The Values Sort

What’s intelligence to you, and are you intelligent? We’ve already established that my education is spotty. I missed a lot of stuff people usually do in high school. Or even middle school. I’ve never read War and Peace. That’s middle school, right? We established that I can’t do calculus. Give me a trigonometric break. I never learned a stitch of history. Everything I know about anything that happened before about 1990 is a result of me digging around and figuring s**t out. I was forty years old when I finally read The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As a side note, what a gift! To be forty years old and grabbing hold of that piece of literature for the first time! Sinking my teeth into something as tasty as Tolkien as an adult, without any of the pesky distractions or misunderstandings of deep-youth. I didn’t read it when my mom told me to. I savored it thirty years later.

As a side note to the side note, I feel the same way about Rage Against The Machine. I discovered “Killing In The Name”, like, within the last six months or something. I’d heard the tune maybe? I’d heard of the band. But I was a good youth-group boy, and I wouldn’t have been able to get around the language element. And now it’s just such a morsel. Such a treat.

I am intelligent. I am convinced of that now. My back-lot GED had impressed upon me that I was less than functionally intelligent for a long time, if you can believe that. It’s the false equivalency of intelligence and education. I had to grow up and realize that the world was full of people with masters degrees who struggled in various emotional or intellectual pursuits that came more naturally to me.

My dad used to tell me “Nicholas, the world is completely full of idiots”. Which is kind of a shitty thing to say. I resisted it into my adulthood, and I still wouldn’t probably classify things that way. But I understand what he was trying to say. The world is full of people giving things half-effort. Full of people for whom “this” is just good enough. No further thought, no further analysis necessary. No need to continue thinking things through.

And I wonder if not starting off with firm footing in this area has prepared me to keep discovering. Keep thinking things through. I got street smarts. Or, rather, I got farm smarts.

And I guess I do value that quite a lot. I value my ability to think things through, to arrive at unique answers and solutions based on my lived experiences. That’s intelligence to me. It can’t be trivia. It can’t be arithmetic. It can’t even be knowledge.

It’s just about got to be about processing information and using that information to identify my values, which illuminate my beliefs, which inform my vision and mission in life, which, when applied and thoughtfully observed can shed light on my goals, which in turn can help me decide on and commit to my tasks which will inform my time management. It’s a line, see? It’s like a waterfall, with our lived experiences eventually informing our nuts-&-bolts actions and thoughts and activities in life.

Or like a tree, with lived experiences being represented by sun rays or rain drops. We can’t control them! We can’t even understand them, those rascally lived experiences.

They just happen to us. And our roots (our Values), informed by the mycorrhizae of our community, take up those nutrients to feed our Trunk (our Beliefs). Our Vision and Mission branch out from there... It all feeds into our goals, our tasks, our time management—the fruit that feeds the people around us. I haven’t thought this all the way through. Probably there’s some way to shoehorn photosynthesis into this metaphorical tree? I’m still workshopping this.

What about you? How do you define intelligence? Are we intelligent? Are we intellectually lazy? Are we thoughtful? Are we interested? Interesting? What lived experiences have informed your values setting process?

I am an influential person. I know this to be true. It’s been this way all of my life. It’s something I’ve learned to try to temper and make healthy for the people I love. The people who haunt my spaces.

We can influence people or events in ways that are profoundly positive or positively awful—the choice is ours.

The question here, for this application, is whether I value that influence. Whether you value influence.

Because we are all influential people. We are like a great painting, all of our colors and hues and pigments touch and work in combination to create the larger whole. We’re all influenced by one another, and while that carries the potential of abuse or mistreatment of the other, it’s also an honor to be in relationship like that, right?

Let’s talk about influencers. It’s 2025 and we are surrounded on all sides by people demanding we be influenced by them. And I suppose we are. Perhaps not directly in all cases—I am beholden to very few members of the zeitgeist of TikTok and Instagram and... I don’t know? Discord servers, probably? Snaps.

Every day we are aggressively advertised to on a nearly minute-by-minute basis, right? It’s everywhere. It’s the water we’re swimming in, to the point that my kids don’t probably recognize it for what it is.

I recall being advertised at on Saturday mornings during cartoon shows. Commercials were more ubiquitous back then. Advertisers, (corporate influencers), could only afford to show the world one thing at a time, it was out there, it was public. Yo Quiero Taco Bell. We all yo quiero-ed the Taco Bell at the same time. We all saw the same Wheaties commercial. We all saw the same “Where’s the Beef” ad, at the same time, on the same channel.

Now everything is so ugly and crafted. So tailored specifically for us, for our own individual preferences and proclivities. It’s maddening for those a******s to be so right about what I’d be interested in so often. I am repelled by my own susceptibility to these messages honed in corporate boardrooms in order to extract an additional dollar from me.

