Ghost States

Part 5: Forever Summer

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 21:00:00 +0000

Parenthood is the most unique experience that 90% of all humans will share with one another at some point in their lives.

90%! How strange that something so common often feels so exclusive. Like we’re the first one to go through it. Like we’re on this island all alone. Sure, we might reach out. Ask for tips. Read books. Endure unwanted advice. But at the end of the day, we all think this parenting experience is ours and ours only.

I think this is because–though humans have been rearing and raising younger humans for thousands and thousands of years–not one of them has parented this exact child of mine before. This one “beautiful and unique snowflake”. This is my kid.

So on that level, it’s hard to totally fault us for thinking our own kids are one-of-a-kind. But on the other hand, it’s also hard to completely relate with other parents. There are common feelings, behaviors, patterns, and rants, of course. But just underneath it, there’s an always pervasive “Yeah, but…my kid is different” feeling bouncing around.

I suppose it’s this ignorance that keeps us pushing through. This ignorance that we’re somehow forging new territory. Because I think without it, parenthood would be a tremendously defeating venture. I’ve already talked about how much it affects your mid-section. If you thought the “Freshmen 15” was bad, wait until you try on the “New Dad 30”.

Parenthood is literally a punch to your gut.

Parenting should provide the best workout that ever could be possible. At least, it feels like it should. It’s incredibly taxing physically. You’re out of breath often. There is near constant motion and very little time for rest. Lugging around a baby carrier for nearly a year per kid is a cross-fitter’s dream scenario, no? How is that not the recipe for being in the best shape of your life?

If you want to make a case for life being unfair, there it is. I’m the most tired, overworked, and physically spent that I’ve ever been in my life. And I also happen to be in the worst shape of my life. Something just isn’t adding up here. In fact, the things that you require most to be a happy and effective parent–sleep, exercise, and healthy food–are often the complete opposite of what you wind up getting.

Parenting is the hardest endeavor I’ve undertaken in my short 36 years of life. And maybe will be the hardest I’ll ever undertake.

“So why do it, then?”, a completely sane and self-respecting person might ask.

Well geez, I don’t think anyone would, if it also wasn’t singlehandedly the most rewarding endeavor a human could possibly dream up.

The best way to prepare for parenthood is to get comfortable and then immediately get up
— David DeWeil (@daviddeweil) April 2, 2018

A ‘Lil Squirt & A Smiley Guy

I think I could easily say that I don’t like this stage of parenthood, but that I love my kids. You might think that’s an oxymoronic statement. But it really isn’t:

Parenting is hard work. My kids are fun.

My daughter is boundless energy personified. She’s a live-wire. This has it’s challenges when we need her to sit still for dinner, or lay down for a nap, or not jump on her brother. But she keeps our family life fresh and exciting. Currently, she’s an extrovert and neither my wife nor I can figure out where (or who) she gets it from.

Before we had kids, my wife saw pictures of her towheaded, buck-toothed husband and claimed that we were destined for at least one “Dennis The Menace” child. Well, she got her Dennis in our daughter.

Audrey has this unshakable inner core that is such pure, guileless naiveté. As her dad, I just want to do everything I can to protect that. To encourage her curiosity and exploration of the world. And to realize that the biggest enemy of that innocence and vitality on most days, is my own selfishness.

My son is pure joy. His default facial position is a smile. And they’re the kind of smiles that every muscle in his face participates in. There’s no way it’s not infectious. Who taught him how to smile like that?

He also has this intensity and intention with whatever he is currently doing. I hope he takes it with him through the rest of his life. It will take him far in this world. Bennett is still young, but there are glimpses of this cheerful and effervescent personality starting to poke through. He’s been such a blessing to us and a delightful surprise.

Your second child is this kind of complete new mystery. What would he even be like? We spent 3-1/2 years with only Audrey, how would we have more love for a whole other child? We spent all those years learning her personality and falling in love with who she is. How would we be able to do that equally with a brand new personality?

And then you meet him.

And you see your children interact and love each other and your heart just floods with all these emotions. It’s then you realize the reserves of your love as a parent are essentially boundless. And it’s also about now when you realize that a vasectomy is a very real necessity.

Again, I can’t sugarcoat how tough parenthood is. I can’t imagine having even one more kid than the two we have right now. But thinking about having three children does give me profound new respect for my own parents and how they raised my two sisters and I. In general, having kids of my own has given me a better sense of reverence for my parents and the decisions they made in parenting me. I have a better understanding of the weight they felt because I now feel a similar weight.

There’s an inherent déjà vu in parenting your kids. You often find yourself repeating the same phrases your parents did. Logic that seemed flawed to you throughout your entire childhood now starts to click. “Because I said so!” no longer seems unfair, but instead, a sensible shortcut that really just saves everyone involved a lot of time and exposition.

I have a theory that all the best loves in life have one thing in common: you can’t explain them.

I can’t tell you why I get excited thinking about going home to see my kids the last hour of my work day. The smell of their hair, the squishiness of their cheeks, the unmistakeability of their laughs. There’s enough of me inside them to feel familiar but enough of their own person in there to keep me pushing further.

My kids are my favorite thing in life.

Slow It Down A Measure

They grow too fast. I know it’s cliché, but you never think about just how short the time is with your young children until you’re living through it yourself. It’s essentially mere months. Within a college semester your baby is already smiling & laughing; at half a year they’re mobile in some capacity and within just a year, they’re walking and talking. A year!

I think we see pictures of ourselves as babies and think that these early stages of life must last forever. We think this period of life raising kids is so long because it felt so long to us growing up.

But hear me out, my friends: this is the fastest I’ve ever felt my life flying by and no matter what I try to do to hack my time, I can’t slow it down. So all that talk earlier about cherishing life right now, about slowing it down, I have to confess:

It doesn’t work.

At least not when it comes to my kids. They are growing faster than my synapses can process. And it breaks my heart.

My children are still so young, but there are moments when the light hits them a certain way as they’re sleeping, or the shadows stretch across their faces while they’re playing and somehow my brain projects them to be a year or two older than they are. And I can’t help it, the future comes flooding in as a flurry of instances flash by me all at once. Like I accidentally sat on the remote and jammed the fast-forward button.

And I can’t take it, it overwhelms me. I know these times are fleeting. And I’m absolutely helpless to stop them. I can shout, I can grit my teeth, I can hold on to them so, so tightly. But nothing I do will bring back today.

My little girl and baby boy are never going to be as little as they were today.

My God. Time is a devil.

And it just keeps clicking along.

Faster, and faster, and faster…

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

“On Children” by Kahlil Gibran

Next week, I’ll take a deeper dive into this strange stage of life called “parenthood”, and more specifically “young fatherhood” and a strange melancholy that I have noticed starting to sink in right around this stage.

