You’re Still Not Right! (PG13)

You’re Still Not Right! (PG13 - Enter at Your Own Risk) (Beware of Potty Talk)

Well, the neck tumor was out and I was healing well.  No massive bulge in my neck when I strain lifting anymore, and if I flex my neck (yes, that’s a thing) I only have veins and muscles on one side!  So, that is almost as cool and I was a little excited I still had a party trick! My neck is numb on that side, so shaving sucks and I don’t really know what I am doing unless I am looking in a mirror.  So there is a fear that I might accidentally cut my throat and not even feel it.  But overall I feel good, and getting back to normal, except I am still not right…

About the same time I was getting my neck diagnosed and treated, I was also dealing with sleep issues related to having to get up and urinate 6-10 times a night. I was barely getting any sleep at all. This had been going on for well over a year and was definitely wearing on me in ways I didn’t even realize.  I understand why sleep deprivation is used for interrogation purposes because I would have told you anything you wanted to know if you promised me I could sleep. Granted I drink about 1 to 1.5 gallons of water per day but most of that is before noon.  The longer this went on the longer my bathroom breaks would take as well and the “Flow got Slow.”  There was a hope that “MAYBE” my tumor had been pushing on some nerve that was affecting my bladder, or at least the neurological relay that said “dude, you ‘got’s’ to go man!”  This was a slim hope and unfortunately one that did not hold true.  So after the neck surgery it was time to figure out what was going on below the Equator, South of the Mason Dixon line, way down South in Dixie (anatomically speaking).

My family doctor referred me to a urologist.  Again, I don’t do doctors.  Not because I don’t like them, but because I never needed them, so now another specialist to add to the list!  I think I knew a couple jokes about Urologists when I was in Elementary School?  Maybe that was the planet Uranus? I don’t really remember, but somebody has to be the butt of the joke!  My frustration was starting to build and I wanted to know, “When was this medical stuff going to end?” NOT ANYTIME SOON!  I got my referral to go see a urologist and waited about 2-3 weeks to get in.  I show up for my appointment and I was the youngest one there by 30 years. I didn’t know if this should concern me or if the staff would like me more because they didn’t have to deal with a really really old dude (just an old one). 

I am not really shy, and not much embarrasses me, but this was new territory.  Why am I here?  Well, (in a really quiet voice I explained) I have been peeing 6-11 times a night and can’t sleep, and my “flow won’t go” (this became one of my rapping tag lines).  It has been happening for nearly a year now and thought I ought to have it looked at.  Little did I know they were going to do a whole lot more than look.  

The nurse took me back, “Hey Brice, didn’t think I would see you here.” Not for sure what that means?  Is it a compliment?  “Well, I didn’t think I would know everyone who works here, so that makes us even”.  She asked me more questions than a four-year-old trying to figure out the purpose of life.  She moved me from the interrogation room to the waiting room for the doctor.  His room was different.  There were new instruments out that I had never see before so I was excited to have things to touch and play with while I waited.  Don’t worry I didn’t blow up the plastic glove to look like a giant turkey (although I have gotten in trouble for that in the past).  Eventually, the doctor came in with a new nurse and I told him my entire story again.  He asked some questions like:  does it hurt when you pee, is there blood, do you leak during the day?  Seriously, this was getting weird now.  No, no, no.  I just go to the bathroom a lot and can’t sleep and now my “flow won’t go.” 

