When you want something done, and it is very difficult or seems impossible, here are five approaches that can help. They work for physical activity but also for improving interpersonal skills and many other types of objectives.
- Dream about it. Envision the end in your mind, awake or asleep. Feel yourself mentally going through the steps to get there. “Sleep on it” actually does help you learn, by letting your brain play with this envisioning the end state while disabling interfering thoughts or inhibitions.
- Spend the time. Many hard things require training. That means spending time on objective, or a component of the objective at a scheduled or determined pace — every day or three times a week. Anything less that that and a build in skill level becomes unlikely.
- Do it in slow motion and then speed it up. Find a way to act out the hard objective in slow motion. Only after it is fluid in slow motion see how fast you can make it to perfect form and lose unnecessary motion.
- Listen. Feedback can come from experts, those around you, or a camera recording what you have done that you can compare to the objective.
- Perform first in a low risk environment. If you are an acrobat, do your first act with a net. If you are learning Greek, learn in a low pressure conversation, not an emergency.
None of these steps will get you doing something difficult without one other thing. The most important thing is to choose a challenging objective. We don’t just show up speaking a new language — we have to choose to learn it first. Choose something worth doing!
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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Photograph courtesy of Unsplash by Vincenzo Di Giorgi
Two weeks ago my post was about initial training in an attempt to return to fitness after having become unfit. However that is not really the beginning of this journey. The beginning was the end of the tyranny of a chronic injury.
It started with a injection to relieve the pain of a pinched nerve I’d been struggling with for years without knowing its cause. Prior to that I felt like I was on a diving board of unyielding rock, only one leg reliably working, and surrounded by fall lines that led to sudden death and not in control of when I would be told to jump. Then came physical therapy. My physical therapist was Dan Ziebel. He did four things:
- He started where I was, no matter how little I could do. He wouldn’t let me do things that were harmful to the nerve, no matter that that they were common exercises for other people.
- He focused on form for a long time. He managed to catch things I was doing wrong every week — to the point of frustration — that I had no clue I was doing wrong.
- He watched. No matter what I said in words he knew much more by watching.
- He said some things were off limits forever. Specifically jumping — on bike or off. Bummer. But helpful nonetheless. He explained a bunch of other things that normal people do that I have to be careful about, and how to be careful.
I’m not sure most physical therapists would have done what he did — he seemed to be trained both in his field and in the field of sports, and to have learned to interpret people’s movements carefully over a lifetime. It was his sight that got me able to exercise without exacerbating injury, a fundamental to returning to full health and fitness. Nerves take an incredibly long time to heal. In my case it has been two years to get to the point where I can ride with any speed without causing more problems.
This week I got up to roughly where I started when I started training for serious cycling objectives as a younger person. That is sort of like reaching a starting line of a training program. There is far to go and I could still run into one of those point 4 above situations that bring it crashing down…but maybe not. There is only one way to find out and that is to aim high and expect success while continuing to listen.
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The rain slowed but the road was still covered with water. Visibility cleared, and the driver put the cruise control back on, hoping to maintain the 70 MPH speed limit on the rural road. A long appreciative glance the foothills of her youth let the wheel get off onto a rock shoulder. The many miles behind her left the tires bald. The noise drawing attention back, the driver overcorrected and sent the car into a spin. Soon it was going the almost the opposite direction, still at 70 MPH, out of control and off into a ditch. The landing back to four wheels was smooth, as if into a pillow created by 1000 angel’s wings. Finally the driver hit the brakes and cut the motor and the vehicle came to a stand still.
I was that driver. At that moment I was thankful for the absence of oncoming traffic, the absence of drop-offs, rocks, or trees or telephone poles just off the road, and the ability of car and driver to go on without function-impairing damage. Without a computer recording the history its hard to know when the cruise control came off. What is certain is that the car felt like it was accelerating through most of the incident and my brain couldn’t quite understand why. Inability to make split second decisions about speed control might be a reason not to use cruise control in the rain. It is also a reason not to go the speed limit in the rain.
Other reasons not to use cruise control are to force attention to the road with immediate feedback should the speed waver due to inattention. In that sense driving is like life. The old adage “grow or die” means we always need to be accelerating in life in order to prevent friction dragging us to a standstill. But if we do the same things every day, in the same measured doses to keep that acceleration content we don’t grow, instead we become content on cruise control. Routine is the cruise control of life. Routine gets dangerous enough to prevent growth when we are cruise control ignoring both danger and new opportunity.
