Supafly.com

So here I am near the end of my Christmas / New Year Break. I logged into my blog and realized there are several from 2011 that I didn’t post. So without further ado, here is a blog that I should’ve published back in February of 2011.

A few months ago I did an interview I did with LifeTeen.com about what it was like to be raised in a family with foster children. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my childhood and how it has shaped who I am today. Here’s the question that really got me:

Greg Iwinski: Now that you have two daughters of your own and you start a new branch of the Smith family, what lessons from having foster siblings do you think you will bring into raising your own kids?

ME: That’s a good question. I don’t think I have answer for that one yet. I guess just talking about all this now reveals how counter-cultural my childhood was. The rest of the world moved along just fine without knowing about our humble lives in the mountains. We were disconnected from the glamorous things of the world—trends, music, celebrity culture, professional sports, wealth, whatever. Whatever I saw on TV about what it was like to be young and have a family – my life looked nothinglike that. We were off the grid, but that doesn’t mean what happened there didn’t matter.

The Smith family in 1984

Somewhere along the way society has become consumed with appearances, and that has confused what it means to be a “happy family.” You know, the parents drive nice cars, they have a sweet house in a cool neighborhood where all the lawns are perfect… the kids are all hip and dress nice and have cool stuff. Fancy vacations. The whole deal. How uncool would life be if all we tried to do as a family was impress others? There’s no soul in that. I want my children to know that its okay to be counter cultural. And there’s nothing more counter cultural than loving like Christ loved.

I should say that my answer didn’t come out quite so composed on my first try. It was an email interview, which means I had time to reflect on the questions and then put together thoughtful answers. It was supposed to only take me thirty minutes, and it took me well over two hours. Because this was the first time that I had to consider my upbringing and then consider how I would raise my own children.

I’ve found myself marveling at the life my parents created for themselves and for us kids. This is what has stuck with me about Mom and Dad:

• Be Creative. They bought an old house with lots of land and they decided they wanted to start a farm. Then came the animals, the large garden, and the fish bait business. Dad even split his own fence posts from trees that he harvested from the woods.  How resourceful is that? Beyond the six of us little kids, they brought in teenage foster children too. We never had enough money to do all that with comfort, but we still did it. My parents were resourceful and creative.
• Be Fearless. What did my dad do? He met the girl of his dreams and they started a whole new life together. There was no hesitation here. They knew what they wanted and they did it. Dad didn’t know all he needed to know to become a farmer, and that was okay. He made his decision and he did it. My parents had little interest in sticking around their homes in the northeast to see what their friends from college were doing with their careers.
• Be Faithful. Mom and Dad called our farm New Life Farm because it was a new beginning for them, for us little kids, and for the foster children that we brought into our home. Our farm had a logo too—a dove. It was stunning. Dad even painted it onto the side of our home. (Again, I have to interrupt here. Do you know what would happen to me if I painted a logo on the side of my home today? I wouldn’t make it till sunset without our HOA having an emergency meeting.)

A big part of life is figuring out your place in the world. Why am I here? Do I matter? What makes me unique? When you are young, these questions define your life in a very obvious way. As you grown into adulthood, these questions may not be in the forefront of your mind each day, but they reside deep within each of us. I believe that most of us make decisions in life with hopes of finding answers to these questions.

Inevitably, we compare ourselves to others to get some context for who we are. If I were to be completely honest with myself, I get jealous of people who have inherited opportunities from their family: admission to an Ivy League school, the family business, the vacation home, the brownstone in NYC, the vintage Ferrari.  They have so many resources from which to draw as they create their own story on this Earth.

I have none of that, and I’m beginning to see that that’s okay. I do have a heritage of creativity, gall, and faith. Absolute individuality. I need to live and breathe this heritage. This defined my childhood and it should define my adulthood.

I hang my ironed clothes along the top of the wainscoting that wraps my living room and kitchen. When I am finished and all of my clothes are all pressed, I gather them together and head upstairs to hang them in my closet. These pants? All subtle variations of khaki. Notice, too, that they’re hung against white paneling that stretches beneath a taupe wall covered with white and black framed photos. The rest of my house looks pretty much the same.

And if you want to look beyond this very photo, you’ll notice my website looks pretty much the same way. Yes, I designed my home and my website with the same palette.

Both of my cars are black.

The reason why I record this here is that it’s ridiculous that I’m so enamored by neutral colors. For my entire life I’ve been fixed on anything bright and obnoxious. I was once famous for having a 40-piece Hawaiian shirt collection. I even wrote a blog years ago about my infatuation with the color purple.

It’s been almost two years since the Financial Crisis began here in America. I’ve been thinking about how this massive shift in our economy and job market has impacted my life. It’s not something you’re aware of at the time, but the Financial Crisis made an impact on my life in many different ways.