My children are less impacted by influencers than average because I closely gate-keep their involvement with social media, a sickly, filthy, untamed underbelly of society indeed. But I’m not foolish enough to think they’re uninfluenced. My middle child is watching a minecraft video on Youtube as I write this. In contrast to the TV commercials of my youth, my son’s experience is largely private, secret, quiet.

I am more than just a little bit concerned that this channel will funnel him into some kind of freakish white nationalistic hellscape from which there may be no easy return. Such is the nature of raising kids today. This is the hellscape. Walk ye in it.

When influence is peddled it is filthy. When influence is informed by greed or avarice. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived through it. It’s gross.

When it just is, when it just occurs naturally between lovers or friends, it can be beautiful. Why, I attempt to influence my own kids every day. I attempt to influence my customers and my friends toward kindness and empathy and love and affection for fellow humans.

We must be mindful of the ways advertisers would pretend to be friends or advocates. We must be mindful of the way(s) that influencers are coming for us. Coming for our children. The ways they will influence a fool from his money. And more than money, from his time, his treasure, his goodwill toward others.

How are you influenced? And how do you influence others? Will you bludgeon others with extractive influence, designed to protect yours alone? Or will your influence be remembered after your name is forgotten?

I am an influential person. I know this to be true. It’s been this way all of my life. It’s something I’ve learned to try to temper and make healthy for the people I love. The people who haunt my spaces.

We can influence people or events in ways that are profoundly positive or positively awful—the choice is ours.

The question here, for this application, is whether I value that influence. Whether you value influence.

Because we are all influential people. We are like a great painting, all of our colors and hues and pigments touch and work in combination to create the larger whole. We’re all influenced by one another, and while that carries the potential of abuse or mistreatment of the other, it’s also an honor to be in relationship like that, right?

Let’s talk about influencers. It’s 2025 and we are surrounded on all sides by people demanding we be influenced by them. And I suppose we are. Perhaps not directly in all cases—I am beholden to very few members of the zeitgeist of TikTok and Instagram and... I don’t know? Discord servers, probably? Snaps.

Every day we are aggressively advertised to on a nearly minute-by-minute basis, right? It’s everywhere. It’s the water we’re swimming in, to the point that my kids don’t probably recognize it for what it is.

I recall being advertised at on Saturday mornings during cartoon shows. Commercials were more ubiquitous back then. Advertisers, (corporate influencers), could only afford to show the world one thing at a time, it was out there, it was public. Yo Quiero Taco Bell. We all yo quiero-ed the Taco Bell at the same time. We all saw the same Wheaties commercial. We all saw the same “Where’s the Beef” ad, at the same time, on the same channel.

Now everything is so ugly and crafted. So tailored specifically for us, for our own individual preferences and proclivities. It’s maddening for those a******s to be so right about what I’d be interested in so often. I am repelled by my own susceptibility to these messages honed in corporate boardrooms in order to extract an additional dollar from me.

My children are less impacted by influencers than average because I closely gate-keep their involvement with social media, a sickly, filthy, untamed underbelly of society indeed. But I’m not foolish enough to think they’re uninfluenced. My middle child is watching a minecraft video on Youtube as I write this. In contrast to the TV commercials of my youth, my son’s experience is largely private, secret, quiet.

I am more than just a little bit concerned that this channel will funnel him into some kind of freakish white nationalistic hellscape from which there may be no easy return. Such is the nature of raising kids today. This is the hellscape. Walk ye in it.

When influence is peddled it is filthy. When influence is informed by greed or avarice. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived through it. It’s gross.

When it just is, when it just occurs naturally between lovers or friends, it can be beautiful. Why, I attempt to influence my own kids every day. I attempt to influence my customers and my friends toward kindness and empathy and love and affection for fellow humans.

We must be mindful of the ways advertisers would pretend to be friends or advocates. We must be mindful of the way(s) that influencers are coming for us. Coming for our children. The ways they will influence a fool from his money. And more than money, from his time, his treasure, his goodwill toward others.

How are you influenced? And how do you influence others? Will you bludgeon others with extractive influence, designed to protect yours alone? Or will your influence be remembered after your name is forgotten?

Ambition. Are you ambitious? It feels like a loaded question. If the last card asked if we are Capable, this card asks where we are going with it.

I definitely have a “dirty word” connotation associated with “Ambition”. Vain ambition.

I grew up in church. In that context, ambition was often treated as a dirty word—a code for greed, vanity, or arrogance. To be ambitious was to be suspicious. Ambition is kind of a coded way of talking about greed or arrogance. For me to show ambition would come at the cost of others’.