He wanted me to do a pee test in the corner of his office in a bucket that had a plastic cone around it.  Kind of like the “cone of shame” a dog wears to keep it from biting or licking itself after a surgery.  It really kind of made me feel the same as what a dog must, I thought to myself.  He was working on the computer and the nurse was laying some things out for the second part of this party and here I was in the corner trying to pee.  Seriously, this is a lot of pressure.  Supposedly it was like a radar gun in there and it was going to measure the speed and forcefulness my pee. I felt like I was a being scouted to be called up to the major leagues as a pitcher.  I wondered if I could break 100 miles per hour?  I wondered what the world record was for this contraption? Whatever, I just wanted to get this done.  I had hoped that (I thought very naively) they can tell me what is wrong after this and I could go home and take a magic pill and go back to my awesome self.  I stood there and stared down the cone of shame until I couldn’t hold back any more, but I barely set the pee meter off. Talk about embarrassing.  The doctor looked at me and said my stream was horrible and I should be able to pee a hole in the wall.  That sounded pretty cool but gross at the same time. It recorded my pee failure on a piece of paper like it was an earthquake machine recording the seismic shift, except mine looked like a baby after shock.  Just to make it worse the doctor told me what his score was and mine was pathetic. Really, you want to have a pissing contest?  I thought that is just something people said to prove a point! So, I told him I could beat him in an arm wrestling competition, which seemed more important in my mind.  I really expected my name to be printed on a wall of shame in the lobby the next time I came to an appointment.  And to think I was paying for this. 

Just when you don’t think it was weird enough, the doctor wanted to do an ultrasound to see my bladder up-close and personal. Warm jelly (check). Black and white computer screen (check).  Long wand thingy they are going to push on my bladder area (check).  Paper sheets to lay back on to relax. (check).  Awkward request for me to drop my pants and lay back with the nurse and himself waiting (check).  Well, my bladder was still half full.  He measured my bladder wall which was about 4 times thicker than it should be, so I reminded him I worked out which did not seem to impress him. How they had to check my prostate. No issue there thankfully. After all that was over, he said he wanted to give me a pill!  Seriously, are you FREAKING KIDDING ME!  A PILL, NOW? Couldn’t you lead with that and if it didn’t work go to the next stage.  “You need to take Flomax and this should fix you up.” Great! A Pill! That is exactly what I wanted.  I went home to take a shower, call my therapist to talk through what just happened, and then go get my pills so that I could be alright and my “flow would go,” but little did I know we were just starting in on a journey that would nearly kill me. 

Easy answers are not always the best answers. Take a pill! If life were as easy as 2+2=4 we would all be able to solve the problems of life.  All I wanted was a pill and they gave it to me, but here is the problem—it did not work!  Most of the time in life (not necessarily medicine) if you just take a pill everything will NOT be okay.  If I just do the right thing, then everything will work out okay!  Nope! If I just love my spouse, they will love me back!  Nope! If I move forward and focus on my future my past will go away! NOPE! If I work out and eat right, I will be healthy medically!  Definitely NOPE! If I go to work each day and go above and beyond and become a transparent leader, then I will be noticed and get that big promotion!  I hope so, but possibly NOPE! And the easy answers and the pills of life can keep being handed out but there is no guarantee everything is going to be okay. 

What I have found is in my life for over 20 years is if I kept taking the pills that culture offered, to try to find the easy answers to make everything okay, but the longer I went in life and the more cultural pills I took, the less they worked. Alcohol repressed my past for several years, but its effects continued to wear off and left lasting effects on my long term memory.  Inappropriate relationships seemed like a pretty good tasting pill at the time, but left images in my mind and more pain in my heart.  Drugs?  Education?  Overachieving? Travel? Going to church every time the doors opened?  Serving in my community?  All pills I tried but none seemed to work. All were like Band-Aid’s put over cancer.  I looked okay on the surface but the disease continued to spread underneath eating at every part of me.  I tried everything I could but still didn’t get better. 

All of us have things that need to be treated and I think our “go to” is to just take a pill, the easy way.  Short cuts when we are driving can be great if we know they are tried and true, but if we don’t we can go down roads into places that are hard to get out of and that we did not attend to go to.   I remember driving through the back roads of Arkansas and saw a ferry on the map that would take you across a river instead of having to drive all the way around the river and lake.  It would be a fun experience to drive my car onto a ferry and to float along and save time.  I took the short cut!  I drove to the end of the road where the ferry loaded but here was the problem.  There was no ferry.  No line.  No pill.  Upon further investigation there was a sign at the water’s edge where the road literally ended at. The sign stated, “Sorry for the inconvenience but the ferry no longer runs.”  What?  This was my short cut and it was on the map!  Why would it be on the map if it didn’t exist?  No ferry?  No shortcut?  No pill?  My shortcut added 45 minutes to my trip. 