But first! A few practical tips on parenting that my wife and I have picked up over the past five years or so:

Take breaks from your kids. I know this is a redundant point from the marriage section, but that’s only because it’s so important. Self-care is a very real need when you have kids. Time by yourself or with only your spouse is so vital for your happiness and as tolerance for the insanity that raising young humans can bring. If you want to have happy and healthy kids, you need to first be happy and healthy yourself.
Don’t pass up snuggle moments. It’s easy to get drained at the end of the day and want to just get the kids to bed. But hear me out: your kids won’t be this small forever. Don’t quickly shrug off a “Daddy, hold you!” or “Could you snuggle with me tonight?” moment. It won’t be long and your kid won’t want much of anything to do with you. Treasure these times.
Let your kids into your world. When I was young, I remember trying my darndest to wake up earlier than normal just to have a slight chance of seeing my dad before he left for work. I remember working so hard to get myself up and ready for the day even though most days he would already be gone. Now as a dad, I’m more cognizant of those moments, when I can tell my daughter is trying to crack into my world. When she takes note of my morning routine and questions me if it differs from my normal. When she asks me how my day went when I get home from work. It’s subtle, but it can mean the world to your kid.
Err on the soft side. Kids need structure and they need discipline. And for God’s sake, give them some boundaries. But if at all possible, err on the gracious side with them. Sometimes just that little bit of patience during a fit or meltdown proves to be the key in a big teaching moment. Sometimes my own selfishness in wanting the fussing to just be over is the biggest impediment to my children’s growth. Or sometimes they just need a nap.
Give yourself grace. The transition from young couple to young parents is severe. It often feels like two steps forward and then three steps back. It’s easy to lose yourself in the shuffle. So cutting yourself and your partner some slack is crucial. Effective parenting is all about adapting to your kid’s routine. And then learning how to adjust to a completely new routine in another few weeks. There will be plenty of mistakes and frustrations. Plenty of down nights and plenty of up nights. Plenty of ebbs and plenty of flows. It takes some time, but eventually you’ll pick up the rhythm and learn to dance.

Miss a previous post?

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Part 4: Life In The Future

Mon, 21 May 2018 18:00:00 +0000

As a young man envisioning what life would look like in the future, I don’t think I could have once divined the one I’m currently living.

I call a city home that I barely knew of, let alone had seen a map of, seven years ago.
With the change in locale, my closest friends are people who I’ve only known for roughly 19% of my life.
I’m over the moon for a woman I only just met on New Years eight years ago.
I am entirely wrapped around the pinkie finger of a little girl and boy that were unknown quantities to me just over five years ago.

This is not the life I planned for, goal-set, or foresaw.

And yet, when I talk of what is soulish to me, I’m talking nearly entirely of these things. And up until my 28th year of life, every single one of them was an absolute mystery to me.

To that young man trying to think about his future, there was only fogginess beyond his wedding day. He didn’t possess the faculties needed to formulate any notion of what becoming a family man would look like. Especially when he was lacking so many of the required variables.

Sure, he had glimpses on particularly lonely days:

A cute girl to carry his guitar gear in and out of band practice.
A lot less ironing and cleaning to be performed on a semi-regular basis.
Someone to be the de-facto plus-one at weddings, family events, and rock concerts.

You know, the kinds of things a twenty-something guy really needs in his life.

On the whole, though, there wasn’t much forethought. That kid didn’t sit around praying for a future wife. He didn’t write her letters. To put it bluntly: this boy wanted to meet a girl, he just didn’t care to sit around waiting for her. You could cross off at least half of the previously listed adventures from his twenties if he was going to be doing much of that.

I suppose some would call this “having an inactive imagination”. I liked to call it “having reasonable expectations”.

And that’s probably why marriage has far exceeded any assumptions that I could’ve previously had.

Soul-mate

In six short years, it already feels like Jordan and I have spent a lifetime together. Married life just seems to suit us. My individual life is infinitely better with her in it.

In the past, the idea of a soul-mate was much more focused around this notion of “The One”. That perfect person who was set aside for me. And exactly when I would happen to cross paths with her. It would be inevitable that I would meet her.

It would be obvious, consequential, impactful, heart-felt.

How could it not be? If it was fate–or better yet, God–that would bring us together, it would have to be all of the above.

Over the years, this idea has evolved for me into that of a more grounded, balanced view. It doesn’t sound as romantic as being fated, star-crossed lovers, but I would argue that it is much more powerful. She and I chose each other. In a world full of entropy and chaos that seems to be sliding further away from its center, we found in the other person a safe place.

There was something to her that I couldn’t quite figure out. An intrigue that I needed to get to the bottom of.

But I don’t believe there’s some magical power keeping us together. Instead, it’s hard work, it’s sacrifice and it’s dedication.

It’s every day. It’s in, not out. It’s you, not me. It’s little, daily decisions that, in part, add up to making the whole better.

In the least cheesy way possible, I can say she’s my best friend. I just love talking to her. My day is made when I get to end it talking it over with her. I don’t want to spend my time with anyone else.

Life is better with her.

She is both challenging yet agreeable at the same time. Those that know her can’t help but adore her. She’s a true-blue friend, fiercely loyal, and a hard-working son-of-a-gun. And I’m the first one in line to benefit. I could fawn over her twice as long as I’m intending this post to be, but I’ll save you the schmooze and just say this:

I’m an incredibly blessed man.

And marriage is a truly glorious affair. It is. But it’s also unlike anything else I’ve ever known. I think that’s because it’s made up of these two unique personalities. And so it takes on an entirely new disposition all of it’s own. We’re still the same old people, but then we come together and now we’re this whole new entity. This couple. This thing.

The nuance and tacit nature of this new reality isn’t made evident, however, until the fresh, new car smell of it has almost completely worn off. It’s this lived-in thing that is both beautiful and sacred, while simultaneously ordinary and mundane.

We work hard but we rest hard too. Buying a house together, fixing it up and investing a little sweat equity into it has helped us realize that we work well together moving towards a common goal. We also try to have our hand on the pulse of when the other needs a break or a night off from the other. And then we abscond to our favorite nooks of the house to write, study, or binge-watch some Netflix.

This is what the married life of two introverts (and Enneagram 9’s) looks like.

But sometimes it gets too mundane and too ordinary. Sometimes we slip into our routines and do so well keeping to ourselves and out of each other’s hair that we forget to venture into this exclusive shared space that is uniquely ours. That space where we’re one, not only in body, but in soul. Sometimes it’s good to step on each other’s toes a little.

This is the yeoman’s work of our particular flavor of cohabitation. To push into this relationship, to drive it even further toward the sublime. It’s a constant juggle between “me” and “us” and finding the delicate balance between the two. I think one of our greatest joys so far has been settling into a simple cadence of life that has worked surprisingly well for both of us.

