Angels Among Us

Lance has regretfully been on a sabbatical from his blog since returning home at the end of July. You may remember he drove straight through from Memphis to Silver Spring after losing his front bumper, grill and engine pan to a errant piece of truck tread. He arrived home to dismal tales of the heat, humidity and power outages that plagued his brave children throughout July. Within days, he packed up his youngest son and drove off to Maryland Leadership Workshops at Washington College in Chestertown, MD on the Eastern Shore where he spent two days reliving his own workshop experience 40 years earlier at that very same college campus.

The following week, the entire family headed for the blessed cool and green of Bar Harbor, Maine for their annual pilgrimage and then a week at even cooler, greener Moosehead Lake, in the North Woods. (There is a "Maine 2010 Slide Show" and a "MLW Slide Show" complete with music, always available on his MacBook Pro for the truly curious. Come to think of it, if a picture is truly worth a thousand words, Lance "video-blogged" his ever-lovin' heart out in August!)

Still, why Lance didn't feel the need to write during this month long "Lance With Family" chapter of his sabbatical is a mystery. It would be easy to say he filled up his blogging time with the inevitable responsibilities of providing food, housing and entertainment for 8 people. It's hard to meaningfully reflect on cosmic issues when you're playing tour guide and hotelier. But one makes time for what is important, even in Maine.

Or, it might simply be because he had taken a public oath NOT to be on the computer in Maine, in the fervent hope that his video game addicted children would take the same pledge of computer abstinence (which they did!)

But, on a deeper level, he ultimately surmised that living a full month being fully present with his family was a wiser use of this precious time than sitting in a corner, pounding away on a keyboard, mumbling things like "Dear Diary..."

So, here he is now, on the last day of August 2010. It is also the first day of REAL LIFE, as most people know it. School started today. Summer ended and traffic jams reflected the return of the workforce to their daily commute patterns. Surprisingly, Lance found himself up and out by 7:00 AM rushing to deliver his son to high school when the school bus failed to show up.

Quickly, Lance decided such crack o' dawn heroics deserved a trip to Panera, his old workaday morning haunt, as a reward for such fast response to a crisis. Besides, it represented a gentle nudge back into the usual morning routine of his past 15 years at a different Panera in search of pre-work solitude. This time, he didn't have to be at work by 9:00 AM so the prospect of a toasted whole wheat bagel, endless Hazelnut coffee, and the morning paper beckoned suggestively.

It's worthwhile pausing here to remind the gentle reader that, if nothing else, Lance's trip had taught him the value and magic of the unintended encounter, the serendipitous event, the karma net that is always fishing for the rare and wonderful better-than-one-could-ever-have-planned-moment. Lance once compared it to walking through water on stones hidden beneath the surface, ever guided sure-footed and confidently toward a new destination on the other side. Lance now trusted in such adventures and accepted them as the norm when living "The Summoned Life" instead of "The Well-Planned Life."

To review, in the Summoned Life, each day is a journey wherein adventure is just around the corner, but always out of sight. Here, there is an open-ended time frame, flexible routes to travel, and progress can't be measured until the morning after. Conversely, In the Well-Planned Life, each day is a strategic trip with a predictable destination, strict timetables, a a route direction designed explicitly to avoid detours, and a slew of defined outcomes to measure forward progress.

Unfortunately, most of us work very hard to make our life well-planned when we should be working harder to leave it open to fates and destinies we can't predict. Among the treasures tp be gleaned are love, luck, wonder, miracles and surprises. The critical difference is, when serendipity knocks, do you give yourself permission to open the door and chat? The hardest part is actually believing...even knowing, it will knock. Today, it knocked.

And so it came to pass, while Lance was standing in line for his bagel and coffee, he bumped into a friend he'd been meaning to call since he had started his sabbatical two months ago. They sat down in a booth and what started as a polite and inconsequential conversation, soon turned into a no holds barred, straight forward, compellingly honest, self-revelatory purge of his journey, it's meaning, roads-not-taken, and mysteries yet to be explored. It went on for two hours. Amazingly, it was fully mutual. For every admission, regret, joy or longing Lance revealed, his friend had a complementary, technicolor, visionary, all-consuming passion equally aligned as if living in a parallel universe. How did that happen? What made it such a right place, time, person thing? One thing was for certain. Lance didn't have to run off this time. That made all the difference. We need time to dwell, reflect, imagine, play, invent, and conceptually dance. We need time to hear our own thoughts, and the thoughts of others and then take them to the next plane of possibility. If there is such a thing as a quantum leap forward in a friendship, this was it. Unplanned. Unforeseen. Unprecedented.

But not unexpected. During the month of July he spent with family, the most dramatic change he noticed Lance was the increased number of significant conversations he had with his family simply because he was no longer distracted or interrupted. Just being there, willing to listen to someone, sends a message that no time conscious, schedule-driven parent or friend can fake. And when that moment is given its full measure, Lance discovered, most people actually want to talk. And when Lance learned to swallow his immediate impulse to respond, to solve or to fix the problems, they talked even more. Irt turns out a good listener, listens.

With strangers on the road, Lance had been surprised with his own struggle to make conversation. One night in a motel room in North Carolina, he carefully listed the steps needed to engage a stranger, dispel fear, build trust, establish mutual interest, seek information, and then gently disengage and exit. In his professional role back at work, he could always fallback on his institutional context with strangers. They were on his turf and he held the cards. Same thing held true in workshop settings where he routinely stood in front of fifty Type A strangers. But Lance always controlled the agenda.

But on the road, he had no portfolio, no standing, no constituency and nothing to build on. Other than mundane topics like the weather, the opening encounter was always delicate. Politics, the economy, even TV shows and movies were iffy propositions with strangers, especially when the culture was small town and a guy wandering around with no obvious purpose couldn't be normal. Caution won.

Lance soon discovered with men, seeking directions or local information was always a safe bet. Guys like to provide answers and solve problems. Women, however, were tricky. After overcoming the initial fear for their own safety (no small thing with a male stranger) they seemed to respond best when protected by a professional role...waitress, hotel clerk, visitors center guide, etc. Starting a conversation with a single woman, out of a workplace context, was terrifying, both for the women and for Lance. Handing his crafty Three Questions card to a waitresses sometimes earned him only suspicious looks and a quick exit. Some even handed it right back like it was a bank robber's note to a teller. Strange. Lance hadn't expected to have such a hard time connecting,

But now, this morning's conversation was simply extraordinary. There was a pre-existing friendship, of course. But now Lance was able to listen more deeply than before his journey. Perhaps, he had more quality thoughts to share, new perspectives on life or a greater capacity to empathize with someone else's journey, in light of his own. Perhaps, for the first time, he finally took enough time to savor the many thoughts, dreams and even life plots they invented. Whatever the reason, he came away more exhilarated, renewed and confident of his relationship to this person than ever before.

There are moments when Life takes us by the shoulders and shakes us alive, again. To still be able to connect so vividly and deeply is a blessing Lance had forgotten. It reminded him that there are angels and they walk among us every day. We just have to stop and make time to listen to them.