Not just another Hotel Room

Another hotel room; another overnight bag that I have unpacked; another set of clothes that I have ironed, laying out; another wi-fi system that is marginal; another day away from my family; another dirty, dingy rental car; another, another, another…… 

This is the way I was looking at life just a few short months ago.  I wasn’t really looking for a meaning in life; I was just looking for the experience of being alive.  I just didn’t feel alive when I was away from my family; life away from them was getting pretty boring.

A fact of my life, is that I have chosen a career that keeps me from my family at times.  I have always missed them, but when away I could always do something to make me feel alive.  Wether it was work, hiking, biking, running, hanging at the hotel lobby bar, visiting friends or just doing stuff with the crew; I could always find something to do that was not boring.  For me, this job got terribly boring a few months ago.

As I sit in this hotel room tonight though, I look out at the lights of Wichita, Kansas and I see potential, hope, new experiences, and a new passion for something I have always loved to do.  I just get to approach this career that I love, from a different vantage point.  And I get this feeling from doing something as boring as revising a document that has been passed on from several people.  Now it is on my desk for me to put my fingerprint on – to attach my personality to it.  I’m humbled that someone want’s my opinion and values it – outside of my family and my friends. 

Tonight, I don’t sit in just another hotel room. 

…running through my mind…

Communism and Corvettes

I have run with a couple of friends this week and had lunch with a few as well, and there is this over-riding theme that we don’t really talk about, but you can tell it is there.  That theme is that we are all just trying to get by, make a paycheck, pay the bills, do what we can to not get laid-off, and press on (go to bed, get up in the morning, and do it again).  There seems to be no time for passion or time for us to reflect and attempt to write a new – or a different – story for our lives.  At least in the movie Groundhog Day, Phil Conners gets to change how he approaches each day.  We seem to be stuck in the same day, yet feel as though there is nothing we can do about it. 

Have we always been this way, yet I’m just now seeing it?

This over-riding theme seems to slip into most of the conversations I have anymore.  Sometimes it is directly addressed; other times it is the elephant in the room.  Yet, I can feel its power over the conversation.

Is it just me?  Am I the pessimistic one now; poisoning those around me with negativity?  (I swore I’d never be that person, but could I be…..)

Is it the economy?   (Forget that I asked that, it’s too easy to say, “Ya, it’s the economy”)

During my drive home from running this morning, I started thinking about Russia and how hopeless their citizens were back in the middle to late part of the last century.  Russians had everything they needed to survive, yet from what I was taught in school, they had no ability to change their plot in life (or so they thought).  Let me repeat myself; they had everything they needed to survive.   Why were they so hopeless?  Was it the Communist regime?  Could it have been that there was nothing to fight for?  Wasn’t everything already provided?  Why the hopelessness?

Is there a link here?  

Is it possible to get passionate about something if all of our needs are met?   

Do our survival needs make us passionate people?

What if, once our survival needs are taken care of, we were programmed to start focusing on other people’s survival needs?  There is something I could get passionate about….

Or I could go take out a loan and buy a mid-life crisis Corvette.  I’d probably opt for a Black one; it would go well with my iPhone.

 

…running through my mind…