Which means this dance between us can either merely satisfy our basic human needs, or it can move us into the realm of the divine. That’s what’s so beautiful about it. It’s ours to make of it what we will. Together, she and I have birthed this lovely rhythm and have made it our own. And it works, it just does. Yet we know that there is more waiting if we will continue to put the other first. To remove more of “me” from the equation and add more of “us”.

We’re only six years in, but I can honestly say that marriage is one of, if not the most, supreme lessons in selflessness that this life can offer. And attaining that level of self-effacement is something we can vow to fulfill early on, and then something entirely different to actually live out later. It certainly isn’t given.

It’s something you have to give.

And it is well worth the cost.

Now, quickly, a few tips that have helped my wife and I immensely in our first few years of life spent together. Take’em or leave’em.

Keep a good, realistic budget. I don’t know if I can overstate this enough. Staying on the same page financially will save yourself a metric sh*t ton of stress and your relationship a good many arguments. Being the nerd I am, I’ve come up with a pretty detailed budget that tends to focus on the past. With Jordan’s help, we are now also using it to plan for the future. If you need a kick-start into budgeting, I’ve saved off a generic copy of the one I’ve been developing over the last 7 years for you to download here. No need to thank me for your inevitable descent into nerd-dom.
Take on projects together. Sweat co-equity, four-elbow grease, and rubbing shoulders with your one-and-only has a magical effect that, I believe, can be only beneficial for a marriage. We both love working hard towards something and then celebrating hard when it’s completed. The camaraderie, the laughs, the sweat, the frustration, the accomplishment. It all goes toward building more life and shared experiences together. This, to me, is a good thing.
Eat dinner together every night. Old-fashioned alert! Thankfully, we currently have schedules where this is a reality the majority of the week. I can’t stress how great it is for us to just debrief, catch-up on the day’s events, and share a meal together. It’s therapy.
Take breaks from your kids. You deserve it. Before our son was born, it worked out well for us to ship our daughter to her grandma’s for one night every week. Sometimes we used that free night to get caught up on school work, projects, or other commitments. But sometimes it acted as an informal date night for Jordan and I. Sometimes it was just a night off. This brief pause from parenthood introduced such a needed breath of fresh air into our weekly schedule. We don’t have a set day for this now that our schedules have evolved, but we still ship the kids off to grandma’s about as much as they let us.

Speaking of parenthood…that’s what we’ll be covering next!

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A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Part 3: A Grown Up Soul...

Mon, 14 May 2018 18:00:00 +0000

I remember when the summers stretched on forever…

I remember jumping feet first into the “crick” behind my childhood home, never worrying about soggy shoes.

I remember the Belden Brick plant’s eleven-thirty bell sounding across my whole hometown, meaning it was time to sprint inside for lunch.

I remember countless hours spent with neighborhood kids exploring the woods lining old strip mines surrounding our allotment.

Time stood still in the eternities that spanned the vast expanse between spring and fall.

These days, time clips by at a much more hurried pace. The winter that we dreaded all last fall has come and gone and cooled our sunburned skin. And now we yearn, once again, for the warmth of that devilish summer sun.

As I touched on previously, around the age of 33 I started to become much more aware of my own fragility. And with that, this nagging realization that time, and it’s rapidly-cycling seasons, just wasn’t on my side anymore.

I think if you’re a person who’s geared towards the future, at this point you start scrambling to squeeze as much time as you can out of every moment. Past-minded folks, like myself, probably spend too much time trying to figure out where all that time went.

In the next few posts, I hope to talk a bit about both. Because when I talk about “soul”, I’m talking largely about the things that are most worthy of my time and attention.

You know, things like your family, your friends, your passions. And where you steal the time from for any of it.

Cuz time, my brothers and sisters, is tickin’ away.

Time Is Tickin’ Away

/begin DC Talk rap

/end DC Talk rap

/dispense sincerest of apologies for including a DC Talk rap in this post.

A few years back, I came across a study that looked at how we humans perceive time. Specifically, how that perception morphs and bends the older we get. Apparently, this isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that I had never heard of before, so it felt revolutionary at the time.

The gist goes something like this: as we grow older, our perspective towards time shifts proportional to the amount of time we’ve been alive. Thus, the longer you’ve been alive, the shorter your days, weeks, and years feel compared to someone younger than you.

It’s our own personal time dilation. Time doesn’t just feel like it’s flying by, it actually is. At least according to our perception of it.

If this is something that you haven’t heard before, just let it sink in a little bit.

The more I thought about it, the more it resonated. I mean, just think about how we measure time at different stages of life already:

Babies are aged by months.
Elementary kids are eternally awaiting that next school holiday.
College kids set their clocks to the school semester.
Adults plan their budgets around a fiscal year.
And your grandma can’t remember what decade she lost her reading glasses.

In other words, our points of reference pile up closer and closer together the older we are. The days get shorter, the years come quicker. Time, objectively, isn’t necessarily speeding up, but our viewpoint relative to it is.

If you’re not tracking with me, there is a great website that visualizes this phenomenon quite well. Take a scroll yourself and see where your own age fits in. If you’re like me–cresting your first third of life–the more you scroll, the harder it is to believe.

There are a few tidbits of info as you scroll along that help crystallize this perspective shift:

Waiting 24 days for Christmas at age 5 feels like waiting a year at age 54.
According to this theory, assuming you’ll become 100 years old, half of your perceived life is over at age 7.
If you factor in that you don’t remember much of the first three years, then half of your perceived life is over by the time you turn 18.
The summer vacation of your first year of college will feel as long as your whole 76th year.

If you’re curious, here is how my 36 years of life look when thrown into this model:

Look how slim those years get to the right! Compare that with the first two years my son has lived to the left. The scariest part for me is continuing to scroll and witness how blindingly quick the next 36 years go by.

To wrap this up, let’s finish back where we started, with math. So, since I have 36 years of life to reference back to and my son only has two, this coming summer is going to be roughly 11.1% of his conscious life. For me, it will only be about 0.7%.

A year in Bennett’s life has the “perceived weight” of nearly 18 years for me.

In his eyes, last summer really did last forever.

Gone. Just Like That.

Sitting where I am now, my twenties felt an awful lot one of these 0.7% summers of mine.

Gone. Just like that.

I mean, what did I even spend that time on?

I got married at the ripe old age of 29 years, 11 months and 6 days. So my twenties were largely spent as a single man. That bothered me more than I ever let on during those years. And I spent far too much of that time worrying about being alone for the rest of my life. I viewed that unchecked box next to “Married” as more of a curse than what it actually was:

A fr*ggin’ blessing.

Because looking back on them now, I am ridiculously proud of my twenties. I wasn’t the most adventurous guy on the block, but I think I made pretty good use of the ample free time I had. I traveled as much as I could while still holding down a respectable 9-to-5 job, and I explored as much as my simple, home-bodied heart allowed.

