A Ghost You Can’t See

My Facebook feed is filled with people screaming at each other but no one is listening to what the other guy is yelling about so it feels more a steel cage wrestling match than a conversation.

I know why they are yelling. I understand much if not most of the various sides but this time around I am not wading into the middle of the muck because I don’t have the bandwidth to fight with people who haven’t any interest in listening to opinions that differ from their own.

There is no upside to that. I haven’t any interest proving that I can yell louder and longer. There are no rewards for such a thing so for now I’ll sit back and wait.

Besides I am too busy fighting the dragons that live in my world to look away for very long. Fighting is the one thing I have always been good at. It is easy to be a scrapper, to be the guy that does more than give as good I get.

The young man I used to be kind of got off on that but the wiser, more mature fellow asks what it has done for me and shakes his head.

I am thinking about fear and pride again. Thinking about how they influence me and how they influence you.

Thinking about how when people let fear push them into action they don’t always make smart choices. Thinking about how I use the blog to try and name my fear so that I can pull it out of the shadows and confront it.

Yet my fear is no less frightening in the daylight than in the dark.

Pride pushes me to find a way to prove I have beaten it down and pushed it into a box from which it can’t escape but that doesn’t always work out the way I might hope for.

Sometimes I hear the demons rattling their chains and howling. Sometimes I hear them find a way free of their fetters but I don’t always race down the stairs to recapture them.

I don’t always do the noble thing because fear overcomes me and I feel diminished, less of a man.

And then pride finds a way to stop licking his wounds and raises his head.

“Are you going to be like that guy in the Lightfoot song, ‘A Ghost You Can’t See’ or are you going to show them all you are man.”

Part of me wants to pull that guy out of his grave and ask him what he would have done without money, opportunity and luck.

Part of me dares him to tell me that he didn’t benefit from good timing and good fortune.

But I am not really interested in debating with him how, what or why led him to his position because it doesn’t really matter. It is not my real focus.

I am more interested in figuring out how many times the sun has risen and set since I was born. More interested in laying it out so that I can measure my performance against some sort of benchmark that lives only inside my head.

The numbers push me back to what Jobs said and I nod my head because it is a mistake for me to focus upon him as a high powered CEO who had enough money to do whatever he wanted to.

That is an excuse. It is a reason not to pay attention to the message in those words that I am meant to see.

I am supposed to follow my gut. I am supposed to follow my heart and not worry about it because in this situation it is just right.

Life is too short to spend our time making excuses for why we aren’t putting all we can into living the kind of life we really want to live.

• Saved: Life