But hard working & aspiring. Those are concepts I could traditionally get behind. I would like to be seen as very hard working. As being successful & capable.

And aspiring. Aspiring to what, I guess? Aspiring to humility? Aspiring to greatness? Aspiring to fame or fortune?

Maybe you’re highly ambitious. Maybe I’m highly ambitious. I play myself off as a simple country boy. But I have accomplished many things. I am more than I was. I am greater than how I started. I am kinder, I am wiser. I am more attuned to my values and more interested in others’. I care very much about the people around me.

And those are learned, accomplished things. I suppose they have required a certain ambition to ideate something new, some new way, some new method, and follow a path toward it.

Ambition can be like a fire, I think. Ambition can warm the home or burn it down. Ambition probably can be really evil and ugly when it’s unkempt and exercised at the expense of the people around you. But it can also be the home-fire burning, warming the hearth and the home built around it. It can be what gets us up out of bed in the morning, gets us out into the day when it’s raining. But we must mind our sense of ambition lest it consume us.

What if we were ambitious about each other? About our values. About the things we value. I guess I’d like that to be my story. Ambition viewed through the lens of kindness, one of my own core values. In all we do, perhaps we can be ambitious and unapologetic advocates for the poor, the weak, the marginalized. What if we tempered our value for ambition with a value for others. Not at our expense but as our privilege. We can build a big hearth, we can build a big fire. We can warm the people around us with kindness and a newness and freshness of ambition that puts others first.

Hinging on my last post, Success, Capability is an interesting thing to come next in the deck.

I have done many things in my life. I grew up on a farm where we didn’t make very much money, (Wealth). This engendered a sense of frugality and an attitude that makes it work. Finds a way forward. That’s what my parents did. They found a way forward in spite of not being massively resourced. We drove old pickup trucks. We rode five wide. We didn’t have air conditioning. We swam in creeks. We did odd jobs. We chored long and hard. I can build a square box out of plywood. I know how to properly use a Japanese pull saw. I can ugly-weld. I can drive anything on wheels or tracks with just a little bit of practice in a gravel lot.

I can feed calves, I can milk cows. I can kill chickens by the dozen, though I don’t like doing it. I can shovel silage and clean stalls and I can bring lambs in from the field without getting the s**t kicked out of me by a protective ewe. I can work hard, long, wet. I know enough to know I intend never to own pigs.

I can bake a pie. I can bake bread. I have the best biscuit recipe, handed down from my grandmother, and who knows who she got it from. I can change spark plugs and I still know what points and a condenser are. I have many woodworking clamps and I’m not afraid to use them.

When I was fifteen I went to work for a landscaper in the summer and when I wasn’t in school. When I was sixteen I got my GED from a trailer behind Harrisburg High School. When I was seventeen I failed all of my classes at community college. When I was eighteen I worked the parts counter at a tractor dealership. When I was 19 I worked in construction as a grunt-laborer.

When I was 20 I joined a cohort at the local Community College studying Natural Resource Management, (Forestry). I discovered that I loved plants, native trees and shrubs, I loved ecology and dendrology. I didn’t care for mensuration. And forestry involves a lot of mensuration.

There are two types of people in this life. One type is my beautiful cousin, who completed a course of study in Forestry at Oregon State University and enjoyed quiet, alone times in his pickup truck cruising timber.

The other type is me—I panicked when I learned about all the damned mensuration and I quit. As a side note, I wish someone had grabbed me and shown me some of the ways a guy with big feelings and big love for people could benefit an industry that is favored by people who want long stretches of quiet time in their pickup trucks cruising timber. But I digress.

When I was 22 I was back into construction. This time commercial jobs. I worked with commercial customers who had varying levels of hand-holding and need, for companies like Nike, Nordstrom and Safeway.

When I was 23 I lived on a futon mattress in Portland. Just the mattress. All of my worldly possessions fit in and around a 1986 Jeep Cherokee. I slept on the aforementioned futon mattress in a friend’s utility room and each morning I’d fold the backpack I was living out of into a “Belongings Taco” to try and keep their kids out of my stuff for the day while I was out.

When I was 24 I fell in love with my partner. When I was 25 we got married. When I was 26 I had a daughter.

A mentor who turned out to not be a great mentor told me “Swinging a hammer is the best way for a guy with no education to make $25 an hour and support his family”. And so I did. I got my own license, bond and insurance and started doing work for myself.

When I was 27 the bottom dropped out of the construction industry, (the recession of 2008), and I opened a coffee shop with some friends. I worked behind the bar every day. I honed the skill, (and it is a skill), of loving and caring for my neighbors.

When I was 28 I bought a coffee roasting company. And it’s pretty much been one series of learning experiences after another since then. I won’t make you go through my entire life.

