Last week, I wrote about how it bothered me that my grammar was so poor, and my writing was like vomiting words and thoughts with no appropriate restraint or reflection. Why did this bother me? Let’s face it, that was 47 years ago!
I think part of the problem is that I don’t like to think of myself at any age as so underdeveloped. However, the fact is, I was undeveloped, even for a 22-year-old. Let me suggest that I need to start thinking of myself as a late bloomer rather than an early star. Is there a qualitative difference between these two descriptors of extremes? I don’t think so, but the second reason that being labeled a late bloomer bothers me is because I thought of myself as always having been a deep and thoughtful thinker. But the evidence doesn’t seem to support this.
If one were to look at the first couple of decades of my life, I was pretty extreme. A short look at a few of these incidents during the first 20 years of my life would include:
- Broke my leg,
- Ripped neck muscles, which resulted in losing control of my head,
- Hit by a car going 60 mph,
- Stitches in my head, 8 different times,
- Food poisoning,
- Shot windows out of our house (from the inside),
- Several motorcycle crashes,
- Drove a car through the back of our brick garage (@ 14),
- Drove a car over 145 mph (on a busy main road)
- Threatened expulsion from school for leading a rogue cheerleading squad,
- Threatened expulsion from state park for pulling the stakes from other’s tents,
I am not proud of some of these incidents, but they are descriptive of a young man who was not a deep and thoughtful thinker! I pitied my parents, who tried to encourage yet encumbered me.
I am reminded of the quote from the book Raising Self Reliant Kids in a Self Indulgent World is, “…it is easier to tame a fanatic than to put life into a corpse.” I was clearly a fanatic of some sort, and these past 47 years have tamed me.
It would seem there were three significant factors (events) which began that taming in my life. The first, as I have written about before, was my surrendering my life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ at 20. The second factor, as I mentioned last week, was when I started to journal in my mid-twenties. This gave me the means and insight I needed for growth. Though others may not need journaling as much, given my extremes, I did. It was part of my taming.
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo DaVinci he writes:
In notes for his treatise on painting, Leonardo recommended to young artists this practice of walking around town, finding people to use as models, and recording the most interesting ones in a portable notebook: “Take a note of them with slight strokes in a little book which you should always carry with you,” he wrote. “The positions of the people are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, which is why you should keep these sketches as your guides.”
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo DaVinci
If DaVinci believed that about the way people look, it is so much truer in how we think or act. I have found in life, there are so many thoughts and feelings regarding God, ourselves, and others that the mind is not capable of retaining all of them. This is why it has been critical for me to write them down daily to keep a record of them and to learn from them.
The third and final factor in my taming was having kids, and I will deal with that next week.
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