In my twenties I ventured to Hawaii (age 20)…

…New York City (21)

…Europe (22)

…California (23)

…and again the next year (24)

…Seattle (26)

…Las Vegas (27)

…and California once again (27).

(At this point, I thought pretty hard about moving to the West Coast. But then, unfortunately, thought better of myself.)

I also joined a pretty decent indie-rock band for a few years and we toured across the South and Midwest (25).

I moved in with a good friend at 26 and then worked up the courage to strike out into my own pad at around 27. (Editor’s note: I talk more about this period of living on my own in a future post.)

And finally, at 28 I set off for the vast, wild wonderland of Kansas City. (I’ve talked at length about those decisions already in the past, so feel free to catch up here.)

For better or worse, there it is. Roughly the first third of my life.

Gone. Just like that.

Life moves quick, my friends. But once you realize it’s just your perception of that time that is shifting so quickly, you can hack your hard-wiring a little to better cherish the moments you’re in. Sometimes, I think what kicks the passing of time up a few clicks is our lack of acknowledgment that we’re living through it right now.

That we’re actually allowed to live this gorgeously unique, little life of ours every day.

Live and in person. Right now. We’re in it. This is it!

And it’s all we’re going to get.

Time will only slow down once you pay attention to it. Once you’re aware that your own personal metronome is only going to tick faster and faster as the measures picks up in meter, it’s then that you’re much better equipped to see the sheet music for what it is, and start writing your own time signatures.

(That may have been the most cornball thing I’ve ever written, you guys.)

I think we get caught up in grieving these fleeting moments that have passed because we’re not truly living through them in the present. We’re looking to that next easier moment.

That next cup of coffee,
the next trip to the lake,
the next moment of silence after the kids are in bed.

I don’t have it all quite figured out just yet, but somehow acknowledging and savoring life as we’re living through it is the closest we’ll ever get to actually slowing down time.

Check your calendar. We are nearly halfway through the year 2018. 2018!! Re-read the digits my fingers just pressed into the keyboard and your optic nerve just transmitted to your brain.

2-0-1-8.

We’re living in the future.

Next, we’ll take a look at what life in the future has been like for me as a husband and a father over the past few years. Thanks for reading!

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Part 2: Middling Age

Mon, 07 May 2018 18:00:00 +0000

Aging is weird.

Your thirties reveal that–like some cruel plot twist early in the second act–your body has just been out to betray you all along. It’s slowly been switching it’s allegiance from your side to the one of some unknowable, unrepentant force of evil. And no matter how hard you try to coax and convince it, it’s just not coming back.

Things that you used to enjoy–like sleeping in, eating, showering, and pick-up games of any sport–now become reflections on your fragility.

I can’t sleep-in past 8 a.m. now without my back feeling like it’s going to dislodge a vertebrae. Eating becomes a tally of how many pounds a meal will add to my waistline and how many miles are required to run/bike them off. Showering hits a whole new level of creepiness now as you horrifically gaze in the mirror at this saggier, hairier, alternate-reality version of your 20 year-old-self staring back at you.

And well, you just hurt after any and all prolonged periods of activity.

You hurt a lot.

Ryan Tries A Tri

About a year ago, I found myself smack in the middle of one of the rarest gifts that a young parent could ever hope to experience: a weekend all to myself. My wife had taken the kids to visit some family out of town, and I guess the uniqueness of the situation must’ve went straight to my head. Because the undeniably hair-brained scheme that I hatched coming out of that time spent alone wasn’t something I normally would’ve chosen to do on my own:

I decided I was going to swim across a lake.

In 12 weeks, I'm gonna swim across this lake. What have I gotten myself into?? Well, needing a bit of a kick in the pants to lose a few pounds and round myself back into shape, I decided to sign up as my work's representative in the triathlon for KC Corporate Challenge. It's a sprint triathlon (500m swim/10mi bike/5k run) so I'm not THAT insane. But this is a big deal to me. So I thought I'd document my training over the next 12 weeks here. Hopefully by Father's Day, I'll be ready!

A post shared by Ry Tries A Tri (@triingryan) on Mar 26, 2017 at 8:44pm PDT

Now, let me back up a few steps and attempt to explain myself. Before the fateful weekend I just described, I had already been seriously mulling over representing my employer in the Kansas City Corporate Challenge Triathlon. (Corporate Challenge, if you’re unaware, is basically the workplace version of collegiate intramural sports.) And also, by “triathlon” I’m of course not talking about the full-on, insane version of the event, I’m talking about a “sprint” version. For this particular race the distances were: 500m swim, 10 mile bike ride, and 5K run. Comparatively, not all that bad.

And so, given a chill, reflective weekend and a chance to drive out to the park where the triathlon was going to be held, I started to feel this swelling sense of destiny: this was something I just had to do. I had been feeling more and more like I needed the swift kick of a firm commitment to get my post-new-dad fitness back on track and this seemed to fit the bill. So, all that coupled with the fact that the race itself was being held on Father’s Day had me believing that my involvement was nearly inevitable.

As I’ve discussed in the previous post, I had already been cycling at a decent level for several years, so 10 miles was definitely achievable. I also knew I could hobble my way to the finish line of a 5K without too much long term knee damage. But that 500 meter swim? Hoo boy. That was going to be tough. I had 12 weeks until the race to learn how to swim and swim well enough to not drown in the middle of a lake. So thus, my challenge was laid out before me.

Though the idea of swimming across a lake was daunting, it also sounded pretty fun. Before the idea of competing in a triathlon was presented to me, I had already been thinking that maybe swimming would be a decently viable fitness avenue for me to start exploring. It’s a great cardiovascular workout and uses nearly every major muscle group while also staying very low impact. It helped that our gym at the time also had a nicely maintained lap pool. So I had that extra wind in my sails before I even started training.

So to get started, I first planned out an extensive training regimen in a spreadsheet. I enlisted the help of a friend who regularly competes in triathlons to teach me how to actually swim. And I started documenting my journey on Instagram for accountability. I thought I was getting off to a pretty great start.

And then, as they say, life happened.

Shortly after my revelation by the lakeside, my wife and I decided to sell our house. This decision required many late nights painting rooms, many weekends landscaping patios, and plenty of garage sales and Craigslist meetups attempting to sell off rooms full of junk we didn’t need. Unfortunately, it also meant many less nights at the gym–and more importantly, in the pool–than my training regimen required.

And so I guess when they implore you to not let your first swim in the lake for a triathlon take place on race day, they probably have a good reason. Because even with these setbacks, I still followed through on my promise 12 weeks prior: I attempted to swim across that lake on Father’s Day 2017…

And I made it roughly a quarter of the way.

An issue I had encountered in my training during a few of my longer swims hit me again on race day right around the 100m mark: foot cramps. Basically, the whole underside of my foot locked up on me. It’s just kind of an annoying thing to have happen when you’re in the middle of a lap pool. It’s a whole different thing in the middle of a large, virtually bottomless body of water. Once it hit, and the panic set in, I knew I was done for.