It’s a lesson that I remember in life that short cuts are just that—shortcuts.  They cut short your learning.  They cut short your experiences.  They cut short your ability to grow and change.  They cut short your relationships.  They cut short (at least in my life) your deeper healing. They cut short a deeper foundation.  Shortcuts do what they are supposed to do, they cut short.  Don’t get me wrong I love saving time but not at the expense of adding in pain and problems.  In life shortcuts usually mean we are exchanging an easy way that is temporary for something later that will be harder because we didn’t spend the time at the beginning laying the right foundation.  I had one friend say it this way to me, “Brice you can play now and pay later or pay now and play later.” 

As I went to graduate school I didn’t make the time to read every book, so I read the reviews of the books that I was supposed to read.  It was a shortcut that cut short the depth of my education.  In college I couldn’t stand American Literature class so I listened to people talk about all the stories and sat in on their study halls, but I did not read the stories.  Another short cut that cut short my collegiate experience.  I could go on and on with short cuts I took in life. If only I could just take a pill!  Wanna lose weight? Just take this pill! But, it would take years and even decades to finally figure out that I was still not right. 

It would take total failure, and my life falling apart, for me to look for the deeper issues. It would take the collapse of a marriage, the loss of more friends that I care to think about, the loss of employment because I would quit my jobs and move on because it got too personal, the loss of some of the best years of my life, the loss of wealth and personal growth, and the list could go on and on.  I found that there would be no short cuts to healing. Dealing with the cracks of my character, integrity, and the person I had become and in many ways still am and fight against every day of my life.  It was not only going to take avoiding the short cuts of life, but it appeared that I was going to have to take the longest way there, pull over at every rest area, go below the speed limit, and then stop and talk to people along the way to be sure I was still on the right track. In other words, a pill was not going to fix it, it was going to require pretty evasive surgery.  If I am honest with you I would prefer to take a shortcut, until I find out it’s just a dead end.  Even though the doctor did some weird stuff to me, I still left happy that I only had to take a pill.  Or at least that is what I thought, but medically—just like in life, I was getting ready to find out that I still was not right. 

As a Transparent Leader we are called to stop taking short cuts because all they do is cut short our influence on the people we are leading.  If I only share 50% of who I am with you in these pages then that is all you will see.  The same is true in our marriages, workplace, friendships, etc.  I am the poster child of sharing “just enough” to get you to shut up and stop asking questions. But I have found that my influence and growth stop where I stop.  Of course I have to learn when and what to share in an appropriate manner.  This chapter is proof of that.  This is the extremely edited version of my doctor’s room experience, but you know 100% of what happened in that torture chamber.  We all have to choose how we say things, where we say them at, and who we say them to—that called “wisdom.”  Something, I don’t always have (just ask around). 

My hope for each of us is we can get real and stop just taking the pill, the short cut and start looking for deeper ways that we can invest in those that we are leading.  I know it’s hard!  But I have come to learn that if it is hard for us who are developing in our leadership, then how much harder is it for those you are leading.  Be a conduit of change for those around you and let’s show them that there is something better.  Lets’ show them that they can be Transparent Leaders who show others who they really are!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Everywhere I look today that is what I see.  “Happy New Year!” “2020 will be better!”  “2020 a new year and a new decade!”  “I resolve to have a great year!”  “2019 is blurry and in my past and 2020 is crystal clear in the future!” (See what I did there) “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and for all my friends from the South “Happy New Year(s)!”  

As a kid and now a “somewhat” adult I have always found New Year’s interesting.  Why do we put so much stock in the changing of a 24-hour period that end one year and begins another?  Many times I hear people, throughout the month of December, talk about how bad this year was and they are SO ready for the next year.  It was almost as if they were just sitting around waiting for the calendar to turn.  We then make resolutions that we plan on keeping in our lives to make them better the following year, only to see 80% of them fail by mid-February (another 10% fail by mid-March just to depress you a little more).

