OffOfMadison

Tag: blog

  • Alioth & The Journal

    Oof it’s been a while since I’ve been here. I’d say I’m sorry and express some shame, but the reason I won’t do either is a large part of the ‘why’ behind my absence.

    First: you bet I’m still working on the novel, though I’m doing so at a much slower rate than I had wanted to admit out loud. Most of the time that’s on me, but some of the time it just is how it currently is, y’know?

    Second: the virtual school I work at has spun up the last month or so and we have some new leadership, so things have been more, uh, hectic than expected. New boss seems alright, to be honest, though I’m having trouble shaking some of the adjacent toxicity. Was that vague enough? Gosh, I hope so.

    Third: I’ve been on a bit of a journey. My wife and I started a 75 Hard program that has some pretty strict exercise and diet rules and we just cleared Day 50 of it. This program has also had be focusing inwards, devoting slices of time to self-help/improvement books (currently reading through Dialed In and The Five Marks of a Man) Before those two, I was reading No More Mr. Nice Guy. Like most non-fiction books, they have shining moments and dull.

    Fourth: I’ve also just completed my first month of seeing a therapist to help me with some of my anger issues. Let me tell you: WOW does that kind of thing make a difference. And, not to brag, but I feel like I have an unfair advantage as I have an amazingly supportive wife who takes any progress I make and somehow accelerates it even more. You rock my socks, CLM.

    Ok…so with that off my chest, the reason I’m not apologetic or ashamed isn’t because I have a good excuse; it’s because I’m not sorry and I’m not ashamed!

    That might not seem like a big deal to you (and sorry for presuming here), but to me?

    HUGE.

    I have a notorious habit of not letting myself off of the hook for anything. I would apologize profusely for things that weren’t only not my fault, but not even something I had direct control over. And my sense of shame? Have you seen the series Loki by any chance? Alioth from season one best embodies the amount of power and sheer space it took up in me.

    One of the variants of Loki even describes Alioth in way that also describes my sense of shame:

    It’s a living tempest that consumes matter and energy.

    Luckily, I have an amazing support system in my wife and a well plotted map forward from my therapist, so I’m finding myself with a lot more energy and drive to show up in real life and in real time. I’ve started journaling also, which has helped me in ways I never understood I needed to be helped. It’s like, if you have ever heard the phrase “the cutting room floor”, you might know how journaling has been for me

    Put simply: the cutting room floor used to be a room where film would be edited frame by frame, organized and spread out on a large expanse of floor. This allowed the director to ‘zoom out’ and see it all in order to decide what to keep and what to, well…cut. This zooming out is what journaling seems to be doing for me

    Zooming back in to this blog, I’ve been gone for a good reason (not that I feel like I have to have a reason) and now I hope to be back more regularly. I hope you’ll join me.

    Best,
    Bryce

  • The Season of Intention

    My adult life has gone through several, let’s say…seasons. I’ll skip the perfunctory (college, first job, promotions, etc) and try to find my way to a more profound season that I’ve recently alighted on: the season of intention.

    Now, that’s not to say that those other seasons aren’t a big part on how I arrived where I currently am…as they totally are. It’s just that, in thinking about this blog post today, I found that a lot of my more “generic” seasons of life amounted to a lot of similarly generic adecdotes.

    Were they important enough to talk about?

    Absolutely.

    So will you, then, talk about them?

    Actually, no.

    Trust me and let’s skip over the bulk of what got me here. Let’s write/read this blog with intention. And, in doing that, let’s be cool with the fact that we will be intentionally skipping over many events to arrive in the here and now. I’ll even say I’m doing it in the name of economy and saving all that for another day’s blog (and that’s not entirely untrue).

    Yes, well…fine.

    First, some context. My family is everything to me. This includes my wife Carla, our two dogs Penny and Han Solo, and our cats (which I shall not name here in hopes of not being judged for the amount of cats we may or may not have). I love them all dearly, but Carla is my everything. She is easily the most impactful person in my life. The reason that I’m the person I am today who can sit here writing this blog to you and have the audacity to attempt to write a book? My CLM.

    I tend to gush, but this is related…I promise.

    Carla and my’s relationship has taught me so much about how important it is to be intentional in the things that you do. When I say this, I mean everything from how one spends their free time to how one plans their daily, weekly, etc. life. I was sleepwalking through life when I met Carla. I had no intention in anything that I was doing and largely never had. My life was the result of tacitly developing the habit of never living with intention. I never meant to do this, but I just kind of defaulted into it. Time would just elapse. Things did or didn’t happen. Shoulders shrugged. And though I couldn’t see it then, I can see it clear as day from here: I was standing still.

    Zip ahead a bit and I meet Carla while I’m teaching a high school band camp. Her younger brother was marching baritone that year and she had graduated the year prior. Her best friend at the time was one of the snare drums in the drumline I was helping to teach. This will be at least another post (probably several), but suffice to say: love at first sight. We eventually began to date, moved in together, got engaged, and have been married nearly sixteen years.

    In the past few years especially, some big changes have happened in our lives. I had a pretty serious surgery, we left our long time jobs in the local county school system, and we went virtual and started to exclusively work from home. All of these (except the surgery, of course) were pretty great things and helped to improve our quality of life.

    Well, ok…maybe the surgery did that, too. Another post for another day!

    So, with this new work from home life, we found that there was a lot of extra time. No leaving the house to work meant no commuting. This alone gave us back so much more of our lives. And, while was a complete blessing to us then and is still to us now, if helped me see something more clearly:

    I was not living intentionally.

    Instead, I was ever waiting on things to happen. I was missing out on big opportunities to grow closer to my wife and be a happier and more fulfilled person…and for what?

    Side note: one good thing I learned from my vengeful percussion professor from college…

    “Don’t be a habit rabbit.”

    Alas…I had become the thing I was taught to fear: a habit rabbit. My actions lacked initiative and purpose, instead being reactive or consequential at best. This started to really show in our new season of life and amidst it’s prominence of time, the one thing we had lacked so much of in previous seasons.

    Before? We never had any time. I mean, I’m sure we did here and there, but largely…we were always busy. Here’s an example: when we were in college, we’d commute an hour one way daily and then commute an hour back to then work at and close the local McDonald’s. We did this for years. When we graduated and got jobs, I was immediately a band director and in the throes of all the extra-curricular tasks that came with it (pep band, concerts, marching band, etc).

    Now though: time is on our side. And, I’m making the choice to live intentionally. It’s still easy to fall into that ‘habit rabbit’ role and I’m working on it daily. To my wife: I’m sorry it took me so long to see and thank you so much for being infinitely patient with me.

    So…live intentionally. Take initiative and be accountable. It sounds kid of lame, but I promise it actually rocks.

    Intentionally,
    Bryce