So, with my tail between my legs, I doggy-paddled my way back to shore. Thankfully, the race officials allowed me to finish the cycling and running portions of the race, keeping my pride mostly intact. All-in-all, it was a fun day and I was happy to have the lofty goal I did to keep me motivated those previous 12 weeks.

But the whole experience exposed me to another new shifting paradigm taking place in this grown up reality of mine: that of my mind being willing and open to trying new avenues in hopes of achieving some modicum of physical fitness, and my body flatly and resoundingly telling me “No.”

Rarefied Air

Still, for all the frustrations and disappointment with your body that occur in the middle third of life, there is an obvious richness to this stage of aging that I’ve been purposely skirting until this post. For all the fresh wrinkles, new aches, and extra pounds, there’s this airy plateau of transcendence that can only be reached once you crest that first hill of your thirties. A plateau that gives you a clearer view of your life and how little of it you actually have left.

I’ve made it this far and my body is still intact. I still have the majority of my hair (though it’s the minority I’ve lost that bothers me) and some bounce left in my step. What do I have to worry about?

It’s not rosy but I think having a firm grasp on your finality is a good thing. It makes you try harder, push deeper, and commit more fully. You are much less likely to half-ass your way through life when you have an achy back or creaky knee continually reminding you that your body is trending in a downward direction.

In last week’s post, I noted an MIT study that claimed our “fluid intelligence” peaked at age 20. If you actually clicked the link and read on from the first few paragraphs, you’d realize that I wasn’t entirely being truthful with what I had reported back. Oops.

Yes, some of our cognitive abilities peak when we’re younger, but many more are still ascending upwards through our thirties and even into our fifties and sixties. Facial recognition and visual short term memory both peak in your early thirties, says the MIT study. Our vocabulary and the mental skills needed to evaluate other’s emotional states peak in our forties and fifties. So that’s certainly something to look forward to!

And really, it makes sense, doesn’t it? My mind doesn’t feel all that old. In fact, it’s still on point. Our thirties are the years to take advantage of our superior mental acuity.

Middle age is the unique period of your life when you will actually know more than both your kids and your parents. If there was a bell curve on peak intelligence, your thirties would undeniably be right around the crest. You’re probably not going to be more “with it” mentally than you are in your thirties.

This is a gift, my friends, and we would do well to take advantage.

Now, I know there will be folks several years my senior that will no doubt scoff at a 36-year-old complaining about feeling old. I get it. I know I have plenty of aging, aches, and probably pounds left ahead of me.

But I think that if you polled a few individuals down the road a ways, and asked them to recall what age range they first started to feel the full force of aging, I’m pretty certain the consensus would be:

Your thirties are definitely when you start to feel old.

Next, we’ll dive into just what a grown up soul might look like. It’s kind of like an old soul, but cooler.

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Part 1: A Grown Up Body...

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 18:00:00 +0000

I feel old.

Though you’re always going to have the contrarians who all too happily exclaim “I’m in my thirties and I feel great!” Compared to your pre-thirties self, however, you objectively feel worse. You just don’t know it because, well, that’s the fun thing about aging: it slowly sneaks up on you.

Every year your body is going to suck just a little bit more than the year before. It’s kind of a verifiable fact.

Yes, by age 30 your body has already started breaking down. They say that your age 27 year is statistically when your mind’s cognitive ability starts to trend downward. What MIT calls your “fluid intelligence” actually peaks at little earlier…at age 20. In turn, your body’s metabolism starts it’s long arc of decline at around age 24.

“It’s not fair,” you might think, “20 is too young to start declining.” And I think anyone over the age of 20 would agree with you. But if you step back and look over the entire pantheon of human history, 20 is right at the cusp of our collective median age. 200 years ago the average lifespan was barely 40 years. Taking that into consideration, we should be having midlife crises and buying red convertibles all before we can legally drink.

The older I get the more apparent it is that these 21st century bodies of ours have yet to catch up with our ever-extending life expectancies.

We are increasingly outliving our own functional lifespan.

We all know that we begin aging the moment we’re born. Already my five-year-old daughter has creases in her skin from non-stop giggling and too much sun at the kiddie pool. We just don’t pay close attention to it until we’re older. When those creases become more prominent, when the weight is a little harder to keep off, and when our hair starts letting go a little easier.

It’s not until these midlife epiphanies hit us squarely across the chin that we begin to consider our lives might actually be finite just like everybody else’s. I mean, how many times do you really think about dying before age 30? Maybe you had a near-death or religious experience, lost a loved one, or had a moment of clarity at your high school graduation. On the whole, though, we plan out our lives as if they’re going to last forever. Somehow we’re going to rise above it if we just ignore it.

It’s only when your skin starts to sag a little that you snap back to reality: “Oh yeah, this body is probably only going to live another fifty years or so.”

This sucks.

Finding Fitness

I’ve always been pretty keen on working out and trying to at least maintain a healthy weight. I kept up pretty well with it through my twenties. There was safety in the routine of it. I also think I inherited an irrational–though maybe healthy?–fear of getting overweight. So, my thinking was that if I could just stay a step ahead, I’d be able to head off my metabolism before it completely dropped off the cliff. This really just meant that I flailed my arms and legs on an elliptical in my parents’ basement roughly three times a week. It worked for me only because I didn’t completely hate it.

And then a revelation hit me in the summer of 2009 when a friend introduced to me the wild, wonderful world of cycling. Yes, I’m talking about Lycra bicycle shorts, clip-in pedals, carbon fiber frames, the whole bit. It was fun, if only because it was completely different from any other fitness strategy I had attempted previously. Frankly, I just enjoyed it.

I’m not much of a runner–or an athlete, for that matter–so the simplicity of biking was something I embraced wholeheartedly. It was something I was finally good at. I bought a decently nice bike and while at a shop getting “fit” for it, the trainer noted that I had a nice pedal stroke. A nice pedal stroke! I was made for this.

So I went for it full speed and racked up a lot of miles in my first few years. I took a hiatus after moving from Ohio’s expansive countrysides to the congested suburban streets of Kansas City. But then in 2011, I worked up the nerve and started wading through traffic and working my way back in to it. It was true love. I passed 2,000 miles on my bike in 2012 after nearly three seasons of riding.

And then my daughter was born.

For those without children: basically, the birth of your first child is this unalterable, drastic upheaval in whatever form of a priority structure you once had. And one that you’re pretty certain you’ll never bounce back from. Up is down and down is less sleep. Oh, sleep. How you can’t wait until they’re asleep! (I’ll talk more on parenthood in future post).

