I fell asleep leaning against a brick wall. I fell asleep with my elbows propped up on my knees while reading a magazine. I fell asleep while lying on a picnic table with my arms crushed beneath me. I fell asleep mid-conversation with Mary. Third shifts are brutal. The brutality compounded by going straight to a second job after getting out of the first. One more week…

My comments here have been usurped. This album is simply stunning. I loved the last two Sigur Ros albums in particular but this one rocks their socks. Uplifting. Ethereal. Glorious. Evocative of a bouncing through an open snow field under a star-filled winter night sky. Which I suppose would make sense coming from an Icelandic artist. The album is called Takk…

I’ve been feeling a little introspective lately. Maybe from lack of sleep. Maybe a reaction to the kids I work with. I don’t know. Either way I’ve been noticing an underlying theme creeping into my day to day thoughts. A couple of quotes I’ve bumped into recently:

Sitting there , listening to my stomach growl, I started to understand things about myself I’d never thought to ask. I’d never gotten to a point like this where my entire sense of identity hung by a tiny sinew of ambition. Most people find a confort zone, which they sometimes stretch but never exceed. They live in there, thinking they know themselves. Some define that sense of identity in terms of what they can do. Others define it in terms of what they won’t do.

The military has known about this process for hundreds of years. It’s the psychological regeneration – the phoenix principle. You take a capable, earnest spirit, then break it down, strip away any trace of ego, dig a crater of insecurity and need. Then you fill it back up with dogma and ability and trust. The talent you started with becomes harder, forged of a different metal and tempered in another image.

You traveled the world… Now you must journey inwards… to what you really fear… it’s inside you… there is no turning back. Your parents’ death was not your fault. Your training is nothing. The will is everything. If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely. Are you ready to begin?

The first two quotes are from Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and the second, if you couldn’t guess from the pictures, is from Batman Begins. In Cold Zero, a book I just finished, the author describes his path into and through the ranks of the FBI with great emphasis placed on the internal struggles throughout basic training. It’s one of the better books I’ve read recently, written with great clarity, gripping detail, and a fascinating story. You also see the auithor’s strong sense of his own self pouring out onto the pages. He has clearly pushed himself to mind-boggling extremes, choosing challenge after challenge, and come through it with a great grasp of what his mind and body are capable of. And also with a sense of his life’s purpose. He’s faced the demon’s and fears and self-doubt. Result: inner strength, inner calm, purpose.

Batman Begins, which I saw in the theatre with Mary about a month ago, shares a similar idea. After Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered in front of him as a boy, Bruce grows up and wanders the earth in an attempt to understand himself and his place in the world. Ultimately his search leads him to the League of Shadows, a secretive warrior society based deep in the Himalayan mountains. It’s an exhausting search and even more exhausting battle to become one of the society. Just like the author of Cold Zero, Bruce emerges from his struggle free from fear and with a warrior strength. And with a sense of what he’s willing to dedicate his life to. Result: inner strength, focused anger, purpose.

So, my point is, I think to ever really know yourself (your fears, capabilities, dreams), you have to take some sort of journey of self-discovery. Some sort of challenge where all the external garbage is stripped away and you’re left with your thoughts, ambition, and survival instincts. But, of course, this is a tricky thing to pull off. We aren’t all billionaires or lucky enough to get selected for FBI special agent status.

Twice in the past week I’ve been out on Lake Michigan with waves well over my head. This past Sunday was a solid red flag day out at Hoffmaster. I took a few kids from work, most of whom I don’t think had ever seen waves that big, and splashed around in 4 foot breakers for about four hours. Then on Tuesday I was watching some Internet doppler radar showing a nice blob of green moving across the lake and decided to take a chance with the weather.

I headed out to Grand Haven with Dan late in the afternoon with grey skies overhead and a few light rain drops splattering on the windshield. I thought maybe we had missed the big wave window when we first walked up. From the beach edge the waves just looked like speed bumps, but after getting closer and spending some time in the water things really started to pick up. In no time I realized we were toying with five to six foot waves. Sometimes rolling in in sets of three or four at a time. Curling and sucking back on themselves like ocean water. Big enough that half a dozen guys were out with surfboards by the time we had to take off. We settled for body surfing, but I have no complaints. Other than wishing now that I lived near an ocean.

Saturday night I caught The Killers in concert with Louis XIV and Conner at Soaring Eagle Casino. Good stuff. Good, good stuff, indeed. The Killers’ setlist was basically the entire debut album plus a couple others. They opened with “Jenny was a Friend of Mine” which was an effectivly raucous opening salvo and busted out “Somebody Told Me” a couple songs later during which the audience nearly drowned out Brandon Flowers’ vocals. Beautiful. Same noise level for “Mr Brightside” as well at the end of the night. “Under the Gun”, “Indie Rock and Roll”, and a song presumably off the upcoming 2nd album were the only songs played that weren’t from Hot Fuss.

At the library this morning I saw a man cheating while playing online Scrabble. Brow furrowed, he punched letters into some sort of hand-held anagram calculator then looked up and typed his ill-gotten word into the computer. About twelve hours later I watched Lance Armstrong and other Tour de France riders hammer up a mountain road on the Outdoor Life Network while I worked out at MVP.

I write this now because I find it striking how much differently different people choose to live their lives. One man battled back from a billion different types of cancer and trained his ass off to become the world’s greatest athlete in one particular event. You watch him ride and you can see the burning interior spirit and the unbridled confidence that goes along with knowing he’s outworked everyone as he shakes off challenger after challenger. And then… there’s the 35 year old man who’s spending a beautiful Friday morning cheating at a computer game.

Where exactly does this dichotomy occur? Did Scrabble-man miss out on one too many sunny days when he was a kid? When other kids were discovering they could climb trees was Scrabble-man out with a bad case of chicken pox?

Lately, I’ve been trying more and more to go the Lance Armstrong route, trying not to cheat myself out of a single moment of the day. At the pool last year we (Dan and I) slapped up a Lance poster in the filter house and have used this, often jokingly, as motivation whenever there is the urge to take it easy with our break time. “Would Lance stop after only 10 laps?” “No, hey, that’s okay, I’m sure Lance would sit at the picnic table instead of playing soccer.” And despite the light-hearted quips it really does work every time. Back into the pool, back onto the field. Suck from day all the the goodness you can get.

This is good stuff too (click).