WOKE
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
You’ve heard variations on this:
Help, I’ve fallen.
And I can’t get up.
Help is not required.
I did fall.
I stayed down too long.
Yes, I’ve fallen many times. Some were ghastly and embarrassing, public humiliation, gossip-fodder, and well deserved falls from grace. In my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s too. This is not to say I didn’t do plenty of good works and some good deeds. I did, but the failures mostly were the private kind, the self-doubt kind, the deep emotional hole, the kind that saps your confidence, blunts your message, and makes you hide rather than shine. I’ve been there too many times and recognize the guy who survived all that did it with resilience and a work ethic far more than from strokes of genius or inventing the next new clever thing.
Being ‘woke’ is a current theme you may have heard, and it’s not that kind of collective woke-ness I’m talking about. That’s a label/meme to reference a collective societal consciousness about something – and saying you are woke or describing someone as woke is to say they get it. They understand some significant issues or emerging trends.
I woke recently. It wasn’t at 2 AM when the noise on the screen stirred me from sleep because I’d fallen asleep while streaming. It wasn’t from something I read or heard, or investigated.
It wasn’t from a deep conversation with someone close either.
I re-woke to my potential. Some might argue I’m a few decades late. I would counter with, “better late than not at all” because it’s a revelation. It’s not like getting religion or having an out-of-body or spiritual experience from drug or alcohol or magic potion intoxication of the mind.
But I woke. Not one particular piece of reading, listening or experience – and certainly not from academic research of some kind I can attribute this, but I woke. I’m feeling a difference every day, albeit small some days, my fire has been re-lit.
The time for excuse-making is long past for most of us.
Life slips away too quickly.
We all do things about lengthening our life – we talk about diet, exercise, sleep, purpose, value, interests, and giving back. Sure, good, great, let’s all do more of that. But while we are at it, let’s not forget to be busy strengthening our life too.
I’m talking about weight-lifting and wait-lifting.
Too many days in my life have been spent lifting dead weight – my own.
Out of the bed, out of the chair, from the bottom rung to the top of the stairs, up and down again and again. Time has come for a significant revolution in my life. I’ve sewn some seeds recently, and I’m pouring water on them. There is some life and value in so many places – ones I’ve been looking at for far too long, and not seeing value and opportunity.