Over two years in, I’d like to say that my workout regimen has normalized since Audrey’s birth, but that just isn’t a reality:

Bicycle rides in the year 2012 alone: 53
Bicycle rides since Audrey’s birth: 57

I’m getting back into it but I’ve had to adjust expectations. There just isn’t enough time in the day. Kids take up so much of it, and deservedly so. It’s hard work but I doubt anyone with kids would trade them for anything. Even our fitness.

When I was a younger man, I often looked sideways at parents that let themselves go after they had kids. “Convenient excuse”, this all-knowing punk used to think. “Just you wait”, they’d mouth back through an all-knowing grin.

When you break my day down now, the time I spend with my kids overlaps nearly completely with the time I used to spend cycling or working out. And I’ve learned to be OK with that. It just means I have to work a little harder to find something else to steal time from. Usually, it’s from television. Or from typing up blog posts such as this.

Really, when I get a chance to work out, I’m also working out for my kids. The better shape I’m in today will almost certainly have to translate into a happier and healthier dad tomorrow, right? And eventually, a happier and healthier grandpa for them to take care of somewhere down the line. All the more reason to hit the bike and the gym with whatever waning moments I have left in the day.

It’s hard to admit this to teenager-me or 20-year-old-me, but an extra 10-15 pounds just isn’t that big of a deal at this stage of the game. And you care less about those extra pounds the older you get. It’s just life. There are plenty of other important things to worry about.

So that’s what I think when I see other parents now. I commiserate. I get it. This stage of life is rough. It’s a boxing match with entropy.

And the body blows only hit harder and come faster the older you get.

In the next post, we’ll season in a little upside with this whole “your body in your thirties kind of sucks” thing. Thanks for reading!

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Intro: The Middle Chapters

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 11:00:00 +0000

Midlife is what happens after the credits roll.

No matter how you slice it, midlife is just a uniquely and profoundly unremarkable period of life. By it’s very definition, it is an age between other ages. It’s interstitial, domestic, and unexceptional.

I think this is mostly because middle age is a stage of life that is, by-and-large, bereft of any major milestones. Compare that with your teens and twenties: society grants those age ranges so many baked-in rites of passage. Every year there’s something new:

Driving!
Graduating!
Voting!
Drinking!
Career[ing]!
Marrying!
Birthing!
More drinking!

But then, what’s next? Realistically, a whole lot of nothing.

Midlife feels like it could seemingly go on forever. It is “a book without any structure, sentences, periods, commas, paragraphs, chapters…or punctuation.” And so, without any of these built-in cultural chapters, you can quickly find yourself slipping into one fantastically dreadful existential breakdown.

You might even call it by it’s more popular name: a midlife crisis.

I first started writing on my experiences growing up and getting older soon after my 33rd birthday. Life was speeding by so fast up to that point that it was honestly the first time I recall thinking to myself, “Y’know, I’m kind of starting to get old.”

Your thirties are that tweener age range that, as a kid, you can remember your parents being, but never dedicated much forethought to reaching yourself. When you’re young, it’s just some far-off dot on the horizon. That boring mid-point between “younger” and “older”. It’s Marty McFly watching his dorky-dad-self in the way distant future of 2015.

I can’t say what it was specifically about turning 33 that tripped a breaker in me the way it did. Maybe it was realizing that I had officially reached “the age of the Lord”. You know, the age when Jesus decided he’d had enough of his human existence and kicked it into high-gear back to heaven. (He had to know what he was doing, right?) Maybe it was the realization that virtually every pro athlete essentially reaches the washed-up phase of their careers around age 33 (the one exception being LeBron, of course).

Or maybe it was that little bit of extra hurt I started to feel in my knees the day after I ran at the gym. Or the slight twinge of anxiety that shot through my gut when I realized how quickly my children were growing. Or the expanding list of doubts about beliefs I was so certain of all those years before.

The best part of middle age is finding the perfect balance between anxiety about the future and regret about the past.
— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) February 4, 2015

Maybe it’s because your 33rd year is right about when the full weight of “getting old” starts to set in. You’re starting to get a better picture of the frailty of your own body and the brevity of your own life. It’s roughly the age when you realize that if you’re not doing what you want with your life by this point, then maybe it’s time to start re-thinking your priorities. And if you’re not who you want to be by now, it’s likely time for a full-on sea change.

It can be a bit disorienting, yes. But I’m learning that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

And so, now that I’m smack dab in the middle of my thirties, I have come to recognize just how crucial this time of life is. The middle is where the work happens. This is the proverbial “nose to the grindstone” portion of your life. It’s where things get done. It’s where you become:

A better driver
An informed voter
A working professional
A seasoned partner
A mature parent
A craft beer drinker

Midlife may not be filled with many “firsts”, but it will almost certainly be filled with many of your life’s “bests”.

You may not be able to see it quite yet, so let me report back on my early findings from where I sit at this stage of the game: your midlife crisis is a gift.

Your thirties are this sweet spot in the center and thick of it all. You’ve lived enough life to know what not to do, while still possessing the agency over yourself and your choices to be able to do what you want to do. Yes, midlife can be unremarkable. But it’s also this rare presentation of a second chance that we are afforded allowing us to regroup, refresh, re-purpose, and redirect. Getting a handle on your fragility may just be the wake-up call you need to remind yourself that you’re still in this thing. And you’ve got a long way left to go!

And so, I’ve resolved that if there are no inherent dividers in this section of the book, then I am just going to have to create them myself. If society isn’t going to hand me any punctuation during these interminable middle years, then dammit, I am going to add my own exclamation points.

And just like my expanding waistline can attest, there is a lot to love in the middle.

Speaking of waistlines, next up we’ll look at what growing up into a midlife body looks like. I promise, it’s not all bad! Click here for Part 1: A Grown Up Body…

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

A Midlife Guide To Growing Up

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 12:00:00 +0000

I really thought I’d feel grown up by now.

I mean, aren’t your thirties when you’re supposed to have life figured out? And if not figured out, than at least well on your way. Or I guess that’s what I had always assumed. In my younger years, if I ever looked ahead to life as a middle-aged man, I could only envision that future version of myself as someone who thoroughly had it all together. A married man? Yes. A family man? Sure. A career man? Naturally. And of course, the wisdom that would accompany each new phase.

This, as I have discovered, is not actually how life works. Just because you’re getting older in age, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “growing up”. Wisdom isn’t just knowing more than you used to. It’s having the humility to acknowledge that the older you get, the less you truly know.

Just because the tree adds another ring, doesn’t mean it’s grown any closer to the sun.

And so I started to think about what it looks like to actually grow up. To grow upwards while also growing outwards. To grow taller while also growing deeper.

The in’s and out’s of everyday life in your thirties don’t make it easy for many extended periods of introspection. However, once you open up that door, it’s near impossible to close. Never have I had such a simultaneous flood of answers, epiphanies, and transformational self discoveries flying at me all at once. And because there must always be balance in the force, those answers inevitably come laced with their own new set of deeper, harder, and more existential questions.

So I felt like I needed to start writing a few things down.

