I lost count around seven days of loses. Maybe five soccer matches? A dozen matches of jiu-jitsu punishment? At least yoga isn’t competitive and I only play the video games I can win against my sons.
It could have been easy to be deflated leading our team into a soccer tournament tonight to determine the league champion.
I can’t take credit for my positive attitude. God made me for adversity. He made me a magnet for positive people and messages. This afternoon I heard a meaningwave song from Akira the Don that used Jordan Peterson’s voice, “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” Yeah. That’s right, I can hijack the air of loss, the funk of defeat. I can stand tall, put a smile on my face, and be brazenly confident about leading a team into a tourney of largely younger guys (shit, some kids out there).
Our success was modest in the context of the tournament, but we won our first match and bravely faced the #1 seeded team of youngsters after a break of no more than fifteen minutes.. We stayed positive and worked together to carry ourselves with pride. We played our best matches of the short season.
Within the context of team success, a teammate took a moment to ask me about my success. He wanted to know how, at 41, I run like I do and play so hungrily.
I was kind of embarrassed at the compliment, but he pressed as he really wanted to know what my secret was. I gave him the God-made-me-crazy-for-chasing-things line and left it at that.
But I think there’s value in sharing more of my story. It’s taken great loss for me to get here.
By the end of 2017, we were a family of four who had found a beautiful church community and been baptized into Christ’s Way. We weren’t perfect, my eldest was acting out aggressively and my wife, Mary, and I knew we needed to work on our relationship. We were aware of the problems and working on them.
Not a couple months later, Mary got sick with influenza and strep infections. It was all unexpected and after six days in the hospital, she was gone. That was a losing streak to end them all.
In her final moments, Mary left me with a miraculous gift. I saw her rising to Heaven and, with her arms outstretched toward me, she sent a rainbow of Love into my heart. It was God’s Love, infinite. I didn’t have to worry about the loss of Love that I was experiencing, she had opened up an everlasting conduit that could never be closed.
As many widowers can attest, the first year after loss seems like an impossible dream amd nightmare. I chalk up my survival to an insanely positive attitude and an imbalance of adrenalin production. If not for those blessings, I imagine the drinking would have killed me. I had been a problem drinker for a long time, but now it was there on the darkest days of the nightmare.
I met a woman and stopped drinking because I wanted her and she wasn’t a fan of alcoholics. Mind you, I didn’t identify as such just yet, that’s why I thought I could turn it off to satisfy other desires.
It worked for a time, I even started going to AA and blogging about my newly discovered alcoholism. But it wasn’t for me in those first few months and when the relationship ended, I had to face exactly why I wasn’t drinking.
I read and listened and I came to Jesus’s words, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Again, Peterson helped by flipping that convention. We often take care of children, neighbors, and lovers better than we take care of ourselves. It seems altruistic until you realize that your ability to love comes from your self love. You can only love others as much as you love yourself.
I started a daily course of caring for myself. It started with some stretching and affirmations. I stopped going to AA meetings. I checked in with myself every day and remembered that feeling of infinite Love. Not drinking became too easy. I gave up fast food for myself and my boys. A small step in the right direction. I started therapy sessions for myself and my sons. I took up yoga and expanded my affirmations. I improved our diets, slowly decreasing meat consumption and greatly increasing the availability of fruits and vegetables in our lives.
2019 was a year full of little self improvements.
2020 promised more good. A new relationship with a beautiful, independent woman focused on her own self-love journey. A budding acting career, complete with talent agent, for my sons. A new grief support community, the first real place for my sons to work on their healing with other youth. I bought a used bike and started exploring our world farther and further with the boys.
The Lockdown took so much of it away. March got dark as friends disappeared and opportunities dried up.
We took to hiking and biking and getting out into as many places as we could, but heck, we were already doing that. Our experiences narrowed and I prayed for guidance on how to fulfill a promise I had made to give my sons a childhood full of exploration, wonder, and learning.
On April 1st I heard Wim Hof make some daring claims about how his breathing techniques had made his blood immune to pathogens like COVID-19. He posted at 40-day challenge and I started the next day. I’m pretty close to 120 days now. It only takes about 15 minutes and at least one cold shower per day, but when soccer returned, I discovered that I had lost very little of my cardio vascular stamina. When yoga returned, I learned that the techniques worked as well as, if not better than, stretching before class.
I’m reading philosophy and listening to history. I’m bettering myself everyday and doing my best to model that for my sons.
I engaged in some intense soccer training as games started to pop up, but had a drive for something new, something uncomfortable. I’m passable at soccer, even when losing I’m not likely to embarrass myself. Now Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ)? That is terrifying. I had heard Joe Rogan and Russell Brand and Anthony Bourdain discuss how punishing it was. Brand was especially explicit in imagining another man’s bowels full of excrement, pressing down on your chest. Yeah…no thanks.
I’ve developed a counter reaction to the mental voice that says, “No, thank you.” It’s a call to action. It’s the marker that signals, “Time to get uncomfortable, Jason.”
I’m only a couple weeks in and had a little guilt in skipping a class in preparation for the soccer tournament. But I’m glad I was able to show up with full strength for my teammates and have a good night. I can pick up an extra class next week.
I don’t have much to say about BJJ yet. I’ve collected a fat lip and sore elbow and the learning curve is as steep, energetic, and challenging as a salmon heading up a waterfall.
So there it is: find Jesus, go through incredible loss, quit drinking, honor your body with good food and good thoughts, play soccer, bike, hike, fall in love with yourself and as many others as you can stand, get crushed by every colored belt under the sun (white too), get serious about yoga and meditation, breathe in the Spirit of Life, and do all the little things that you can do today to better yourself.
With lots of Love,
Jason