As for me, I am thankful mistakes can be forgiven even while in this life, that some crashes result in soft landings on angel’s wings. I seek to keep the routine off and to stay alert to danger, to seek to optimize speed to potential opportunities.
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Girl Day is February 27, a day set aside to encourage girls interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). I had to correct the “T,” at first I typed theology. It’s been a while since theology would have generally fit on that list …hundreds of years. It fits for me in that girls in theology are still rare.
My own interest in STEM started when Bell Labs gathered kids from all over Dallas and put on a show for us — maybe I was 10 or so. I don’t remember what grade I was in but I remember learning about LASERS and how many phone calls were going to fit into a fiber by guiding light down a piece of glass. It was ultra cool and indeed has since come true.
Back then we didn’t feel the need to have separate days for girls (not sure it’s needed now — what’s needed is including girls, not isolating them)… all curious kids were encouraged to go into the STEM topics. Or maybe they actually picked the irritating ones that kept asking “why” because that was about my only credential back then.
Roger Williams was not my only favorite character during my research on Rekindled. My favorite character was John Winthrop the Younger’s first wife Martha. I cried when I learned she was going to get whacked young if I kept to history. I seriously considering quitting the history bit and writing alternate history instead. Martha had an engineering mind. Her brilliance shows through in the letters in code she and John Winthrop the Younger wrote to each other, in an age when most women couldn’t write at all in any alphabet.
She collected medical remedies (he later was famous for using a few of them) from her father the apothecary in England and from the indigenous people in New England and she invent0r her own (he of course got the credit later). She was an astute observer and asked the tough questions. People marveled at hearing the couple debate; only a few could follow them. Curious girls like Martha are who Girl Day was created for, and in many countries today’s Martha’s will not have to die young.
Now that is worth celebrating.
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How is that shoveling going? If you are viewing this you likely have at least stopped for something warm to drink. The snow that snuck in under the coat and into your socks is starting to melt and get you wet…
Times like this aren’t that different for us than they were for Roger Williams. Especially if the power is out. Except, instead of waiting for the power to return, he had to wait for spring. Or he could go find wood and make his own power… which was easier to do in New England than in England. England’s trees were scarce by the 17th Century in London and traveling to them was in a carriage pulled by, if you were lucky, a horse. No F250 to bail you out. Of course, he didn’t have to find an open gasoline station.
Here are a few tips, as sound in 17th century and in Iditasport Alaska as they are in a New York snowstorm:
- Stay dry or get dry. Water sucks out warmth whether from sweat after shoveling or melted snow from coming inside for hot chocolate.
Wet clothes can freeze and then dry on a line, but do harm next to your body. - Move. While in the cold, shoveling is a great way to stay warm. When the shoveling is done, skis beckon, or snow shoes. Or, build a snowman. The cold can be pleasant if there is enough motion to provide heat. Movement is the real reason snowmen were invented…don’t tell the kids.
- Forget the fire until other needs are attended.
Often a first instinct is fire. In real cold, with wet fuel and lacking lots of technology, fire causes more trouble than it cures. There is more warmth in fuel scavenging than in the actual fire unless it is very large. - Get out of the wind. Caves in snow banks, buildings, tress, hollow trees, whatever it takes. Wind is like water, sucking out heat.
- Appreciate civilization. Roger came into contact with indigenous civilization long before he was able to establish his own pocket of civilization in the wilderness. Don’t turn down offers from strangers.
Addendum 1-25-2015
Addendum: I was vey sorry to hear of the death of Henry Worsley shortly after writing this article. He came within 30 miles of crossing Antarctica alone, a feat my hero Ernest Shackleton tried. Shackleton also did not achieve his goals, but he is my hero because he escaped and because he refused to leave anyone to die. He risked his health to rescue the last man stranded.
How noble of Henry Worsley to retry the quest. His ancestor was captain of Shackleton’s ship. My heart goes out to wife Joanna.
There are two more lessons in extended cold that Henry Worsley’s effort demonstrates:
1. He was alone. It is safer with companions. Roger Williams also set out alone, but some believe he met up with other companions quickly.
2. He died after his endurance failed because he was hungry. The most important item to manage in the cold is food supply, because without food you cannot continue move at the rates required. Failure can occur by having eaten all available food or by having your system become unable to digest the food. When you realize either is about to happen, it is time to bail out. Henry Worsley knew that and called for help, and was rescued, but did not survive. If there is a lesson, it is bail early, obey when the metrics say you need to change plan and get out.