I have bought and sold three homes. I have cut and split many cords of wood in my life, and I even made a very fetching firewood wall at one point that my wife was awfully fond of.

I can build cabinets. I can build computers. I can build websites. I can build relationships.

I am capable. My resume reads in full color. But it often feels like the world I’m living in values black and white, precision, perfection, specialization.

Why, when I look at this card, do I feel like a fraud?

I hate mensuration. I have trouble staying organized and that’s been difficult for the people I love. I live comparatively and see only the downsides of my personality and my very essence. I can weld, but as I said, it’s ugly. I cannot get my choux pastry to rise properly—God knows I’ve tried. I’ve been so mad at flat pâte à choux.

I’ve cried over choux.

Why do I procrastinate? Why do I sometimes spin my wheels in the mud and not find traction? I’ve burned so much fuel trying to be something or someone I’m not. Someone who “has his s**t together”. Someone who can be trusted to remember that we set a meeting for 10am Tuesday…

I am a generalist. I am a perfectly capable person. So why do I beat myself up for not being a specialist? I am someone who knows a little about a lot. And the grass is always greener. I allow myself to only want to know a LOT.

The world needs specialists. The world needs people who understand renal function and reptiles. The world needs people who have choux figured out. But when the toilet backs up at midnight or the car breaks down while your bank account is nearly empty you need a generalist.

I tried community college. Twice. I got my GED and couldn’t lay hands on proof if you begged me. And that makes me feel like a fraud. Perhaps laying it all out like this in writing will be a cathartic, healing exercise. I am grown now. I am not old, I am not young. I am properly middle aged, though I love that sixty is the new forty. I look forward to many years of middle aged.

But the education thing has haunted me. Do not ask me to solve an algebra. The best I can do is spell calculus, and even then I’m looking for the little red squiggly line underneath to let me know I misspelled it. (I spelled calculus correctly. I spelled squiggly wrong).

I have realized that I equate capability with mastery & that’s not fair or a realistic way to go through life. Not for me. Maybe not for anyone.

This card, this concept, it’s not about being perfect or being fully-excellent. It’s about being able to lock horns with life, be real, make do, reinvent, re-frame, reexamine, provide the things my family and friends need from me. And ultimately, not about being perfect and satisfactory to all people, all the time.

Tell me about you! Do you value capability in your life? Do you value all of the ways you say “yes” to life and “yes” to the hard things, come what may, in order to be there for your people? Are you measuring capability by what you know already, or by your willingness to get your hands dirty and muddle it all out?

Hinging on my last post, Success, Capability is an interesting thing to come next in the deck.

I have done many things in my life. I grew up on a farm where we didn’t make very much money, (Wealth). This engendered a sense of frugality and an attitude that makes it work. Finds a way forward. That’s what my parents did. They found a way forward in spite of not being massively resourced. We drove old pickup trucks. We rode five wide. We didn’t have air conditioning. We swam in creeks. We did odd jobs. We chored long and hard. I can build a square box out of plywood. I know how to properly use a Japanese pull saw. I can ugly-weld. I can drive anything on wheels or tracks with just a little bit of practice in a gravel lot.

I can feed calves, I can milk cows. I can kill chickens by the dozen, though I don’t like doing it. I can shovel silage and clean stalls and I can bring lambs in from the field without getting the s**t kicked out of me by a protective ewe. I can work hard, long, wet. I know enough to know I intend never to own pigs.

I can bake a pie. I can bake bread. I have the best biscuit recipe, handed down from my grandmother, and who knows who she got it from. I can change spark plugs and I still know what points and a condenser are. I have many woodworking clamps and I’m not afraid to use them.

When I was fifteen I went to work for a landscaper in the summer and when I wasn’t in school. When I was sixteen I got my GED from a trailer behind Harrisburg High School. When I was seventeen I failed all of my classes at community college. When I was eighteen I worked the parts counter at a tractor dealership. When I was 19 I worked in construction as a grunt-laborer.

When I was 20 I joined a cohort at the local Community College studying Natural Resource Management, (Forestry). I discovered that I loved plants, native trees and shrubs, I loved ecology and dendrology. I didn’t care for mensuration. And forestry involves a lot of mensuration.

There are two types of people in this life. One type is my beautiful cousin, who completed a course of study in Forestry at Oregon State University and enjoyed quiet, alone times in his pickup truck cruising timber.

The other type is me—I panicked when I learned about all the damned mensuration and I quit. As a side note, I wish someone had grabbed me and shown me some of the ways a guy with big feelings and big love for people could benefit an industry that is favored by people who want long stretches of quiet time in their pickup trucks cruising timber. But I digress.

When I was 22 I was back into construction. This time commercial jobs. I worked with commercial customers who had varying levels of hand-holding and need, for companies like Nike, Nordstrom and Safeway.

