John McPhee says, “The essence of the process is revision.” He’s referring to writing, of course. But I have a hard time thinking of something about which that isn’t true. My garden, my hair, my living room, my life design, my relationships, my reading list, my parenting plan…most live on a conveyer belt under constant reconsideration. What could be better? What needs tweaking? What isn’t really working, at least not as it could? Continual inspection keeps the quality high and the pressure to be perfect low. We are works in progress as are most of the things we do.

What would you do if nobody paid you for it? Would you still sell houses or work on cars or do people’s taxes or deliver the news? Would you coach ball or drive a tractor or teach a class or build a boat? When your feet hit the floor in the morning, where is it that your heart can’t wait to go?

I’m not much of a New Year’s Resolutions girl.  But I do love lists. They sort of erect borders around slippery things that I’m afraid might slide away if I don’t step in and do my part to contain them. The ones in the notes on my phone, while a decent substitute when I’m on the go, don’t hold a candle to the real ones I make on the backs of envelopes--the ones that sometimes get re-written just so they can get re-arranged. Those carry gravitas in their etching. 

That’s how stuff gets done.

I clearly remember the first time I figured out how good it felt to set a goal and reach it. I was doing ball-handling drills in my Granny’s kitchen. Sounds odd, I know. But it was the perfect setup.

Every December—well, now it starts like the day after Halloween—people in America begin decorating for Christmas. Elaborate lights go up on the exterior of houses. Inflatable characters sprout up in front yards. Chairs get smashed into bedroom corners and lamps get shoved behind doors just so the interiors of our houses have space to accommodate a tree. 

We do what we do. 

We learn a great deal from those we follow about what to and not to do.  Some of it is write down worthy. Most of it is not. The majority of what we carry with us doesn’t even feel significant at the time when we absorb it. It just nestles in without much fanfare finding a comfy place to gestate. Then later, somewhere way on down the road, it serves us. Sometimes when we least expect it to.

Were you watching? I know there was Christmas shopping to do and there were leaves to rake and there was a World Cup to mourn. But on Saturday, I hope you got the chance to watch Max Duggan play. Even if you don’t care much for football. Even if you detest the brutality of the gladiator game or disagree vehemently with the commercialism that’s crept into all, but most particularly, this collegiate sport. I hope you watched the red-headed kid from Iowa who plays football in Ft. Worth. He’s why coaches coach and players play and people cannot get their fill of games.

Last week while driving down a side road that used to be classified as rural, I came upon one of those blinking speed indicators that sits beside the road and is used to get your attention when you’re going a little too fast. Typically, the device flashes the speed you are traveling at when you pass it. Sometimes, when you’ve greatly eclipsed the posted limit, the number will rapid-fire at you as if it’s screaming, trying to jolt you into attention to bring things down a notch.

During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal.  When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Every day an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the front few pews of the sanctuary of my mind. When I’d lay down at night, my head would be packed with all that had gone wrong. I knew a lot had gone right too, but for some reason it didn’t just naturally land in the front rows.  So I had to put it there. 

Several years ago, while working with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, we struck up a deal with Cintas, the professional uniform company that outfits everyone from chefs to fireman to surgeons, and all those in between.  I had never heard of Cintas at the time. I’d never worn a uniform of any kind (unless athletic jerseys count), nor had anyone in my family, so it never occurred to me that supplying them might be big business. After a presentation about who Cintas was as a company and how they functioned as a community with broader goals for all their people, I became a big fan.  When they agreed to a partnership with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund to sponsor our efforts in the fight against all women’s cancers, I became an even bigger fan. And then something funny happened.

I love a road that’s just about to bend. A season that’s just about to start. A concept that’s just about to jell enough to actually become a thing. Energy lives in those “just about” moments. The giddy kind that makes you think there is no lid on the sky. 

“Always” and “nevers” are skinny slivers with not much room for play, but “almosts” have lots of space where imagination can run and jump. The possibility that lies right around the corner from an “almost” beckons like a giant index finger curling itself back toward its palm.  You might get what you think you want.  You might get something better. You might not get anything but more of the same.  You might get a bottomless pit.  There is no way to know what’s coming.  Not really.  Even if you’ve been down that road a thousand times before.