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This is supposed to be a quiet week between Christmas and a New Year.
There are these two guys duking it out in my head — two of my favorites in this world. And they seem to disagree. Both are Christian men of God, their agreements are more significant than their disagreements: they both accept Christ as one born to a virgin Mary, who died for our sins, and who rose again to become our living Savior.
Most of their disagreements I can chalk up to time. God doesn’t experience time the way people do, and He is infinite. It is therefore not surprising there are multiple solutions, akin to multiple intercepts, to the equation that maps truth about God to the finite axis of people experiencing a finite world. One example: one says communion elements become the body of Christ before they are eaten. The other says no, they are symbolic. But that second one agrees Christians form the body of Christ his church and so he too thinks the elements are the body of Christ once digested and incorporated into the Christian. They are argueing over the point in time of transformation. One stresses Jesus’s power through his disciples to bind on earth as in heaven, the other stresses the people’s decision for Christ. Often they are stressing opposite ends of a paradox that God wants us to hold — e.g. infinite grace AND infinite justice.
The two men are Pope Francis and Dr. Albert Mohler. Both are alive today and I would like nothing more than to lock them in a room and not let them out until they can agree. God does nothing by accident and it is His providence that they are sent to sharpen each other and all of us in these confusing days. Failing the power to lock them in that room, they duke it out virtually, bouncing around the neural circuits that are my brain.
Albert Mohler makes it very simple. For him it is this simple equation: Answer the question “Jesus _________ the son of God.”
It is a multiple choice question with these choices as answer:
IS (=Christian)
IS NOT (= damned to fires of destruction for all eternity)
People answer the first way cannot, to him, be worshiping the same God as the people who answer the other way. He bases this on a scriptural if and on if. The if side is John 8:19: “If you truly knew me, you would know my father also.” In case anyone thinks the folks that claim Jesus is only a man “truly know him” the same chapter quotes him as saying “Before Abraham was born, I am.” That is more than just a person, that is God. For the only if there is John 8:42 ““If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here.”
Theologian Stanley Slade that said when we are saved we committing what we know of ourselves to what we know of God, and the rest of our lives we learn more about each. Sometimes we learn a lot more later, but never all.
Pope Francis says all the Abrahamic faiths worship the one God. It sounds good, and seems peaceful and generous. The trinity is a hard concept even for Christians to understand, and many have a hard time with it. Many liberal protestants and Catholics, as well as people of other faiths, can be found having a hard time. In our day, many have a hard time admitting any active inputs by God from outside the universe at all. Sending a part of God to be born human is significant outside input.
Pope Francis seems to be willing to let that mystery lie unresolved while dialoguing with people of other faiths and no or little faith. He goes off the deep end from from Albert Mohler’s perspective if he says he therefore does not recognize a commission to tell the full gospel to those people. However, he did not say exactly that (see source link). It appears to me he made a finer point: non-Christians should not be compelled to follow Christian rules before they have Christ. We must share the story of the gospel, and leave it God to meet them in person as he did for the Ethiopian — it is God’s to make their hearts leap for joy, so that they go away rejoicing. To be able to share, we must dialogue, starting in the place where they are.
I conclude for today nothing so large as a whole religion counts as able to answer Albert Mohler‘s construct. Islam, for example, is not a human heart. People who follow Islam may never have heard the true gospel — only some distorted version of it (even founders of a religion after the time of Jesus may be in that state). People who have not heard are not equipped to take the test. There can be human hearts called by God inside all religions and outside any religion. God will call them as he sees fit but in our age he has ordered Christian followers to tell the full story of Jesus Christ to all of them. After they have heard the gospel then they are ready for the test. If they are called by God, their hearts will leap at the name of Jesus and they will jump for joy at having found Him. Others will deny, sticking to an alternative set of rules that in the end do nothing for them. Only God will be judge of who has heard the gospel, not man. Many will deny multiple times before accepting.
God told Moses “I am who I am”. God’s signature is that of creator of the universe. There can’t be more than one of those. Either we worship that one or we don’t, and John 8 says if we know God we will recognize his son. However, it is not left to us to know conclusively for other people who is in each of the three sets: IS, IS NOT, NOT YET HEARD.