When I was 23 I lived on a futon mattress in Portland. Just the mattress. All of my worldly possessions fit in and around a 1986 Jeep Cherokee. I slept on the aforementioned futon mattress in a friend’s utility room and each morning I’d fold the backpack I was living out of into a “Belongings Taco” to try and keep their kids out of my stuff for the day while I was out.

When I was 24 I fell in love with my partner. When I was 25 we got married. When I was 26 I had a daughter.

A mentor who turned out to not be a great mentor told me “Swinging a hammer is the best way for a guy with no education to make $25 an hour and support his family”. And so I did. I got my own license, bond and insurance and started doing work for myself.

When I was 27 the bottom dropped out of the construction industry, (the recession of 2008), and I opened a coffee shop with some friends. I worked behind the bar every day. I honed the skill, (and it is a skill), of loving and caring for my neighbors.

When I was 28 I bought a coffee roasting company. And it’s pretty much been one series of learning experiences after another since then. I won’t make you go through my entire life.

I have bought and sold three homes. I have cut and split many cords of wood in my life, and I even made a very fetching firewood wall at one point that my wife was awfully fond of.

I can build cabinets. I can build computers. I can build websites. I can build relationships.

I am capable. My resume reads in full color. But it often feels like the world I’m living in values black and white, precision, perfection, specialization.

Why, when I look at this card, do I feel like a fraud?

I hate mensuration. I have trouble staying organized and that’s been difficult for the people I love. I live comparatively and see only the downsides of my personality and my very essence. I can weld, but as I said, it’s ugly. I cannot get my choux pastry to rise properly—God knows I’ve tried. I’ve been so mad at flat pâte à choux.

I’ve cried over choux.

Why do I procrastinate? Why do I sometimes spin my wheels in the mud and not find traction? I’ve burned so much fuel trying to be something or someone I’m not. Someone who “has his s**t together”. Someone who can be trusted to remember that we set a meeting for 10am Tuesday…

I am a generalist. I am a perfectly capable person. So why do I beat myself up for not being a specialist? I am someone who knows a little about a lot. And the grass is always greener. I allow myself to only want to know a LOT.

The world needs specialists. The world needs people who understand renal function and reptiles. The world needs people who have choux figured out. But when the toilet backs up at midnight or the car breaks down while your bank account is nearly empty you need a generalist.

I tried community college. Twice. I got my GED and couldn’t lay hands on proof if you begged me. And that makes me feel like a fraud. Perhaps laying it all out like this in writing will be a cathartic, healing exercise. I am grown now. I am not old, I am not young. I am properly middle aged, though I love that sixty is the new forty. I look forward to many years of middle aged.

But the education thing has haunted me. Do not ask me to solve an algebra. The best I can do is spell calculus, and even then I’m looking for the little red squiggly line underneath to let me know I misspelled it. (I spelled calculus correctly. I spelled squiggly wrong).

I have realized that I equate capability with mastery & that’s not fair or a realistic way to go through life. Not for me. Maybe not for anyone.

This card, this concept, it’s not about being perfect or being fully-excellent. It’s about being able to lock horns with life, be real, make do, reinvent, re-frame, reexamine, provide the things my family and friends need from me. And ultimately, not about being perfect and satisfactory to all people, all the time.

Tell me about you! Do you value capability in your life? Do you value all of the ways you say “yes” to life and “yes” to the hard things, come what may, in order to be there for your people? Are you measuring capability by what you know already, or by your willingness to get your hands dirty and muddle it all out?

Success.

What a word. It’s loaded, right? What’s it mean to you? What’s it mean to us? As a society, a culture, a group. A family?

I sometimes feel like a successful person, and sometimes I feel like success is far away and out of reach.

I am a 20 year entrepreneur. I have worked in commercial construction, residential construction and eventually in coffee roasting for the bulk of my adult life. I’ve owned my coffee company for more than fifteen years. In that time I’ve paid my mortgage, and paid my bills. All of them. Along with my life and business partner I’ve been responsible for countless thousands of dollars in payroll, years of space rent. I’ve overseen rebranding efforts and new product launches and I’ve overcome adversity.

I’ve very nearly raised three whole children. One of them claims to be an adult as I write this. It’s a grey area. In truth they are stretching their wings and beginning to dabble in adulthood, and again, alongside my life and business partner, I’ve created a space where they are ultimately safe to do that stretching.

My youngest child, for my birthday, wrote me a letter that made me weep in which they let me know that I would never be alone. They would never leave me. May it be so.

My middle child is fifteen years old, is strong and self aware and knows that I’m a safe place for a snuggle when they’ve had a hard day or a difficult experience.