“We do not apologize for our rigor here.” That’s how the president welcomes parents on day one to new student orientation at Carnegie Mellon University.  If you’re one of the exemplary 15% of high school applicants who gets an opportunity to attend there, sleep better not be high on your priority list.  And if you’re the parent of a student about to embark on the journey, you best leave your helicopter at home. They aren’t messing around. There’s no opening joke.  There’s no awkward drivel about the history of the place. No “Welcome!  Welcome!  Congratulations!” for producing such a prodigious child.  Just a clear cut, “You’d better get ready.”  A straightforward lay of the land.  

Little feet can’t resist big shoes. My granddaughter is closer to two than she is to one and nothing is more attractive to her than an empty pair of grown-up sneakers. Especially her mom’s. She’s determined, too. She’ll work with the focus of a surgeon to slide her feet underneath the laces and then willfully scoot around. Danger is at every turn in the giant kicks that are almost the length of her tiny little leg, and yet she doesn’t seem to notice or to care. It’s as if whatever risk is there is worth it; she will not be deterred. What she wants is to be what she feels like she is when she wears her mama’s shoes: Big.

“God can get tiny, if we’re not careful.” That’s how Gregory Boyle begins his book Tattoos on the Heart. First lines are a big deal.  First lines get readers to read second lines, and second lines get readers to read third lines.  And third lines give you a shot, if you’re a writer, to lasso someone’s heart.  Or if not their heart, at the least maybe their curiosity.

Gregory Boyle had me at hello.

It spills down the mountainside like the mixture of pines, cypress and firs that grow intermingled almost on top of each other. Wonder. The word, dressed in its noun finery, draws you in and then in an abrupt wardrobe change becomes a verb that carries on from there: inexplicable admiration followed by curious grappling of how such things can come to be.  The Rocky Mountain terrain is at once as much a teacher as it is a provider of incomprehensible juxtaposition. A continual “Watch This” from a God who whets our imagination and then gives us a hand-out with a bunch of “fill in the blanks.” 

Bad teams don’t win.  But lots of good ones lose. That’s a truth chiseled into the bedrock below the foundations of stadiums around the world, and yet competitors wish with all their might it wasn’t true. They get it, but they’d rather not. When you pour your heart and soul into a thing, you’d like to know the odds are high that you will get what you have paid for.  Unfortunately, in the world of sports, you can never be so sure. So much can go right and then one little flinch goes wrong and everything you thought you had falls out of the bottom of the bag. Maybe that’s why we love it so much, those of us who stay glued to it. The drama grows magnetic when nothing’s set in stone.

My granny used to say bad things come in threes.  If the washing machine breaks down, you can pretty much count on the air conditioner going out.  And when the air conditioner goes out, you better check on the spare tire in the trunk. A flat very well might be just around the bend. I don’t know that she or any of us ever believed it. All superstitions feel a little hokey to me. But it did seem to happen a lot. Looking back, I think the rule of three was more of an organizational tool used for coping than it was a rule of thumb.  A way of putting brackets around things so we could feel like we were in the clear for a while. But the truth of the matter is things just go awry. 

My first season at Oklahoma was an awkward uphill climb. Our team wasn’t very good, we didn’t understand yet how to work, I was a brand new college head coach, and we were entering a newly formed conference that had juggernauts at every turn. It was evident early that it could be a long, heavy year. When our starting post player quit before the end of the first week of practice, the long, heavy year turned into a boulder we’d ferociously push up the hill only to have it slide back down and flatten us day after day after day. Getting good was going to take a while. About that much, we were sure. So we set our sights on little wins we could cling to along the way. 

Peggy Noonan was President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter. In her book about him, When Character was King, she devotes a chapter to his humor. Finding the funny and creating it when there wasn’t any was one of Reagan’s gifts. I’ll paraphrase one of her stories in the interest of space and time:

When summer starts to fade, it does so into the vibrant colors of college football. Bands begin marching, cheerleaders start dancing, Lee Corso slips on some mascot’s head, and suddenly battle lines are re-drawn in permanent marker from Florida to Oregon and all spots in between. Stadiums and the towns who house them percolate. The air just feels different, even if the temperature hasn’t changed. Such is the enduring power of college football. Little has as much societal adhesive for a throng of people as the colors they are bound by in the fall.