Jesus said in Matthew 8:10–12
10 When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him,
“Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel[a] have I found such faith. 11 I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Time’s up for this round… no knock-out for either earthly dude, only for the One found in Scripture.
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After finishing the 2015 Boston marathon, Gianclaudio realized his ID was gone and, not speaking English, he could not find his way to his people or his hotel. Being clever, he went for the the airport directly, but he was taken for by many homeless or worse.
The story of Gianclaudio P. Marengo’s survival has a lucky ending: he was recognized for the civilized but lost Italian he was and returned to people he knew by an officer who said he did “what anyone would have done”. Except that they didn’t and often don’t. It takes real character and empathy to reach out to the dispossessed.
In 1912 John Keenan as not so lucky. Not Without Peril tells the haunting story of how the inexperienced surveyor dressed too light for the changing Mt. Washington weather and suffered overexposure and dehydration.
He was seen, the first time within 24 hours, by an experienced man who should have been able to help. However, he was asking for strange landmarks and it sounded like he was not being truthful. The man pointed him toward civilization and left him with two miles to go on the road. For several days, appearing physically sound but too deranged to be understood as needing help he was spotted several times. Eventually massive manhunts searched for him, but he was not found. His parents never got a body back.
This phenomena of studying failures and near failures explains the fascination with Rob Hall’s expedition on Everest — where living people were also left behind — even though people on the same mountain in the same time on a better team survived. My racing coach used to be really bothered by the relative lack of fame for Ed Viesturs, a leader that does it right.
Multiple major negative events disable. Leadership matters. Planning for supplies required during disaster matters. Communication with those able to assist matters.
The book 1491 begins to examine what really happened to the indigenous peoples of America. When Roger Williams arrived, multiple rounds of disease had already wiped out much of the population. He was seeing remnants of a vast civilization. Early Roger Williams seems to still detect the civilized nature of the indigenous culture.
Sometimes Roger’s own language gets in his way. When he calls men “another of Adam’s degenerate seed” that is actually a complement. His worldview is that all men descended from Adam are sinners, all born degenerate in some way until redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. Much as when evangelicals today feel obligated to communicate what the Bible defines as sin so that people realize a need for the offered redemption, Roger was calling all men degenerate, including indigenous people. In contrast, some English claimed the natives were not human at all. So in claiming they are descendants of Adam, he is saying they are fully human and can be redeemed just like anyone else.
Long decades of trying to Anglicize people while simultaneously treating them as less than human, combined with rampant loss of needed resources to support their lifestyle, changed people. Native peoples that were not desperate in the 1630’s surely were by late in Roger Williams’s life. Like the dehydrated John Keenan they were unable to obtain assistance in any meaningful way. They were striking out in ways that seemed strange and inappropriate to Englishmen, and likely to prior generations of indigenous. Desperate times lead to desperate people. It is in that context Roger Williams’ succumbed to calling the people that burned houses and towns, barbarians. It would be a mistake to think of it as broader or more meaningful than that.
The book Decoding Roger Williams lets Roger Williams speak one last time through a manuscript only recently deciphered. The document shows many of his critics to have been fabricating lies about him but it also documents disappointing language where Williams joins many in his day referring to the indigenous people as barbarians. The later is a symptom of the larger tragedy unfolding.
My mathematics professor taught that some famous mathematicians made their most egregious errors right after the “it is clear that”. The word “barbarian” means “it is clear that this person is uncivilized. It seems to me that those that call another “barbarian” are the most likely to be barbarians themselves.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers
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It goes without saying, if you have a role to play in getting people out of trouble, just go do it. The minutes will be stretched to hours and you will not be able to move fast enough…and you will not be needing this note.
That is not most people much of the time. For most there are still three things they can do.
1. Fight. Channel aggression into something useful, or at least physical. My daughter was disturbed not only by the news from Paris this November 13 of 2015 but also from Lebanon, and by the relative attention to the first vs. the second. She ferociously cleaned for a time. I was proud of her. It is a start.
This strategy is in line with the British tradition of keeping a stiff upper lip and moving on with life. While it may not seem like it, in times of trouble, this is a form of giving fight, of not being subdued.
Prayer and meditation can be a category 1 activity.
2. Flight. Lose yourself in unrelated activity, at least until you think of something useful or physical to do. Warning: it has to be a really engaging or it will not work. For me, a challenging mountain bike ride does the trick. I understand for many others a comedy channel comes in handy. Maria’s advice in THE SOUND OF MUSIC “I simply remember my favorite things” works too.