I am beloved by my five wonderful nieces. I am cared for by my parents. I am interdependent on my brother. I would not do well if he disappeared and he has consistently not disappeared for all of these years.

I’m in therapy. I’ve known complex, personally challenging times and I’ve known vibrant times full of optimism and belief for a good future. I have tools to face my life. I’m able to re-frame my condition and wear confidence like a cloak.

What’s success? Is this it? I think this is enough for me to feel successful.

In unhealthy moments I live comparatively against others. Well I’m not _____…. At least I don’t _______. And while I think that’s ultimately a pretty unhelpful metric with which to measure the merit of your existence, it can sometimes feel necessary to place yourself within a properly framed reality.

So am I successful? I suppose I am.

More importantly for this conversation, do I value success? And that ultimately does come down to definitions I think.

What does it mean to you? Is success in the eye of the beholder, I wonder? Outwardly I do appear at least marginally successful. It’s because of all of the good things in my life. I have a farm. I have chickens and two very good dogs. I have a 20 year marriage to which I’m still committed and with which I’m well satisfied.

Sometimes, though. Sometimes I don’t FEEL successful. And it’s because I know where the bodies are buried, right? I know which windows are left unlocked at night. I know the ways in which I’ve left the door open to things that I consider unsuccessful. I know I have a temper that I allow my closest relationships to be damaged by. I know the ways in which my business is faltering or isn’t as “good” as it could be.

And when you’re a dad, a partner, a boss, those little foxes in the vineyard have real effects on real people. That’s probably where a good bit of my imposter syndrome comes from in this area.

I do value success. But more than success I think I value a growing sense of what it can mean in my life. What success can be, rather than what advertisers or social media tells me it is.

That, I think, is the never ending game. And it’s getting harder to avoid! We’re told in a hundred ways, a thousand times a day, that we’re not enough, not valuable to our communities without a certain definition of a successful life.

I want to be successful. I want to have and be enough. I want to define a life well lived on my own terms and on the terms of the people who love me and are committed to me and my well-being. I want that for you, also.

So, how do you define it? If you had to write your definition of ‘Success’ on a blank index card today, would it match the life you’re actually living?

Now we’re talking.

When I think of Social Recognition, I think of those who have none. Or have less. I think of my own self at times in my life when I have not felt recognized.

When I was a teenager, I was a weird little goober. I was homeschooled and a youth group kid. Meaning that my only social outlets were things like youth group, church on Sundays, and 4-H club. I remember feeling very much on the margins of society—whenever I briefly entered it.

We didn’t have a lot of money that I could have used to “buy” my way into being recognized as something I was hoping to be. I don’t know what. Flashy? Successful, I suppose. Worthy of respect and dignity. I wanted the approval of others.When I was about 14 My folks sent me to the local high school to take a computer class and to try out track & field. Both were deeply upsetting spaces to enter. I didn’t react well. I lacked the confidence that comes from knowing myself, and how I fit in the larger world. I felt small and like I came from something small.

Lacking money I was sent to run track with the wrong shoes. Which is a silly thing to say now, in hindsight. When I was young it was all that mattered. I had high tops we found at Goodwill. Other kids had proper spikes. I wanted to learn something about computers. Most of the rest of the class was busy goofing off with people they’d known since kindergarten and wondering who the heck the homeschooler was. Loser.

I am older now. Not old, but older. I was born in 1981. I have active memories of the 1980s, but I did most of my formative growing up in the context of the 1990s. I remember Stretch Armstrong as a revolutionary new product. I remember the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember wishing I had MTV. I remember a million things that existed before the internet made things complicated.

And today, I’m not as concerned with the daily approval of the people around me. I think I have a better sense that we’re all on this same ride together. We are all in need of both the recognition of our peers, and the freedom from the need for it.

But I still see the hunger. Sometimes I still feel the pangs of starvation myself.

I have teenagers in my home now. I’m watching them grow up in a very different world than I did. And I grew up in a different world than my parents, who were born in the late 1950s.

But in every generation, I see a need for social recognition. I see a void where that need hasn’t been met. Where that value is not observed.

I know that void because I lived in it.

Maybe that’s part of the value I’ve found in this business. A coffee shop is a place where you go to be recognized. To be known. To have someone say your name and hand you something warm.

How can we recognize one another more fully? How can we lead with respect? Maybe it starts by remembering the “weird little goober” inside all of us who just wants to be invited to the table.

This is a short one. Maybe that’s appropriate. The less we say about our “Image,” the better?

Our faces are soft and gentle. They are vulnerable to attack. Punches to the nose. Smacks across the cheek. Biologically, we are wired to protect this part of ourselves.

But the “Face” this card talks about isn’t biological. It’s social.

