Sometimes life just sucks and there is nothing, nada, nope you can do about it except pull the covers over your head and see how many fartsacks you can string together. If you are really brazen you might even proudly post a 6 pack of them on the fartsack channel. “Frisco: Late Night Netflix Binge, Followed Every Single Clickbait that Looked Remotely Interesting Until I Passed Out on the Sofa, Read the Muggo Trying to Get to Sleep and Actually Found Something Interesting…” and all other sorts of fartsack AOs.
That was my Week 1, I gorged myself on everything I wanted to do but never seem to have time for. By Week 2, that got old, everything got old, I was bloated with me, me, me, my patience got thin. Add lack of regular social interaction and no exercise to self imposed isolation and Sad Clownism rushed back in like it had never left. My shield lock brother Crimson posted how angry he was at himself for quickly falling back into bad SC habits. His words were echoes of some fears I had been having: What if I can’t do it alone? Did the better version of myself only exist because of some kind of weird peer pressure?
The good part about isolation is that you finally have that much wished for, rarely found time to “slow down and take stock”…which turns out can really suck, too. Humans specialize in selective observation. We can shove just about anything into a corner or a box in our mind. There is an old saying: Thank you for burning down my house so that I can better see the moon. Sometimes life burns down our house and suddenly there are all the boxes and dusty corners brilliantly illuminated.
We all know a guy who retired only to find in less than a year he had gorged himself on the distractions and hobbies he had been “missing out on” and now is lost. We know that guy who finally emptied the nest, turned and looked at his spouse and wondered: “Who is this person?” We know that guy who spent so much time being a father he forgot to be a dad and now he is seeing the fallout.
But those guys are cautionary tales for us, nothing more. Let’s be honest. We do more before sunrise than a lot of guys do all day, all week even! We workout. We make our bodies and minds and hearts stronger. We are HIMs. We are leaders in our homes, jobs and lives. We focus on our Ms. We focus on our 2.xs. We keep Carpex weird. Not to pat ourselves on the back but, I mean, come on…
Ever woke up to find your arm is asleep because you slept on it? Or have a minor injury that impacts one tiny little itsy-bitsy thing? Ever have something like that and find it a struggle to even do basic things like sit up, get out of bed, or feed yourself? A lot of us woke up the first week of the isolation and found our right arm had been cut off. We found it did not take long before we were not the men we were used to being. Some of us wondered if we ever really were.
F3 is an arm we never knew we were missing until we found it. An arm we keenly feel the loss of now. Eventually we stopped noticing we had it. Just part of the body. How we get up every morning. How we go to bed on time. How we are who we are. Until we weren’t who we were…
You can get mad and kick yourself for falling down. Get despondent and toss in the towel until you can get back into the gloom. Or you can accept that you have an early pass at what other men only get to see in the rear view mirror, usually after it’s too late to do anything about it. Our right arms are cut off, but we are still the men who used them to stand up. We are still those HIMs who reach out those right arms to help another man to his feet. We are no better than anyone else. We just know there is an “up” to get up to and that it can be done. We know there ARE right arms to be had out there in the gloom.
But now we get a chance to look around and see what we have really done with that right arm. Not for ourselves, not for our brothers, but in our life and with the people we care about, the ones who get to stand closer than six feet to us right now.
The best gifts rarely come in nice packages. They hurt, they force you to look at something differently, they cost some extreme ownership. They may not even seem like gifts.
They are.
Don’t wait until you are looking at them in the rear view mirror.
CUITG