New Heights
I’m buying a ladder, and I am excited. I own four buildings, and they all have roofs. You have to get up on a roof and look at it now and then, clean it, patch it, and that is hard without a good ladder. I crawl through my bedroom window or borrow this thing from my neighbor that’s barely a ladder. It has rungs and rails, yes, but it rattles and shakes and creaks when I climb it, and I’m never sure if I’ll get where I’m going or if gravity will win. At Jon’s request I use it only when he’s around. He says he’ll drive me to the hospital.
Tuesday, after waiting for twenty-seven years, I finally buy a ladder. The online array of two hundred and thirty-eight easily narrows to two, and one is clearly better. Weighs thirty pounds, holds three hundred, and costs only two hundred dollars. Why did I think this would be hard?
It’s delivered the same day.
Not only can I now reach the roof, but there are all the metaphors. Reach new heights, the sky is the limit, etc. I think this ladder can really take me places. Places besides my roof, maybe.
I slit open the plastic and read the manual. It can be a step ladder, an extension ladder, you can set it up on stairs. I’m staining my house, and now I can reach the trim on the edge of the roof. New heights.
I’m high all day, high on action and climbing my ladder, high on getting stuff done. It’s September and I have to get stuff done before winter. I’m fueling myself with chocolate, my form of caffeine, and caffeine is a more-ish drug for me. It tells me I need more. More and more, more is better. You need more. More will make you work faster, demolish all obstacles, get stuff done. More. Caffeine promises me I can relax later, when everything is done.
Thing is, it’s never all done. That’s the big lie. Items on a to-do list are like snakes on the head of a gorgon. You kill one off and two more appear. The end of the to-do list is a myth. There’s always more to do.
There used to be a bumper sticker: Be here now. Recently I saw one that said, Be there later and that, I think, is the point. In my chocolate-driven craze to get stuff done, I’m never going to be anywhere. Everything is an obstacle. I’m trying to get somewhere I will never be.
It costs me.
I’m talking to an old friend tonight and I’m so, so happy. Haven’t talked to Jason in over twenty years, and we were really close. Buddies in an intensive leadership program, roommates on one of our weekends away. We’d play together, invent games. One was called the Giving Up Game. We’d pick some attitude or belief that wasn’t serving us and give it up, just for fun. I don’t notice the irony of this until later.
The time for our call comes and I blow it. Still high on caffeine, I talk too much and too fast, respond instead of listening. Jason has built two houses and a business where people love to come to work. He’s been married and is getting divorced. He’s raised a son, has two little girls now, and a baby on the way. He’s been a dad for twenty years with twenty more ahead of him. I get the facts, but the meaning slips by. I miss his courage, and what it must have taken to do all that. I don’t ask what it was like for him.
In my rush to get somewhere, I got nowhere. I missed my friend. I blew it. It haunts me all night, wakes me up early. I almost go silent and slink away, but I don’t want to lose my friend.
In the morning I text him and apologize. I promise that if we talk again, I’ll listen. Right away he replies. Says he’d love to talk again. I get another chance.
* * *
Now, another day of staining ahead. My ladder waits. Can I climb it and still be where I am? Stay grounded as I reach new heights? Be here now, not nowhere later?