3. Connect. Connection is a two-way thing, not a one-way thing. Little benefit comes from watc
hing or listening. Possibly you will collectively think of something in category 1 or 2 to do. That is a start.
Prayer can be a category 3 activity.
Tips include
1. Do something until you are exhausted. Something is better than nothing.
2. If exhausted, be ok with sleeping a lot. 
Sleep is in category 2. It can be a deeply engaging way of losing yourself for a time. Babies have sleeping down to an art form, expecially when adults are stressed. We are all babies somewhere inside.
3. Turn the media off. Most media is a one-way thing, and provides a high degree of interruption. It feels like connecting but it does not decrease stress. It feels like distraction but keeps letting us wander back to the trouble.
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Last November, the seminarian student originally from Romania called Lumi came and told us her story. If you have not heard Lumi, you can listen here:
She left us with an assignment—to figure out how to tell our own stories. Lumi is scheduled to return in April—what will she find? It is my hope she will find us preparing feverishly to tell our stories — first in church to edify each other, then outside. Toward that end I invite you to participate with me in a free online class called “Storytelling for Change”, available herehttps://novoed.com/storytelling-change . It will use about 3 hours of your week for 10 weeks. We are told in Revelations 12:11 that we will conquer evil not just by the blood of the lamb, but also by the word of our testimonies and being willing to tell our stories, and not to love our lives (aka our reputations) so much that we are afraid to give our testimony.
To quote Roger Williams:
Overcoming Evil
God’s people are all over-comers
When they fight with God’s weapons
In God’s cause and worship
In Revelations 2, 3 chapters
Seven times it is recorded
To him that overcommeth in Ephesus
To him that overcommeth in Sardis
And so on…
Revelations chapter 12
God’s servants overcame
The Dragon or the Devil in the Roman Emperors
By three weapons
The blood of the Lamb
The word of their testimony. And
The not loving of their lives unto death.
Reference: The Bloudy Tenant p. 190 Volume 3
For some the conversion or recovery of faith story makes an obvious testimony, for others not so much. Suggestions for where to look for your story include Bible verses you find difficult and the journey to understanding them. Also consider times where your fellow Christians have provided insights and assistance in your Christian walk.
For example, last week in Sunday School, I was sharing my uneasiness with Genesis 12-13:2 — that Abram is judged righteous and yet he got his livestock, silver, and gold in essence from selling his wife to sleep with Pharaoh. I was corrected — Rich O’Reilly has this way of knocking of you upside of the head in one sentence so cleverly you don’t realize it for a few hours…and he said something like: no the riches came later, when he asked her to go to Pharaoh it was to save his life. Which changed everything. For when I went to pray, it was 33 years ago and the truck was blasting Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” as my other half was sharing he’d need laser eye treatments for $600 a week to MAYBE save his sight—a sum higher than Mt. Everest to us then on our teaching assistant salaries. And the only way we found to do it was for me to take an engineering job I’d been offered on the East Coast—to sell-out the use of my brain to corporate America as I saw it then. And I did. And if you doubt the disgust level we felt, understand that in math each concept builds on the prior like a complex house of cards, and time away is like knocking house of cards from your brain structure. They said “If you don’t study it now you will never study it again” I can still hear my prof saying “ You will never again be pristine, you will have rotted your brain”.
I studied for engineering exams in waiting rooms of hospitals in New Brunswick and eventually at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore while waiting on his eye surgeries to complete. My company paid us more in medical benefits than they did in salary. When he was blind I learned leadership skills so that we could still backpack remotely alone. And when he died I felt I lost not just my spouse, but my reason for living on the east coast or anywhere, and my faith. The return to faith is another longer story. My point here is that out of that experience I was blessed—with skills, with resources from a career that lasted 33 years and enabled everything else I’ve ever done and what I’m about to do. And while that job has as of last year ended, God still calls on me to use those skills and resources toward his Kingdom, and for now that means telling stories.
As we used to say in cycling, sometimes it’s your turn to take a pothole for the team, so that the whole team does not go down. How can I look down on Abram or Sarai? We were both immensely blessed out of difficult challenges with murky practical solutions, and we both at points in the story feel completely inadequate to God’s call.
I invite you to join in submitting stories to the collection “We are All Overcomers” with your life experience and testimony.
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