went down in flames. Or even worse, if it just wasted away, starving until nothing was left but the shell it left behind.
But I am scared that in an attempt to stave off failure, I'll change, and that I won't like who I become. I want to bring you beauty, and humor, and spur your mind and your imagination about what it means to be live in this world, and what it means to seek after a better one.
But I also want you to like me. I want you to read my posts. I want you to say nice things about me. Sometimes these desires work together, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I worry about which one is winning.
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| Ugh, feelings. |
Life is messy. I know it's messy, but I don't want it to be. Sometimes I pretend it's not. Sometimes I let it all show. That's why community is so useful. It's a place to let it all show.
I assume this chaotic tug-of-war is present in everyone. We battle our own emotions, desires, needs, and fears on a daily basis. Too often we seek easy answers about ourselves and others. We attempt to clarify our emotions and motivations in an attempt to explain ourselves. We attempt to uncover the motivations of others by dissecting their actions.
We assign grand narrative arcs to ourselves and those around us that look very tidy and clean and believable, but which ultimately bear little relation to the jagged, chaotic tumble of everyday life. We rarely know the whole story, even when it comes to our own interior struggles.
This is where I find the importance of community. We let people in and we let them know us, and in the process of letting them discover who we are, we attempt to know ourselves a little better.
It's scary to be that vulnerable. I'm nervous right now that you'll read this and see me as self-absorbed, or needy, and to be honest, that is who I am. I'm a chaotic mix of diverging emotions most of the time. I rarely make sense even to myself.
Through that vulnerability and through this growth within our communities, experiencing pain and joy alongside others, we learn about them and about ourselves. The discoveries we make aren't always pretty, sometimes they're quite disappointing, but they allow us to grow and develop.
These communities allow us to overcome fear and failure, insecurities and chaos, and live into a better version of ourselves and a better version of our world. Sometimes they help us to know that we just need catharsis, that we just need a release.
That's what I needed.
And that's why I shaved my beard.
Peace,
Ben
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by Mitchell Richards
I really don’t care for baseball much. I love sports in general and
I stay informed of the headlines with most sports, but when it comes to sitting
down and watching an entire baseball game, I can’t say I've done that
in years.
Baseball is boring to watch. Not a lot of action spread out over a great deal of time.
Today I realized that life is a lot like baseball, which is probably why I’m not a big fan of either one.
Baseball seems like the only job in America where if you succeed about
30% of the time (see batting averages) you’re the best at your job.
In my job at the paper, I’d be fired if I only did 30% of an article.
Elite baseball players are paid millions of dollars to succeed 30% of
the time and often less.
But then again, baseball is a lot like life.
I remember playing baseball as a kid and the only thing I enjoyed about it was
running the bases and catching pop flies. Unfortunately, to run the bases you
had to get on base and that meant batting, which I hated.
I
didn’t really understand as a kid how the odds of getting a hit were not
in my favor. I remember crying almost every time I struck out. I just
wasn’t used to not being able to succeed at something every time.
Baseball, like life, is about how you deal with the failures and
struggles. Odds to succeed are stacked against you in both things, and I
suppose it’s about getting back up to bat and seeing if you’ll strike
out again. Baseball is about bouncing back.
Baseball is a lot
like life because the possibility of failure is always there and
imminent, and the odds of succeeding are less than the odds of failing.
I believe that life isn’t as much about succeeding as it is about
failing. I don’t think you can truly appreciate success without the
inevitability of failure. In fact, I don’t think you can truly have
success without failure. Failure is the necessity, the cause and the
effect, of desire. I’ve heard the opposite of love isn’t hate, but
rather indifference, and accepting failure is the evidence of not being
indifferent.
Baseball is also a lot like life because
there is just so much time spent standing around and waiting for things to happen. You
never really know when a ball is going to be hit your way and you don’t
get to bat every inning, but success is determined by how you respond
when these moments come your way.
In life, we will not always
meet these moments and incidents with metaphorical great plays and proverbial spectacular
catches, in fact we may fall on our faces, but the beauty of baseball
and life is that you’re still in the game. If you drop a pop fly, your
job is not done. You still have to make the most of the opportunity that
life has dealt you. You still have to throw the ball in. You can still
make a play.
I used to cry when I struck out in baseball
because I thought I was terrible and striking out was proof of that. From all the years I played baseball I remember two things
specifically. First, there was the time when I caught a ball in the outfield that made me
flip over, and the other was when I slid into home plate and collided
with the catcher, resulting in an injury to my knee that still clicks and
cracks on cold days.
Like life, we win some and we lose some,
but we have stories to tell regardless and an obligation to tell them.
Stories of victories come and go and you won’t hit a home run every time
you are up to bat. Often times you have tales of pain and hard times,
but they are still a part of our story.
I assume the better we
are at going through life, the more opportunities we get to succeed and
fail at it. Some days I’m out in right field, looking at the empty seats
in the stadium, and other days I’m pitching and my arm is about to fall off, but I have to keep going.
Life isn’t about
hitting a home run every time, it’s about how we deal with it when we
don’t. It’s about how we deal with striking out, dropping the ball, and
slamming into the catcher. Life is about striking out and batting again
when it’s your turn. It’s about dropping the ball and picking it
up and still trying to salvage the play. It’s about slamming into the
catcher and stomping on the plate because you made it home.
Mitchell writes at mitchellrichards.com. He tweets a lot and has a weird fascination with John Tesh. You can follow him @MitchellWords. He also wrote a book called Definitive Blurs which you can find it here.
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