Staying competitive can be a life goal.
It means staying sharp, alert, ready.
Being quietly competitive is one thing; you may bring out the best in you.
Loud competition can be a problem, such as?
Remember the first time you got your ass kicked?
I’m not saying a beat down, just the feeling when you realized you’re not the sharpest blade in the drawer on any particular occasion.
Someone familiar to you spoke up in a way that knocked you down without it being a put-down.
You got nicely slammed.
Upon review, you have two choices:
Either never see them again, or see them more often, and learn something you thought you had a handle on.
They might become your best friend.
Normally, we roll along our way, doing what we do, which in my case is planning grocery shopping, gathering bags for grocery shopping, then the actual shopping.
After that it’s getting home, unloading, and placing everything where it belongs.
Notice I didn’t name a place? Not an accident.
I roll from Safeway to New Season’s to Trader Joe’s to Costco.
Does this sound like a shopping disorder? Eating disorder? Cooking disorder? Or, married life?
Call it a normal life for baby boomers?
When I was a kid my Mom and Dad hit the Safeway on Virginia in the Pony Village mall, the biggest mall between Seattle and San Francisco at the time.
It’s the only place I’ve lived with mall pride.
The Bay Area was staying competitive with other bay areas much bigger, which seemed like a plus.
Staying Competitive In The Hometown
Everyplace I’ve lived I tried to imagine growing up there, how my parents would have handled it.
I can’t imagine my parents living in a Philadelphia row house, or a New York apartment.
They would have been New Jersey people who took the train to the city.
Or, some place like Levittown.
It doesn’t look so bad so many years later?
My parents moved to North Bend after my Dad graduated from Southern Oregon College.
We started in an apartment before the first house on Ohio St.
It was a house that would have fit into any starter suburb: Three bedroom, one bath, and a carport with a room in the back.
A mom, a dad, and three boys with a big backyard.
It wasn’t much different than the house my wife and I started in: three bedrooms, one bath, single garage, and a big back yard.
The classic ranch with an almost flat roof. A mom, a dad, and a baby boy, with one on the way.
After urban living as a single man, and newly married man, if you call NW Portland urban, if you call inner SE urban, the first thing I did at the new place was roll around on the grass knowing strangers hadn’t been peeing there.
I called that living in the land of the free, home of the brave.
It’s also why I’ve been nostalgic about Portland, Oregon on boomerpdx.
It was my last city, my last hurrah to single life.
I keep it in the rearview mirror where it belongs, but it still jumps up now and then, like the Winter Light Festival.
There’s something romantic about a single man’s last town, especially when they meet their wife there like I did.
I’ve bored people to tears by taking them on the David and Elaine tour too many times.
“Let’s go downtown.”
“Not the tour.”
“Okay, no tour.”
Once in the car:
“I’d like to drive by the places where I played basketball.”
“You said no tour.”
“That’s right, no tour. Don’t blame me that the basketball courts are in the same neighborhood.”
“Aren’t you the clever one.”
At the end of the day, when you live someplace long enough it feels like a hometown.
And it feels good, not like a traitor.
Maybe a little traitorous after a high school reunion?
Real Life Isn’t Going Anywhere
Work life used to govern time.
It a still does.
Get to bed early for a sharp edged morning.
Check the prep-work from the day before and get started.
That’s a writer’s life, a blogger on a blog life.
No one wants to show up half-baked and jump up on a soapbox and write about it.
What would that sound like?
‘Today I’m tired. I’ll be more tired tomorrow.’
That’s a bad road no matter what you’re driving.
‘I”ll be fat and lazy today. Tomorrow I’ll be fatter and lazier.’
That’s a recipe for being more tired already.
If you like the idea of staying competitive, and you do when you compete with yourself, stay on it.
I’m so competitive I forgot a doctor’s appointment to write this blog post. ( Hey Dr. P)
No matter your age, stay competitive with health maintenance. Things can change faster than you imagine.
One day you’re sitting with your mom in the living room, the next you’re singing a song next to her hospice bed.
One day you’re tearing a roof off with your dad; the next he’s so shaky you have to light his cigarette for him.
One of my gym friends said it best: (Hey Sheila)
“Young people, those under forty, don’t know how good they’ve got it. Both parents alive, brothers and sisters alive, friends alive.”
Even with our losses, we’re all together in a world of the living.
If you’re around people who make you think of death, you have two choices:
Avoid them, or take the time to explain that they’re not dead, and to quit acting like it.
Let me know how it goes.
Blog-worthy? I think so.
About David Gillaspie
