Rebuilding

There’s a process that you’ll hear from many walks of life that involves a tearing-down and building back up.  It’s at the very core of so many things that it has to be part of nature itself. It’s the foundation of institutions such as the U.S. Marine Corps., sports, the arts, even music.  Most people have to be led by someone else.  A drill instructor.  A coach.  A teacher.  A mentor.  Others are led by forces unseen.  Some call it God.  Some call it circumstance.  Most of the time it’s not just one thing being torn down and rebuilt, but a loose collection of interrelated things that must all be torn down together and rebuilt again.  In every case, the thing that must be torn down is years of bad habits and misguided intuition.  Whether it’s working as team, or working alone, it’s still the same.  The student must be stripped of all that they know and rely upon so that they can adopt new things to rely upon which are proven and predictably reliable.  Successful.

2010 feels like a turning point for me, personally.  Career, home, marriage, kids, and so on.  From early 2008 until this year, it’s been a rough tearing down on all sides.  Career-wise things turned around for me once I got my legs back under me in late 2008.  Getting laid off was more damaging to me and my family than I ever expected.  It also clarified my friendships and professional relationships.  They say you don’t know anyone until you’ve gotten drunk with them.  You also don’t know who your friends are until you start desperately looking for a job.  No hard feelings, just adjusted expectations and realizations of bad assumptions.  Whatever.  I hope I’ve learned things that will point me in the right direction from here on.  Only time will tell.  As I said: I have more rebuilding to do, but it’s rebuilding, not tearing down.  I’m sure it won’t be the last tear-down I face in life, but I can cross these challenges off my list of things to sweat.

Ok, I promise my next post won’t be so serious.