Find A Ladder, or Lend One

This is a bear in trouble. Somehow, the bear got trapped in a Colorado skateboarding park and couldn't get out. After spending the night in the skating bowl, an employee of the Snowmass Colorado Parks and Recreation Department lowered a ladder into the pit which permitted the bear to climb out. You can see the whole sequence here.

Ed, a coach friend of mine shared this image with me. I suggested that the lesson is that people should find their ladders -- the help that they might need -- and save themselves. Ever wise, Ed added "Yes, and throw a ladder to a buddy in need."

Confessions

Time to 'fess up.

Readers of this blog have noticed (hopefully!) the lack of activity over the summer. I wrote about it recently, attributing my absence to the heavy workload I carried over the past few months. That's true, but it's not the whole story.

It's not just work that's laid heavily upon me. It's been more a question of mood, of atmosphere. A sense of uneasiness.

Or just plain meanness. The public discourse sapped my soul this summer. I guess it started around the time of the incident involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. As most of America knows, a Cambridge police officer responded to a 911 call at the professor's home, investigating a possible break in. There was a confrontation. Words were exchanged. Ultimately, Gates was arrested and briefly held in jail before he was released and the charges dropped.

Then President Obama was asked about the event at a White House news conference. He said he thought the police had behaved "stupidly" by arresting someone in their own house, after the homeowner had presented proper identification.

You know the rest. The country and the Internet exploded into arguments about black vs. white; cop vs. citizen; Ivy League vs. blue collar; and various forms of class warfare. The missives got nasty and personal. I stupidly continued my practice of reading the comment sections following various news articles and blog posts. Read them until I realized I was being poisoned by the vitriol.

The Gates controversy subsided as the Health Care debate ratcheted up. Now the hostility was no longer limited to the Internet, but live and in person at Town Hall meetings. Little debate or information sharing there. Just screaming and half-truths and name calling, sometimes with a firearm accompaniment. All offered fresh all day courtesy of your favorite cable channel.

And this week, I've been stunned at the outpouring of hate focused on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, a man whose personal failings were well-documented. I was stunned that some people needed their demonized portrait of the liberal politician so much that they could not take one moment to acknowledge his humanity, or the possibility that he'd contributed anything positive to mankind.

I can't really explain why this atmosphere has weighed on me so heavily. Maybe it's the confrontation with hardened ideas and hardened heart -- surely anathema to a coach who believes in options, and the capacity in each of us to learn from our disappointments and failures to begin again.

Enough. I'm done with the lamenting. Done with being made small by the negativity of others. I reclaim my voice. I chose to coach and to lead by example.

Baby, I'm Back.

Google Thyself

I Googled myself today.

It wasn't the first time, by far. Curiosity had led me to that practice many times in the past.

But I hadn't be so motivated for some time. Until today.

It wasn't an exercise of vanity. Instead, it was a form of self-preservation.

Washington Post writer Kathleen Parker prompted my search. Her column today details legal activity surrounding a Vogue model and an anonymous blogger who plainly did not find said model to be her flava. The blogger posted frequently and voluminously about model Liskula Cohen, describing her as a "skank," along with other derogatory names.

Cohen worried that these missives could negatively impact her marketability. After all, how many businesses want their products to be identified with a "skank?" So she sued Google, which hosted the offending blog (as well as this one, if you haven't noticed), and demanded to know the true identity of the poster. A New York Supreme Court judge ruled in Cohen's favor and ordered Google to reveal the blogger's name.

That's not the end of it; not yet, at least. The outed blogger, Rosemary Port, is now suing Google for $15 million because it disclosed her identity. Cohen has dropped her previous lawsuit.

Now apart from my frequent despair over the growing lack of civility in anonymous discourse over the Internet, my interest in this dispute was minimal. After all, why would I have reason to worry about my online profile?

Then I stopped. Because it only takes one determined person to turn your electronic world upside down. Even if you believe yourself to be a straight shooter and fair broker.

So I Googled myself for the first time in several months. There were a lot more entries than I expected. Only a couple of surprises. And thankfully, nothing that bad.

But I will be keeping a closer watch in the days to come.

A word to the wise: Do you know who you are in cyberspace?

Begin Again

Oh boy.

I was afraid to see how long it had been since I'd posted to this blog.

Wow.

I'd think about writing something to explain my absence, but then it would seem lame and I was busy, so I let it go.

The truth is a little more complicated, but not by much.

I had a lot of work. A LOT. Which, in these challenging times, is a good thing.

I would get up early and stay up late into the tonight to balance my projects. I found that burning the candle at both ends gets much more exhausting as I get older.

I also reaffirmed that I can tolerate almost anything (almost!) as long as I know it is finite.

I could reach for a number of profound metaphors from that statement, but I'll let it lay as it is for know.

Another truth is that at some point, I made a choice to let the blogging go for the short run. I recognized I had a finite amount of energy to get through this period, and something had to go. Something turned out to be Present Perfect Coach.

It's likely that I might have found a way to do my blogging. For a variety of reasons, the best plan for me was to give myself permission to let it go for the short term.

So now the big projects are over, and I'm about to launch another big project; one that's much closer to my heart.

I'm taking my baby girl back to college tomorrow. We'll head off early in the morning.

The faithful reader may realize that this is my daughter's sophomore year at college, so it's not the first time she's left the nest.

Yet, this journey does mark a new beginning for her. She's entering a new university in a new state, in a different part of the country.

I am enormously proud of her, for so many reasons. She assessed her freshman college situation, and realized "you only get one chance to do undergrad. I think I can do it better." On her own, she researched her options, made her applications and successfully transferred to another school.

Because this is my kid, I'd like to think I've provided her with the tools and the foundation to know she had options, and to have the courage to try something new. And to learn from less-than-perfect experiences.

Both of us learned that we can begin again.