Originally, I had hoped to just post these musings in three simple blog posts touching on the themes of getting older and growing up. But all of the sudden, here I am three-plus years later with a likely ten-part series on my hands.

I’m calling what follows a “guide” not because it is in any way definitive; I can only speak to the parts that the soles of my shoes have touched so far. I’m by no means attempting to claim any expertise on midlife as a whole. I’m writing this more as a compendium for myself: to remember back to what life was like during this time period and to also challenge myself for the journey ahead.

It’s part memoir, part advice column, part commentary, part confessional, and part gag reel.

It’s a lot, I know. However, I am hopeful that by releasing this thing one small chunk at a time it might promote some thought, perusal, or even a little discussion.

Maybe you won’t find yourself relating with much or any of this at all, and that’s fine! There isn’t anything fantastical or hyperbolic here. Just the middle aged tales of a middle class dude from Middle America. Maybe you’re picking up on a theme here?

Part of the reason I wanted to write these thoughts in blog form, is so that if you ever happen to find yourself lost somewhere down the road, these posts can be a reminder that there are plenty of others out here treading a similar path. Plenty of thirty-somethings also trying to get a hold on their mortality and significance. Plenty of young parents feeling stuck in a neverending grind of messy diapers and messier finances. Plenty of once-believers wondering where that simple and easy faith of their youth ran off to. If my hemming, hawing, and fumbling through this stage of life can save somebody just a few clicks back of me a little pain and disappointment, then I suppose I’m fulfilling at least one of my duties as a true grown up.

Because in the end, we’re all just growing up together.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” - C.S. Lewis

Here’s a rough road-map of where we’ll be going over the next few weeks and months. I’ll come back and update here as a new chapter is released. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Intro: The Middle Chapters
Part 1: A Grown-Up Body…
Part 2: Middling Age
Part 3: A Grown-Up Soul…
Part 4: Life In The Future
Part 5: Forever Summer
Part 6: The Golden Age (Coming June 25th)
Part 7: Present Nostalgia (Coming July 2nd)
Part 8: A Grown-Up Spirit… (Coming Late Summer)
Part 9: Title TBD (Coming Late Summer)
Part 10: Title TBD (Coming Late Summer)

P.S. - If you’re new to me or my blog, the About page might be a great place to get yourself up to speed on who I am and just what I am attempting to do with this blog.

P.S.S. - I’m a big fan of making mixtapes for my friends. And since we’ll be spending some time together over the next few weeks, I decided to make you a mixtape to accompany you on this little journey we’re going on together. These are songs that either influenced me on my journey in the past or inspired my writing in the present. I’ll make sure to include a link to it in every future post so that you can listen along as you read along.

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

A Grey Christmas

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 14:56:56 +0000

I prefer winter and Fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

~Andrew Wyeth

At this point, the majority of us are well aware that our Lord Jesus Christ’s birthday was not actually December 25th. And yet, that is where tradition continues to plant the western world’s most illustrious holiday. (Due to, you know, solstices and things of this nature.)

Those of us in flyover states, and generally anywhere but Florida and California, are also quite aware that weather-wise December is not the cheeriest month of the calendar year.

In fact, it’s often the bleakest.

And so we dream of White Christmases, because we know that if it’s not white and fluffy outside, it will most likely be grey and depressing. Without the spectacle that is the Christmas holiday season taking up most of our attention — and with seasonal affective disorder in full swing, December would be an undeniable downer of a month.

I love this about Christmas. I love that it’s plumb smack in the middle of the drabbest month of the year. It’s not quite orange and Indian Summer-y like the months preceding it, and it’s not yet cold and crystalline like the upcoming dead of winter. It’s literally half-autumn and half-winter. It’s muddy, stark and matted.

At this point I could draw a parallel between the eponymous holiday and the act of the Son of God himself coming down into our grey, dreary existence and bringing pure, white heaven to earth some 2,000 years ago. But that analogy has been made time and again already. So I’m going to hang back on the dreariness for just a bit.

I’m a day-before-Christmas kind of guy. I love the build-up to the actual day-of. The anticipation and the mystery of the season. I love the wonder. There’s this palpable quality to it that we try to put into words, but just can’t.

Like in all our gloomy Christmas songs. What other joyous holiday do you know of that has so many songs written about it in minor keys? I made a mixtape/CD/playlist of some of my favorites a few years back and it’s become the highlight of my annual Christmas music experience, when I actually let myself listen to Christmas music, that is (usually after December 1st, plus or minus a week).

There’s a lot of Sufjan on there, naturally, but there’s also a few renditions that some friends have recorded. And it perfectly captures the greyest qualities of Christmas that I enjoy.

Growing up in Ohio also helped bake plenty of dreariness in to the holiday for me. Grey is practically Ohio’s state color (along with scarlet, of course). My wife makes fun of me, but when we go home to visit over Christmas, I like to just drive around a while and take it all in. I miss the inherent malaise. It’s nostalgic and melancholic all at the same time.

And then we finally arrive at the day of Christmas itself, which comes first bright and gleaming. But then it slowly cedes back to grey as well. The anticipation soon follows. The tree is laid bare, the gifts are opened, and everyone’s back to their phones. The wonder is gone, the mystery is over, and the doldrums set back in.

For the last 10–15 years or so, some good old friends — who have mostly all left our small Ohio home towns — reconvene back in the creaky apartment above the garage that used to be our regular hangout. We call it our Post-Holiday Blah’s Party. We catch up on weddings, children, and divorces. We reminisce. And we do our damnedest to fight off those blah’s.

It’s one more soiree to keep us going. One more festivity to look forward to. One more thing to keep our minds off the mid-winter dreck we’re about to re-enter.

There’s something glorious about this time of year that we all seem to nod and acknowledge in one way or another. The giving, the magic, the love shared amongst next of kin. The calm. There’s some great joy that’s waiting to burst forth in this season of dearth. It’s trapped and we’re doing our best to claw at it and prod it out into the light.

We see just enough of it every year that it keeps us merry. Festive. Full of hope.

But it only comes in hints and whispers. And so we strive. And wonder. And keep the mystery alive for another season.

And all within this beautifully miserable shade of grey.

This post was originally published here.

The 50 States of Grief Project

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 14:13:16 +0000

Sufjan Stevens’ deep dive into death on “Carrie & Lowell”.

Disclaimer: I’m an unabashed Sufjan super-fan.

I know there were many of us out there hoping this latest effort, out March 31, 2015 on Asthmatic Kitty Records, was a return to Sufjan’s early 2000’s form. While there is plenty of banjo strummin’ to keep the purists from tuning out, Carrie & Lowell marks a fairly significant departure from the folk innocence we’ve all come to know and love.

