Steve (and his missus) to the rescue!

Yesterday was a hard day. Last two weeks I've basically been gone all week, getting home sick late on Thursday nights.

No worse than your 80% biz traveler in general, and certainly no 15 months in Iraq. It's just that I've been doing this pretty much non-stop since Oct 2001, and it makes everything seem so intense all the time: all trips are packed, are audiences jacked, all schedules timed to the nth degree (Jenn's amazing role), and content that must be generated in huge chunks and shoved out the door. Add in the energizer bunny that is Steve and it gets awfully blurry at times. You come home and the place is a wreck because wife has been dealing with the pre-schooler, the grade-schooler, the mid-schooler and the high-schooler with her one pair of hands, one car, one everything. So your big non-sick day (today) disappears in one big clean-up that you try to make fun (e.g., Jerry performs Star Wars [can't tell which player] in front of me while I work out on the elliptical [can't forget that!] and listen to my Hewitt appearances on my laptop).

We'll spend all day fixing up the house and cleaning, Vonne and I will hit the Bowflex, then we're trying to talk our kids into "Star Trek IV" in the home theater with Tombstones and "free soda." Tomorrow I'll hit an early mass with the family and then bail for the next jaunt before noon. I'm looking at a serious overseas trip in Feb.

All these things are important. I get so many emails from people who say the material's getting through and changing things and making a difference and yet there are so many more to convince, and so I remain convinced that the work I do, coupled with the Enterra stuff Steve and I are creating, is having crucial impact. And you read something like Daily's piece and you say to yourself: Can I do more?

And then I realize how lucky I am to have Vonne.

And then I realize how nice it is to connect to people through the blog.

Yesterday I got this great piece of email from a Chinese Alzheimer's researcher. My guess is this person's born in China, came here for education, and stayed--for now--because of the research. Imagine devoting your life to something that important! Well, she (I'm guessing the sex here because the name was no hint!) sent me a nice letter and it really picked me up.

Everybody's holding down somebody else's fort. There's the guy who organizes all the servers at my church. Small thing, but it helps me immensely with my fort, giving my son Kevin this tremendous feeling of belonging and accomplishment and faith. No one probably ever asked him to step up. He just did. This guy won't cure anything (he's an apartment super, like I once was) and he won't catch any bad guys, and he won't foment any revolutionary change. But maybe he makes all those things possible for others, holding down one fort while so many more get built.

You sense that web, that network. You try to live up to its demands and its promise. You try sacrificing just enough while surrendering no more than is necessary, and you constantly recalibrate.

Thanks for giving me this venue in all its forms and functions. "Downhill" for me is just taking more than I give, and being such an inveterate performer (8 of 9, I always remind myself), that makes me feel sad.

But it's a good thing to network, to draw strength from others and to feel your strength drawn to them. Frankly, it's the low days that make me understand best why our victory in the Long War is both inevitable and quite right.

Connectivity is the basis and the purpose of all faith: the challenge is how you choose to use the strengths offered to attempt a widening of the circle.

In that sense, I have been offered many gifts in this life, and I intend to repay them all.

How'd Steve and his wife came to my rescue? It's called SinusRinse and it's OTC from NeilMed. Simple as the day is long. Almost too natural to call a medicinal cure. Think it's going to help me a lot. Steve, maven of mavens, connected me to his wife to clue me in, and for that I thank them both.

Comments

[GLASR]

Everyone loves you. You know it, they can't help it. Line up to show it. Guess is, the sinus stuff, did more for her than you.

[GLASR]

Take your 5 Iron and a bag of tees when you travel. Guess is, squared away describes what comes with, put the club in that 60mm tube with a sling you carry. Need a break? Hotel room, turn tee upside wrong, deliberate draw back, plink goes the tee, follow through. Waiting in a car, lobby, anywhere find that piece of Earth. Exploding into that tee can, ya know, therapeutic, like that. Try to avoid the tee in eye of room service trick though.