MUNDANE LIFE? CONGRATULATIONS

Fear the mundane life, or celebrate the accomplishment?

The more the pace of life speeds up, and you don’t, the more your effort shines.

Who knew normal and ordinary could feel so good?

But there’s a problem. Not everyone gets it.

I sat in a cancer related waiting room listening to a man talk to his support team.

He was on his second round of cancer treatment.

The group was very attentive to him.

 

“I’ve had a good life. Been a few places. Met a few people. This time around I’m taking things more seriously.

I’ve even stopped smoking this time.”

 

He was dressed like an old rancher coming off the range. He’d come all the way to Beaverton from Idaho.

I was all the way to Beaverton from Tigard.

What did he have? I didn’t ask, but he was taking it seriously.

Sometimes you take things more seriously, and should. Cancer is no joke.

The cancer industry is full of serious people doing serious work.

You’d think all of their patients are equally serious. Maybe they are.

For me, it was lock down and grind it out.

My attitude was, “You do your job, I’ll do mine, and this ought to work.”

 

The Benefits Of The Mundane Life

Your day breaks, your mind aches
You find that all her words of kindness linger on
When she no longer needs you
She wakes up, she makes up
She takes her time and doesn’t feel she has to hurry
She no longer needs you

 

The Beatles, of all famous people, understand mundane.

First they play a club all day and all night and get their act together before hitting the world stage where everyone agreed they were awesome.

Then it was over and the four lads went in for country living.

English country, which is different than country people around here, like the guy from Idaho.

After a decade of attention and fame the boys wanted to turn it down.

But how do you go from being more popular than Jesus to the guy next door?

 

If you lived next to someone famous, would you treat them like ordinary people, or go the extra mile and be a pain?

I lived next to a famous man, just not famous in the conventional sense of the word.

He was famous in the state prison and famous with people he helped get early release.

Yes, I lived next to a criminal kingpin, and like every street with a kingpin, it was the safest, most secure, street in town.

He was famous in prison for doing time based on his daughter’s show and tell story in second grade.

“Tomorrow is show and tell and I want you to bring something from your dad’s work to tell us about.”

My neighbor had been a big weed farmer and the little girl brought a bag of weed to school, which led to a raid on his farm.

I lived there before he moved in and he seemed to know quite a bit about my hometown, North Bend, but I didn’t ask any questions at first.

Eventually I got around to it and he said he knew North Bend after spending time in the Shutter Creek Correctional Facility for early release.

He was famous outside of prison for offering a job and place to live for guys who qualified for their own early release if they had a job and a place to live.

When the crew partied I got invited over and it felt like Jailhouse Rock with the Purple Gang.

My neighbor kept it all in check for a mundane life in the suburbs.

 

High Or Low, Just Stay Steady

Have you ever been The Best, The Champ, #1 in the hearts and minds of everyone you know and don’t know?

Yeah, me neither but it looks fun right up until it isn’t.

One of my favorite celebrity guys who hates the celebrity life is Sean Penn.

He’s the slappy guy who married Madonna first.

The pair have since remained friendly, and in December 2016, Madonna said she was “still in love” with Penn, even offering to remarry him if he bid $150,000 in a charity auction.

 

When your work is based on ‘Look at me now” but you resent the onlookers, you’re not trying to live the mundane life.

Now is a good time to ask yourself, ‘What will echo in eternity about me?’ Or you?

It’s a big ask. Why not make it something good, since eternity is already stocked with enough bad guys.

And it doesn’t have to be something huge if living mundanely is a constant goal.

Like what? What do you want to be remembered for? I’ll go first:

I want to be remembered a guy who stood up for his wife.

When some punk ragged on her unnecessarily until she’d had enough and ‘waited in the car’ I said, “The next time this happens I’ll put on on the ground and it won’t be gentle, so make sure you’re in a comfortable place with a thick carpet if you want to run your mouth and think it’s funny. It’s not.”

I want to be remembered as a guy who stood up for his kids.

A high school coach once asked why I went to my kids’ practices after coaching them in youth sports?

I said, “So I can help them be better student-athletes by adding to what you tell them.”

Pretty mundane life kind of stuff, don’t you think?

Well, that’s my life goal. What’s yours? How do you want to be remembered, and by whom?