Admittedly not more so than 2010’s techno-glitch-heavy Age of Adz, mind you, but that record at least had plenty of Sufjan’s trademark lightheartedness spaced evenly between it’s drabber moments. “Too Much” and “Get Real, Get Right” were good examples, even if he tried to drown that eagerness out with beeps and zooms in minor keys.

When I heard the first sampling of this new album, I don’t think I was alone in secretly praying that the textbook Sufjan youthful exuberance was back after a brief, trippy, digital detour. The kind of exuberance that was once accompanied by lilting orchestrations that rose to climactic explosions of flute, cymbals and spiritual exclamations. Orchestrations that fit perfectly with innocent, carefree lyrics that seemed to masterfully describe this undisturbed, uncomplicated life that we all wanted to exist somewhere. Lyrics that evoked idyllic images of young unrequited love, effortless faith, and child-like hope for the future.

Put simply, Carrie & Lowell lays these notions to rest. This is Sufjan grown up and stripped bare. Those of us who were lobbying for a record full of “The Dress Looks Nice On You” sound-a-likes might be a tad disappointed to find out it’s a lot more “John Wayne Gacy” in nature.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that this album is very literally just Sufjan and his banjo. It took me a few listens through to realize that there really isn’t a lick of percussion anywhere to be found. No wind instruments. No grand orchestrations. Instead, reverberated vocals, ethereal pads and spacey guitars do their best to fill the gaping sonic void.

Since Sufjan is fairly secretive about his recording process, I like to imagine that he took a Johnny Cash American Recordings approach with Carrie & Lowell. Wherein, he sat down with banjo in hand and sang and played his way through each song while Rick Rubin came along later, layering in just enough complexity behind Suf to get the song’s point across. Except maybe instead of Rick Rubin it was Sufjan’s buddies in The National doing the dirty work.

The lyrical fare hovers nearly entirely around the death of Sufjan’s mother, the eponymous Carrie, who passed away last year. The tension of their relationship (she left their family when Sufjan was very young) and the confusion he feels after her death are both themes that are layered on thick throughout the record. That dynamic, while it lends itself to some very rich songwriting, left me struggling to connect emotionally as I have yet to deal with such grief in my own life.

The honesty that flows out of each one of these new batch of songs, however, is very palatable. Probably more so than any Sufjan record yet, I’ll give it that. The subject matter obviously lends itself to this. Carrie & Lowell is a son coming to grips with the pain of a parent’s death and attempting to file away the pain that was caused by that parent’s reckless life.

After a week of regular listening, “Fourth of July” is oddly the song that has stuck with me most. I think it’s because it’s the most un-Sufjan-like song he’s released to date. Rather than layered wispy vocals declaring the coming of the Lord, it plays as an intimate conversation between he and his dying mother and culminates with his naked voice numbly deadpanning “We’re all going to die…” throughout the final few refrains. It marks the thematic climax of the record and also it’s most downward-looking point.

It’s not all death and depression, though. “Should’ve Known Better” starts slowly but ends up just about as joyous as I would suppose a grieving man could muster. This apex arrives as Sufjan encourages himself “don’t back down…nothing can be changed” and beams over his brother’s daughter and “the beauty that she brings”. A few rays of sunlight do wind up breaking through after all.

This, frankly, is not the Sufjan album that I wanted. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the one I needed. A pared back, mature record that speaks honestly and directly with little-to-no frills. I guess that’s what I should be wanting, anyways. Much like Sufjan, it’s probably time for super-fans like myself to stop pining for the past and grow up a little bit ourselves.

Let’s all just hope that it isn’t another five years until we have new Sufjan Stevens material to keep pushing us along.

This post was originally published here.

Hate Before Love

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I have this quirk. I tend to hate things that I wind up falling in love with.

It happens a lot with new apps. I think an idea is stupid and write it off, then it comes back around to woo me. Twitter is one example. I signed up in 2008, but didn’t start using it until 2010. Now it’s the first app I go to on my phone.

It’s happened even more often with music.

Back around 2000, a good friend wanted me to download & burn him a copy of this new British band he had just heard of. For some reason, I instantly couldn’t stand them. Something about their sound irked me, like they were just sampling The Bends era Radiohead.

A few years later, I heard “In My Place” on a TV show and had to know what band it was. Well, it was obviously Coldplay. I had missed the boat, they were pretty good. After that, I couldn’t get enough. And then I had to get caught up on Parachutes, which everyone was sick of back in 2000.

And then there was Springsteen. I didn’t have any friends into The Boss, I just hated him on mostly political grounds. I was a fairly heavy conservative back around 2004 and he was prominent in the Democratic opposition to The Iraq War and George W. Bush. Something about his political activism struck me the wrong way, so I wrote him and his American-blue-collar-rock off.

Fast forward to the spring of 2008. I had just started course-correcting myself back to being a moderate. I was beginning to think towards voting for Barack Obama. But it wasn’t anything political that turned me on to The Boss, it was purely a chance musical encounter: I was at a Margaritaville in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The cheesiest place you can be, really. I overheard a live version of “Waiting On A Sunny Day” on the restaurant radio. The cheesiest Boss song you could play (though you could debate that award goes to “Cadillac Ranch” just as easily).

Something about it hooked me. His live show energy. The huge E-Street sound. Something. I went back to our vacation condo and downloaded every Springsteen album I could. From that moment, I was a Boss fan. He’s become one of my all-time favorite artists. I’ve seen him live twice and hope to again many times.

Now, if those were the only two examples of this phenomena, I wouldn’t think much of it. But I could recite similar stories of heavy distaste for many of my favorite bands/artists now: mewithoutYou, Beirut, Broken Social Scene, The National, and on and on. With varying levels of initial distaste.

It’s the strangest thing to me. Maybe I am just too skeptical. Maybe it just takes a second and a third try to sway me around. And honestly, I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it just takes that much more to convince me that something’s worth more than one listen.

So if you want to know if you have a really great idea or a hot new sound, let me take a gander. If I don’t like it, you probably have something worthy on your hands there. In the meantime, I’ll just take stock of the things I hate right now and prepare myself for a few years down the road when they’ll be the only thing I talk about.

Ghost States

Part 5: Forever Summer

A ‘Lil Squirt & A Smiley Guy

Slow It Down A Measure

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Part 4: Life In The Future

Soul-mate

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Part 3: A Grown Up Soul...

Time Is Tickin’ Away

Gone. Just Like That.

Images not from my personal camera roll are provided by Unsplash. Illustrations created using Assembly.

Part 2: Middling Age

Ryan Tries A Tri

Rarefied Air

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Part 1: A Grown Up Body...

Finding Fitness

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

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Intro: The Middle Chapters

A Mixtape Guide To Growing Up:

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A Midlife Guide To Growing Up

Table of Contents

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A Grey Christmas

This post was originally published here.

The 50 States of Grief Project

Sufjan Stevens’ deep dive into death on “Carrie & Lowell”.

This post was originally published here.

Hate Before Love