I recently had a conversation with a friend who said he was SO READY for 2020 to be here due to the amount of sickness, death, and accidents in 2019.  I understand this with the health issues, doctors’ appointments, co-pays, and surgeries I have had this past year.  In fact, my New Year’s Resolution has been “no more doctors’ appointments in 2020”, but just found out I have 2 follow up appointments in January! FAILED ALREADY! Who is to say that I won’t have MORE health issues in 2020?  Who is to say that my friend won’t know people who die or have accidents in 2020 just like 2019?  Chances are he will!  Why do we rely so much on a date, a number, a month, a year to bring us comfort, hope, and a rejuvenation of vision?   In fact, many people stayed up last night just to make sure the new year actually happened and that they could see it firsthand!  They even had a really big party to usher it in and now woke up in 2020 in the middle of the day (already missing the first morning of 2020) with a headache and are a couple hundred dollars poorer.  I hope saving money or living a healthier lifestyle in 2020 wasn’t one of those new resolutions! FAILED! 

I honestly can’t remember what I was doing last New Year’s Eve.  Probably watched some TV, tried to eat half-way healthy, returned a few Happy New Year’s texts to random friends, played a board game or two with the kids, and went to bed about 9 pm. Much like this year.  I know boring, but there is a reason for that I will get to in a moment. 2020 was also a new decade—EVEN BIGGER!  Of course I have NO CLUE what I was doing when 2010 rolled in (probably the same thing as last night and the year before).  I think the only decade I remember was 2000 because the fear of God had been put into us that the computer apocalypse was going to happen and shut down a free market economy and we would all wake up trading chickens and goats. (Thank God that didn’t happen or we wouldn’t have ever had Bit Coin.)  Plus, I was partying like it was 1999 finally thanks to Prince.  However, my computer still worked and that 1999 party was really no different from the one in 1997 or 1996—except I wore a red beret and got a little attitude and walked in through the out door (Prince joke for my 1980s friends). 

We really have an obsession with measuring things in America.  24 hours in a day, 12 months, 365 days in a year (except 2020 just to really mess you up--Freaking Leap Years), 10 years in a decade, 100 years in a century, 1000 years in a millennium (that is all I know without Googling answers so I will stop).  Then we measure miles, money, grades, etc.  We use numbers, percent’s, and anything else that will compute in an excel spread sheet.  Our military measures things by using a different system and then science and foreign countries have an obsession with the metric system (personally I just think to make themselves feel superior).  We count and measure everything.  Happy New Year! It’s Wednesday, January 1, 2020! 

Everything has a beginning and an end and we compute the cost every step of the way.  I am in no way saying this is bad, but it is so interesting to me to compare this to other countries, especially the non-Anglo ones, who have a future and eternal view on so many parts of life that can’t be separated.  It is like there is another chapter that really doesn’t have a starting or stopping place.  It is kind of like if you could write their lives down, their story doesn’t use paragraphs, capital letters to start a sentence, no punctuation, or spaces.  Poor grammar I know!  It would drive us Americans nuts!  It would be unreadable to us!  Why?  Because it can’t be measured or separated, put into nice neat little compartments that we can get our minds around.  We just love that.  But what if you never had a New Years and the date, day, or time never mattered? What if you had an eternal view of life and lived into it now, but saw it as never ending!

What if you lived your life with no end in sight and every day was just a continuation of the last? Not like the old movie Groundhog Day, but more linear without a starting place or ending place. Generations before you brought you to this point and you will take others farther down the road as well.  If time didn’t cause you to do some things and wait to do others, but instead you just did them because they needed to be done (remember time doesn’t exist). Sure, we have daylight and nighttime, we have seasons, and all of us are getting older.  But what if that didn’t have anything to do with time or measuring but rather simply represented the natural cycles for us to sleep and work (or play), or allows a natural cycle for the earth to reset itself for future crops, balance, and growth, and a natural life cycles that comes with getting older and dying so new birth can take place (kind of like seasons). 

