Earn it

I don’t really like writing around a certain day, and I don’t talk often about my time in the military. So even though today is Memorial Day, this is completely out of place for me.

On this Memorial Day, I’m not talking with my kids about my time in the service. I’m not telling them about the friends who never returned home from the watch. We’re not walking the cemetery, planting American flags on headstones, nor are we doing a family Murph. I’m talking with them over a cup of coffee on the back deck as the sun rises on another picture perfect Montana day (and Memorial Day no less) about what it means to earn it.

Earning it means living up to the potential that every one of those veterans sacrificed for. Earning it means not giving up on life, no matter how hard it may seem. Earning it means not lying to ourselves about who we are, but also holding in our mind who we want to be, and letting the difference inspire us to be that much better. Earning it is our obligation, as human beings, as people created in the image of God.

I tell my 8 and 10 year olds that my wish for them is to earn this day.

The other day I was reading about The Choice: Embrace the Possible from Edith Eger. If you don’t know her work, she was an Auschwitz survivor who spent decades helping survivors come back after their war was over.

It’s a struggle I know just a little too well. For years I struggled after I left the service. I struggled with anger, anger I couldn’t explain because there wasn’t a word for it, only a simmering undertone that always existed. It came out when I least expected it. My young kids were crying and I couldn’t handle it. I’d yell at them, and then I’d feel worse about myself, and then I’d yell at them again because of it. I don’t even think I was mad about the crying. In fact, I wanted to be there with them, even as my brain couldn’t figure out how to.

I struggled with feeling like I hadn’t done enough during my time in the service. That insecurity haunted me for years. I struggled with a loss of purpose. For years I had told my wife that the Navy was my job, not my identity. She always smiled and nodded. It wasn’t until the Navy wasn’t there that I got to find out what she already knew.

What Eger reminded me of was that I didn’t need to be free from pain to earn today. Earning it requires being honest about the pain and moving forward anyway. It requires taking the first steps towards freeing myself from the pain. The loss of pain wasn’t the point. Taking those steps was when I was able to see what I was really given this day for.

We’re all in pain, in some way we aren’t ready to talk about. Aren’t ready to admit even to ourselves usually. We accumulate pain every day. I think that’s been true for as long as humans have been alive. But Eger tells us unflinchingly what the pain actually is. It’s a story, and we get to decide whether the story runs our lives or not. We get a choice. Earning it requires that choice.

My kids don’t really know what it means to earn it yet. But on that deck, they’re listening. Silently, looking down or around, deep in thought. The way that I know means they’re listening beyond the moment. They’re hearing something that might come out a few hours from now, or a few years in the future.

I tell them about how I’m earning it. In my case, the thing that gets me up every day is pushing the limits of human potential. To see what’s truly possible, to explore what we know and what we’ve forgotten about greatness, and how to live lives that rise to meet our potential. I do it in the way I raise my own children. I do it by writing this newsletter so that you can do the same.

That’s how I choose to earn it. That’s not how my kids will earn it. They’ll find their own ways. Ways that are uniquely them.

On the deck, they’re watching me. They don’t have an answer. Nothing really important appears in a moment. This is no different. Today they’re earning it by listening. Tomorrow they’ll earn it by taking the next step towards their own greatness. I tell them earning it is about choices compounded over a lifetime. I let them think about the choices they’ve made, choices like leading their jiu-jitsu class and the fit they threw because they didn’t get a treat, and I let them see that those choices become who they are.

I tell them that no one ever lived well until they accepted that they could live well. That’s the lesson Eger reminded me of, the one I had to learn the hard way. It’s the lesson I pass down today.