Having a public persona is part of being human. Having that “face” be “good enough” or “measuring up” is very important to many well-adjusted people.

Personally, I find the idea of “Protecting my Public Image at the expense of others“ objectionable. That feels like a vanity I cannot endure. A kind of taking I will not endure.

But as I meditate on this photo of the card—which I absent mindedly took with my recycling bins in the background—I realize the tension. Here I am, trying to talk about “Public Image,” and my literal trash is in the frame.

Maybe that’s the healthy balance. My face is what people see when I’m interacting with them. It is my primary communication tool. We’re saying things before we open our mouths.

So, do I value “Preserving My Public Image”? Yes. But not because I want to look cool. I want to preserve a “Face” that signals safety. I want my face to say “You are welcome here” before I even speak.

Perhaps if I worry about my shirt or my publicly stated opinions, maybe it’s not just vanity. Maybe it’s an attempt to clear away the distraction so the Kindness can come through.

Even if the recycling bins are still in the background.

When I guide people through this values exercise, they often get stuck on the fine print. They get hung up on the categories (like “Self-Direction” or “Hedonism”). Or they flip the card over and get distracted by the “Aware-Affirm-Apply” prompts on the back.

But usually, if people are going to get derailed, it is by the definitions on the bottom of the cards.

* Authority: The right to lead or command.

* Daring: Seeking adventure, risk.

And so it goes for me with Card #27. I immediately keyed into the word in the definition: “Tolerant.”

When I was young I was given the impression that to be broad-minded was to be lukewarm. And as we all know, God spits the lukewarm from his mouth. Broad-mindedness opened you up to all manner of new thoughts and ideas that could lead you easily astray.

To be tolerant of different ideas or beliefs was to be unsure of your own, and this was unforgivable. Untenable. And inconsistent with a life with God.

On the contrary, I now believe that narrow-mindedness was brought to me on a platter labeled Conviction. And my conviction was that there was but one way. One way to believe, one way to be a Christian, one way to live.

Listen, we weren’t just suspicious of the rank & file heathen, the unbeliever, the Pagan, the Satanist. We were suspicious of the people attending the church down the street. We were suspicious of anyone who might cast doubt in our minds of our own centrality in the heart of God. Of our own right-ness.

And I have beliefs today. I am not without my own opinions and beliefs. But for me, Broad-mindedness has been another little death for my ego, the death of the idea that I am consequentially correct. Or that I even could be. The death of the idea that my spiritual kinfolk and I might be the central theme of the universe at the expense of all others.

So, I challenge the word on the card. I am uncomfortable with “Tolerance.” Because to “tolerate” another’s ideas is often just a polite way of clinging to your own superiority. It implies: “I know the truth, and you are wrong, but I will put up with you.”

And in the ugliest corners of our society, tolerance itself is becoming anathema to our fabric. “We cannot tolerate others’ beliefs or ideas”

I don’t want to just be tolerant. I want to be interested.

Today I am aware that my map is not necessarily incorrect, but it is incomplete. It’s been said that “you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”. I’m not sure that’s true.

Does the world need me to be a moral arbiter? Am I called to know everything, to be able to comprehend the complexities of plain old life and death on Earth, let alone the richness of God and of other people?

To be tolerant of others’ beliefs is fine I suppose, but it feels to me like it’s leaving something on the table in favor of something that you simply cannot have.

You can work hard and have many things in this life. Like a pet capybara. But you cannot have certainty, you just can’t. And to stand on certainty is to build your house upon the sand; when the waves come and the winds blow you will surely be washed out to sea.

I’ve seen it a hundred times. We’re raised with certainty and then s**t gets weird. Things get complex, ideas shift and we can’t unsee what we’ve seen. We can’t put those genies back in their lamps.

I just saw it with someone who did their values with me. They were raised agnostic. Or maybe atheistic? In any case, he was certainly something certain. And then he fell in love with a woman, and they made a life together for more than thirty years. And she had been raised in a fairly devoutly Christian household. Her faith was deeply informed by her mother’s but in due course it became her own until eventually she received a death-sentence-diagnosis. Her final months were uncertain—turbulent. Marked by moments of hope, dashed by ugly realities. In the end, death comes for us all, and it came for her. And this man, her husband, sat with me and marveled at the peace with which she composed herself during those months. At a certain point, he reported to me, she was just ready to go. She was certain of her faith and it caused him to be uncertain about his lack.

And so now, in his sixties, he’s embarking on his own exploration of faith. And I don’t know where it’ll lead him! I’d love to walk closely with him in this new exploratory phase. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Better for me, maybe better for us all, I think, to be interested in others’ ideas and beliefs. I am under no obligation to adopt them as my own, I am under no obligation to forego my own experiences and beliefs. But to remain closed to the ideas of others is to close myself off from exploration. And if this life is not for exploring, I’m not sure what it’s for.