I know it is hard to get your mind around because time and measuring things is all we know.  If you ever go to a church service in a foreign country, you will understand.  There is no beginning point or end point.  It just is.  When the people are there we begin and when they leave we end.  I met one guy wearing a watch that had not worked in 10 years.  I asked him why he was wearing it and he said because Americans that come visit think it makes me look more important.  If you don’t believe me go to a funeral of someone in a foreign country compared to America—you might be there for days (except you will be the only one that know that).  They will just stay until they are done grieving and then go back to living.  It is bazaar and seems very unorganized to a temporal type A American!  How about a foreign wedding? Will these things ever end; I have things to do! Just going to dinner in a foreign country can feel like an all-day adventure (except there is not a measurement of how long a dinner should take or not take to these people it is just a time of community and relationship building that happens to be taking place with food).  And we get peeved if our waiter takes too long to bring our FREE bread that we feel we deserve! 

I know we have to measure time otherwise no one who works for/with me would show up tomorrow and blame it on this post. (“Yeah, but you said there was NO time so I didn’t know when to come in!”)  I want to know how much money I need to retire and what I need to do to get there.  I get it, we have to measure things and I am in no way bashing your New Year or your resolutions (that you probably won’t keep).  But I do want to challenge you and myself to look at 2020 differently.  If you have to measure something, measure 2020 as the year you began to see every cycle of a sunset and sunrise as important and refused to wait for a glass ball to drop in an over crowed city with an over paid host to REALLY start living.  But instead every moment of the day was important to live to the fullest not knowing what was going to happen in the next sunrise and sunset. 

I will get sick this year and I have resolved I will see a doctor.  Hopefully, no surgeries, but I am really okay if I do because it is going to happen in life.  People I love will get sick, get hurt and die at some point (it will happen to my friend as well, who was lamenting about this).  It may be during the 4th full moon (just making crap up now) or on the 3rd cycle of winter (more made up crap to prove a point) but I know it will happen to you and me.  I can stop living and wait for a clean start or I can live through it and keep going.  I am choosing to do the second (see I am already measuring again). I hope you will join me so that every sunrise will count from now until eternity.  Happy New Year’s (sort of). 

Word for 2020?

Word for 2020?

What is your word for the year? Over the past years a growing trend is to “pick” a word that you are going to try to live into during the upcoming year. One word! One thought! I love the simplicity of this, but it is not an easy exercise unless you google, “Best words that people have used to be their word for the year.”  Or at least something like that.  It is a fun exercise because it forces you boil everything down to one thought, one approach, one word.   That is a BIG word. Not necessarily a long word, but a BIG one. What is your word?

I have 2 this year!  I know, that is not the game, but once you hear them you will understand how they go together like peanut butter and jelly!  Some of you hyper-type A personalities are thinking that I should not be allowed to play the game if I can’t follow the rules.  I get it and that is ok. Relax!  It’s a new year!  In fact, that would be a great word for you—RELAX!

My first word is “Willing”!  In 2020 I want to be willing to do whatever it takes.  I am WILLING to go the extra mile.  I am WILLING to learn something new to make me a better person.  I am WILLING to get up a little bit earlier or stay up a little bit later so I can write another chapter for a book.  I am WILLING to make new friends.  I am WILLING to look at every aspect of my life no matter how difficult and see how I can make it better.  I am WILLING to love.  I am WILLING to lose.  I am WILLING to compromise.  I am WILLING to hurt.  I am WILLING to risk.  I am WILLING!   This is different from “trying”.  Trying is a suggestion while willing is a command. If you want to “try” to risk, “try” to love, “try” to be a better person, I will promise you mediocre results at the best and I promise you won’t have to “try” to fail—it “will” happen naturally.  But it you “WILL” yourself to risk, love, hurt, compromise, etc.  there is resolve and different level of commitment.  I am willing to love or I will love COMPARED to am trying to love or I will try to love.  Do you see the difference?  So this year I am willing!  Or I will! 

As I thought about my “word” of the year I also thought that there were things that I should probably be “unwilling” to do, so that is my second word.  I hope you can see how they go together now (Type A friends).  I am “unwilling” to settle for mediocrity!  I am “unwilling” to keep toxic relationships in my life!  I am “unwilling” to settle for failure (I am willing to fail, but unwilling to stay there)!  I am “unwilling” to not be happy! 

What is your WORD/WORDS for 2020!  And encourage and inspire others!