To have a home, a real home, a safe home, a loving home, is there any sweeter thing?
Home is a place, but not the building. Home is the people, the laughter, the sadness, the exciting and the mundane.
At home you are best known and best cared for.
And yet for many many people in New Zealand don’t have a home. They have a place they call home, a roof over their heads. But it is not a home, certainly not in the sweetest sense of the word.
I flew to Christchurch yesterday morning for meetings, was scheduled to get home at 8:30pm last night. By lunch time our meetings were done, and Tere graciously dropped me at the airport and I caught the last direct afternoon flight.
I was home for dinner, home to chat with my kids. I was tired as it has been a very busy last 7 days. But I was home.
There is no sweeter thing.
168 | 365 – This is a shot of the Q300 as we turn onto finals over the Waikato River to land home in Hamilton.
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Jayden is showing me how he can be a risk taker, and tries to jump higher and higher.
No pads or nets on our tramp. Hurt yourself, take risks, learn.
I like this photo because of the way the sun fuses with the water to create bright spots that look like small liquid fireworks (without the risk of burning your house down).
Spent the last couple of days thinking about bright spots. Things that are working.
It’s been refreshing because by default I focus on dull spots, i.e. things that need fixing, rather than seeing the cool picture that bright spots create.
The goal in seeing bright spots, is to work out why they are bright spots, and then try and replicate it to dull spots. Hmm, a complex train of thought.
Basically looking at why things are working, rather than focusing on why things aren’t working.
I love the view out of my office window. I enjoy gazing off into the distance towards Mount Pirongia, which is 27km away to the southwest of the city. I am captivated by the movement of cars and trains journeying to their destinations at the bottom of the road.
When I’m on my mobile, I often get out of my seat and watch the world go by my office. I’ve been known to get caught leaning on the window ledge, just pondering, considering, thinking. Across our driveway is a café. I’m sure that people must look up from time to time and wonder what the weird guy is doing just looking out the window. “Get a real job” they probably think.
Yet a huge chunk of my job is thinking. And thinking can be really really hard. But without thought we carry on through life without change.
Without change nothing improves.
I got reminded that I need to think more yesterday. To ponder more.
So today will be a day of …
You’ve heard of beer goggles right. The experience of allowing alcohol to somewhat taint a persons normal scale of attractiveness for the opposite sex.
Well maybe we don’t actually need alcohol to taint our view of people.
Maybe we allow our picture, our framing story of a person’s life to form an inaccurate view of a person we barely know. A wrong view no less.
Last night we had dinner with some friends and in the course of the meal we were chatting about one of our friend’s parents. I was really surprised to learn some cool and funky things about the dad. I have known that person from a far and never would have pictured him in the context I was told about. I was pleasantly surprised.
I think I do that more often than I care to admit.
It was as though I was looking through an orange bottle at a person. My framing story was wrong. My view was tainted.
161 | 365 Yesterday I forgot to take my camera with me, so this is a shot from my phone.
10 years ago today a great challenge was before me. On one hand I was compelled to care for my wife in labour with our first child. On the other hand was my desire to watch Team New Zealand defend the America’s cup. Trust me, balancing the two, while at a hospital is very difficult.
Today that baby girl is 10 and she too is balancing. Only her balance is physical on an imitation Rip-stick. I tried it out tonight. Trust me, balancing on two wheels is very difficult, particularly for an old guy like me.
Yesterday I was speaking to a person who used the term “work-life balance”. It’s a fascinating term. Work-life balance almost implies that you work and then you have a life. Life is far more complex than just work or life. Sports, family, children, finances, churches, work, friends, exercise, relaxing, entertainment, hobbies and the list goes on.
For me there is a continual struggle to balance all of the facets of life. Not just work and everything else. Maybe, we have the wrong term. What if instead of teaching people to have work-life balance, maybe we need to teach people to have “whole-life balance”.
Whole life balance I suspect is harder than balancing a wife in labour and the Americas cup, or an old guy riding a rip-stick.
Whole life balance. Provocative?
You know that experience you have when you first turn the light off and everything goes pitch black. Then slowly, over a period of time, your eyes adjust. This process is called night adaptation. It takes roughly 8 mins to half adapt to darkness and around 30 mins to get full night adaption.
Once our eyes are adjusted. We can walk around with very little light as though it was daylight. We get used to walking around in the dark, and the night feels very bright.
Suddenly someone flashes a bright white light towards our eyes for less than a second. In that second our night adaptation is destroy completely and it will take a further 30 mins to completely restore it. We start fumbling around in the darkness again, wishing it were really daylight.
I took this photo yesterday morning. The bright light is not the sun, it is a street lamp that illuminates small exposed patches in its vicinity, while still casting deep shadows into the darkness. Dawn is breaking in the background. Daylight is coming.
Here’s the point. How bright a light will I be to the people around me? Will I be a bright white light that has significant radical impact? Or will I be like the streetlight, an artificial light that illuminates small patches while leaving deep shadows?
I’ve been thinking lately about how we are all creative. Every single one of us, in some way enjoys creating. Its as if we were created to create. And yet we are all creative in very different ways.
Some people create through art and paintings. Some people create through music and dance. And then other people create through welding or building or software or written words or stories or laughter or process or clothing or teaching or parenting. Why you can even have creative accountants.
And then once we have created. We look at what we created and say “it is good”, and our creation helps create us.
Today’s photo is a part of the Birthday cake, Karina, my very creative wife made for Kyla’s tenth birthday. It is the zero of the ten, and is a banana cake with icing edges and a slightly hollowed centre with blue jelly on top.
Very creative.
One of the hardest parts of being a parent is watching from a distance as your children develop friendships. We know that true friendship can craft our children, develop and enhance them. But we also know the wrong friends could have a long-term negative influence on them.
We would like to determine who our kids are friends with, but we know that they must learn those lessons themselves.
So we watch and coach. We listen as they describe hurts and share their joy as they discover true friends.
This is a picture of some of Kyla’s friends. We headed to Rotorua, for gondola and luge rides to celebrate her upcoming 10th birthday. Kyla and her friends were incredibly well behaved, had heaps of fun and enjoyed the day.
I am proud of Kyla. I am proud of the friends she is choosing. I am proud of how she connected with each of them yesterday.
So far so good. Long may it continue as we head towards her teenage years.
“So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadow boxing. I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what I should.” – Today I ran 5 km’s. It’s been a while and it was hard work. I had to keep setting small targets. I’ll run to this corner, and then I’ll run to these shops. All the while I had the end goal of completing the run in mind.
As I was running I was thinking about how hard work life can be. Paul talked metaphorically about running with purpose in every step. Sometimes the goals we are called to, seem so unattainable and so distant.
It is easier to give up.
To stop running.
It reminds me that I have to set small obtainable targets and run with purpose to each one. Then move to the next target with purpose.
This is how improvement comes, how perseverance comes.
Then we complete.
We finish.
We win!