Some people, like the man in the story, believe that this is all there is. That we are born, and we live and then we die and we are just… no more. And some people, like his wife, believe that there is much, much more indeed. More before. More after.

To be broad minded means to be softened to live I think. It means to have held something tightly, made it your own, to have had it challenged and to have it broken down into its constituent parts, ready for reformulation. In any case, exploration and openness, I believe, should be applauded.

And anyway, the truth doesn’t hide like a coward, afraid. The truth is large, and robust and illuminating, and it is out there, I think, to be found and explored.

*

Money, honey.

I grew up without very much of it. It was the 1980s, and that was really an excellent era to grow up broke. We had nothing and we didn’t know it. We had a dam on the Calapoolia River nearby, see, and we could go swimming there. And we didn’t have the internet. It really was a different time.

I was young. I didn’t know what kind of need for money was coming for me. I didn’t know that I would need money so badly for the basics of living—like food and gasoline and Blackwing pencils. I didn’t know how badly I would need money to survive.

And I didn’t know that the very material wealth necessary for human flourishing is, in higher doses, often lethal to our souls.

It’s easy not to be obsessed with money when you have plenty of it. When your storehouse is full. It’s easy not to be worried or preoccupied with money when there’s enough of it that you don’t actively notice it coming and going.

Our values are informed by our Lived Experiences. In every case? I think so. I’m not an expert, but I believe our Lived Experiences are the primary drivers behind the setting of our Values. How and where we grew up. Your cousin who died when you were teenagers. That one time your boss yelled at you. Your dad praying for you every night of your childhood.

So while “Wealth” is a card that feels easy for some people to discard, for me, Wealth is uniquely important.

My parents’ generation had wealth or didn’t. And frustratingly, the ones who did... did not seem to communicate a lot of the “juice” to the ones who didn’t. How’d you do it? Your company worked! Your investments paid off. Why them and not us, I wonder? I think perhaps it’s always this way, in every generation. The reasons aren’t tidy enough to explain.

I didn’t understand the scale of wealth until I left the country.

When I was fifteen years old, I visited a rural Philippine community as an “evangelist.” The community didn’t see me coming. I laughed, I cried. I prayed for people with words I didn’t understand, and I developed a new understanding of poverty. I was able to interact with people living on the margins of that society, and it shifted how I saw myself in relation to my own. Why us and not them, I wonder?

Upon my return to the rural Oregon community in which I grew up, I decided that, in fact, I was the victim of an embarrassment of riches. An essentially unlocked spending limit at Goodwill when we visited once a month. All of the home-grown beef I could contain within my growing frame. Friends, family, roofs.

In the end, I waffle still. I might be rich. I don’t even know anymore. I am unable to calculate my riches.

Still, I have known the sting of poverty, of not enough. Sometimes I fear a future with not enough. It seems so globally, statistically possible.

May we all be rich! Wealth, in the context of the card sorting exercise, is defined by cash money and material possessions. But we know better. We know that our wealth can be calculated in terms of the love my daughter feels for me.

The letter I received from her on my birthday this year said, among other things: “I will never leave you alone.”

I cannot calculate my riches.

*

Card #2 is Authority. The caption reads: “The right to lead or command.”

Authority is slightly more palatable to me than Social Power, but only just. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I have clear examples of abuse of authority in my life—early on, and consistently throughout. Maybe you’ve experienced that, too. I am suspicious of people who stand up and wave their own flags and try to teach others about the value of submitting to their Authority.

But on the other hand, I spent years in construction. And on a job site, Authority isn’t a dirty word. It’s a safety feature.

If the foreman shouts “Stop!”, you don’t debate him. You stop. Not because he is a better human than you, but because he sees the crane swinging your way.

I believe in the structure of Authority, but I distinguish between authority being Imposed versus being Imbued.

* Imposed Authority is the boss who demands respect because of his title.

* Imbued Authority is the leader you listen to because you know they are looking at the blueprints and keeping the building from falling down.

Interesting are the times in our lives when we have Authority thrust upon us. We end up in some situation where we’re suddenly in charge—in charge of setting the tone, setting the agenda. In charge of the well-being of those who cannot care for themselves.

I reflect on the bookends of our lives. At the beginning, you are a helpless babe. You rely on the authority of parents to feed you and keep you warm. And assuming you live until you are old, you will likely return to a similarly helpless state. The day our children take our driver’s licenses away is a painful transition of authority.

But authority is a part of the great cycle of life. It is not just about “Command.” It is about stewardship.

Who is an authority in your life right now? And more importantly, whose safety has been entrusted to your authority?

*