A Learning a Day

Two years ago, for a short period in the summer, we had two juvenile Cooper’s hawks call a couple of trees in our backyard home.

Juvenile hawks are still learning to be adults. So they usually make a lot of noise as part of this process. This included chasing squirrels, walking around the yard, and constantly calling on each other at all hours of the day.

A few weeks ago, we had two juveniles show up again. We have no idea if they were connected to the pair who showed up two years ago. But, sure enough, they made themselves at home and woke us up on weekends with a din of high-pitched calls.

I was reminded of a time at home when my grandparents were telling me off for blasting music before heading out for an exam a few months before college.

My mom told me to not bother and told them – “You’ll miss this when he leaves home in a few months.”

They did. And said so many times after.

It is now good advice for me as a parent. But it turns out it was equally good advice for us as temporary juvenile hawk neighbors as well.

Now that they’re gone, we miss the din they created and are grateful for the time they shared space with us.

An experience doesn’t have to be the greatest of all time for you to enjoy it.

It’s easy to fall into the comparison trap. You can compare this place to the last one, this beach to that one from 2 years ago, and so on. Doing so simply lets the memory of one good thing rob us of another.

It takes a quiet kind of discipline to reset our expectations and take an experience on its own merits, rather than dismissing it for all the things it isn’t.

After all, the only Zen on the mountaintop is the Zen you take with you.

There’s a player in our Sunday soccer game who’s generally at a level above everyone else. The kind you’d watch for five minutes and call a natural. The ball sticks to his feet. His movement is slick and easy. And he always seems to have so much time on the ball, like the game runs a little slower for him than it does for the rest of us.

I asked him recently whether he’d ever thought about going pro.

Turns out he came up through the fourth division in Argentina, playing all the way to the under-21s. When he was in college, he’d train from early morning to early afternoon, then head to class.

In effect, he’d put in thousands of hours of practice over most of us at the game.

It’s the reminder that never gets old for me. What looks like natural talent almost never is. There’s usually some talent in the mix. But the thing you’re actually watching, the ease, the time on the ball, is a culmination of thousands of hours of practice that came before it.

Yesterday I wrote about how Ed Sheeran stopped using his phone back in 2015. There’s a second half to that story he told at the concert.

A few years ago, Ed was sued over “Thinking Out Loud.” The family of Marvin Gaye’s co-writer accused him of copying the feel of an old hit – “Let’s Get It On.” He talked about what it’s like to live through something like that said something true about court cases. You lose when you lose, and you also lose when you win, because of everything the fight takes out of you along the way. His ran for the better part of a decade.

He decided to fight it because the claim was that he’d copied a chord progression. And you cannot own a chord progression. They’re the building blocks of songs, used in hundreds of them, free for everyone to reach for. It mattered so much to him that he said he’d have walked away from music for good if he’d lost. And, to make his point, he played many songs before and after “Let’s Get It On” that all use the same chord progression to the grand jury (and won).

Here’s where the phone story comes full circle. As part of the case, he had to dig out that 2015 phone and switch it back on for discovery. Waiting inside were messages from a friend who has since died, arguments with an ex, conversations with family he’s no longer close to. A lot of old baggage that hit him all at once.

Out of that came a song, “Old Phone.” Writing it was how he closed the chapter, and then he put the phone away again.

He ended the story with a beautiful note about making music about a bad memory. When you go through something hard, creating a song about the experience means you’re able to walk away with gratitude.

This applies well beyond making music of course.

We don’t choose bad situations. But if we find the learning in it, we’ve made the best of it.

I found my old phone today
So full of love, yet so full of hate
I put it back inside there from whence it came
Nothing good will come from regretting

Conversations with my dead friends
Messages from all my exes
I kinda think that this was best left
There in the past, where it belongs
I feel an overwhelming sadness
Of all the friends I do not have left
Seeing how my family has fractured
Growin’ up and movin’ on

Ed Sheeran hasn’t used a phone since 2015.

He’d kept the same number since he was a teenager, and by the time he was famous, he was receiving thousands of texts a day. It got in the way of being present, so he cut it. Now he has an iPad, spends about an hour a week replying to email, and that’s it.

He’s often shared an example of how this has changed his life. He’s at dinner with his wife, and she gets up to go to the bathroom. Anyone in his position would reach for the phone and start scrolling. Ed just sits there. And it’s in that quiet, doing nothing, that his best lyrics and melodies tend to arrive.

What I love about this is how clear he is on what actually matters. Being a social media sensation does nothing for him if he isn’t making great music. And if the music is the point, then the job is to build a life with the conditions for it.

For Ed, that means doing the one thing few, if any, celebrities, will do. He turns off the phone.

It never ceases to amaze me how consistently I underestimate the effect tiredness has on my demeanour and mindset.

When I’m running on low battery, everything tilts to the wrong end. The small annoyance becomes a grievance. The neutral comment sounds like a dig. The manageable problem feels immovable. And the whole time, I’m convinced I’m seeing the world as it is — not noticing the lens itself is messed up.

Tiredness is sneaky precisely because it hides its tracks. It doesn’t show up as tiredness; it disguises itself as a bad day, a difficult person, a real problem.

So when everything suddenly feels heavier, the first question isn’t what’s wrong. It’s whether I’m tired.

With the people we play long-term games with — family, close friends, anyone we’re in it with for the long haul — one thing is easy to forget: some days, our energies simply won’t match.

You could call these moods, but moods feel more momentary. Energy feels like a better term.

For example, one of you wakes up restless, wanting to get things done in a hurry; the other is happy to move slowly and relax. One is buzzing, the other is flat.

In close relationships especially, it’s easy to let that mismatch curdle into an argument — to read meaning into it, to treat it as a sign of something bigger.

But most of the time, the whole solution is just to be aware of it.

This one hit me recently because I’ve been guilty of the opposite — reading too much into a passing mismatch and letting it spoil a perfectly good day, when I could have simply shrugged and said: today isn’t quite working. We’ll try again tomorrow.

“You must never give in to despair. Allow yourself to slip down that road and you surrender to your lowest instincts. In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength.” | Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender

Our inner strength = our ability to summon hope.

Beautiful.

One of the harder truths to internalize is that there’s very little correlation between a problem being difficult and a problem being valuable.

It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming the two travel together. If something is taking all our effort and ingenuity, surely it must matter — and we take the struggle itself as proof we’re doing important work.

But difficulty and value sit on separate axes. Plenty of brutally hard problems are worth little once solved. And some of the most valuable ones are relatively simple — but executing them well is worth a lot.

So, as you attempt to build your career and find yourself drawn to hard problems, make sure they’re also valuable ones to solve.

Before you go on a grueling ten-mile hike, try a three-miler.

Before you run a marathon, it helps to have a few ten-mile runs in your legs.

Before you ship a risky change, ship something smaller and safer first.

And before you transfer a massive amount of money, do the ten-dollar test.

It doesn’t matter what we’re attempting. A trial run goes a long way toward surfacing the kinks in the process before the real launch.

Make space for the trial run.