The most obvious is that I chose to enroll in graduate school to earn my MBA. I know it’s cliché, but when the economy takes a plunge, people go back to school because there is not much room for growth in the job market. Or because it’s not clear whether or not their company will be strong enough to endure the recession.  Although both of these fears rattled around in my head, the primary reason I went back to school was because I wanted to get a graduate degree before my family got any larger. I had flirted with the idea two years prior, but it was more important to focus on wedding, a new marriage, a baby…

The Crisis had impact other parts of my life as well. The story isn’t over yet, but one could guess that it’s been difficult for me and everyone else was invested in land, houses, or buildings. I don’t have enough time or humility to write any more about it, but I will say that I had to redirect my creativity and passion for building into new things.

I focused intensely on building Life Teen into a better organization through innovative websites that served as tools for our staff. Plus I tried to improve my level of professionalism, time management, and to improve the projects where I collaborated with other teams. Of course, these were not new priorities to me, but how I did it changed—I invested all of my creativity and passion because it had nowhere else to go.

Finally, I focused more on my relationships, particularly with Candyce and Norah. I know this should be an obvious choice for a husband and father, but it’s easy to be distracted by the “projects of life” and miss those golden moments with my family. A product of this refocusing on the family was Candyce and I starting a small ministry for newlywed couples. We figured that we weren’t the only couple to struggle in our first year of marriage, so we decided to do what we could to help younger couples through the challenges of early marriage. So far we’ve worked with four couples and it’s been terrific. Again, this is a different type of building and investing for me.

In the end, I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from the Financial Crisis is that success is not the guaranteed outcome of hardworking people. Plus once you have success, it’s not permanent. I guess the good news is that the inverse is also not guaranteed: that hardworking people can achieve success, and that depression is not permanent. Regardless of how you look at it, I’m not going to reduce life to a series of investments. Life is too good to be wasted obsessing over money.

Yesterday we ran in the Pat Tilman Run in downtown Tempe. Candyce and I trained for a couple months to build up our endurance to finish the 4.2 miles with strength. I knew all along that we could do it, but Candyce had never run in a race that long and had her doubts whether she could run the whole way. Her fear was enough to make our training intense and consistent.

We are the champions.

The run was beautiful. It was exciting to cross the Tempe Town Lake and run through the south end of Papago Park.  I was proud to push Norah in her running stroller because I love my little girl and I want her to experience this kind of thing. (Note to self: start the race with the 7-minute miler because the 10-minute milers are really just walkers who are delusional.)

The stands at Sun Devil stadium were packed with cheering friends and fans. We crossed the finish line with great sense of accomplishment. We ran and we ran hard.

To celebrate, we met friends and family who also ran at La Grande Orange for a festive brunch. There were dozens of other runners there, all sporting their race number pinned to their chest. The place was glowing with pride. This is why I’ve become a huge advocate for these road races–because it builds pride in yourself and in your community. Plus, exercise makes you look hotter and live longer. What could be wrong with that?

I will avoid chastising people who do not exercise, because I understand that it’s difficult to keep exercise as a top priority in your life. It’s rare to find an adult who has exercised consistently throughout their adulthood, that is, unless that someone is a professional athlete. There are just too many big life experiences that demand your attention. My post-college years were active for sure–working in the yard, on the house, traveling–but I wasn’t getting my heart thumping.

Lucky for me, life changes. Candyce and I have been married for two years, and we’ve run several times a week through most of those 24 months. It’s a huge part of our lifestyle together.  We enjoy the weather, nature, and looking at the beautiful homes in our neighborhood. We talk to each other and share about our day. It’s wonderful. For the past seven months, I’ve had the added bonus of buckling baby Norah in the running stroller and pushing her down the streets of my neighborhood. She loves adventures outside of the house, and that makes me and Candyce happy.

Norah bundled up in her stroller on a cool evening, taken in January of this year.

Today we’re not running. We’re relaxing and letting our bodies rest after yesterday’s race. We’re feeling good. …I know that hot summer months are coming and they aren’t the best condition for running. This makes me sad if I think too much about it. Candyce and I have talked about how it will be more difficult to exercise as our family grows in the years to come.  I imagine that our life together may get more complicated as our years unfold. Who knows if we will be able to continue to exercise as consistently as we do today? I certainly don’t. But what I do know is that Candyce and I will always remember these first two years together as being blissfully active. And we’ll always be pressed to recreate this feeling for the rest of our life together.

When I first started traveling around the country in 2000, every destination was exotic and glorious, mostly because it I grew up in a sleepy town in the rural South. My friends and I joked that we had a lower suicide rate than big cities because there were no building you could jump from with hopes of ending your life. The closest we came to scraping the sky was our two-story courthouse. At most, you would twist an ankle if you stepped off the roof.

However, after ten years of heavy traveling, the United States is starting to seem like a smaller place. This afternoon I will travel to Rhode Island and finish in Massachusetts, a region of the country I’ve traveled to at least a dozen times. I’ve made at least twenty trips to the New York / Long Island, and just as many to Southern California. These places are no longer foreign to me; they are more like suburbs of my life separated only by a flight.

Earlier this month I made a quick trip to Denver to speak at a couple events. My most vivid memory of Denver comes from 2003 when I went on tour with Third Day through five cities in the West. By the time was made it to Denver, I was tired of living in arenas and the tour bus. I stumbled out of the bus early that morning and–barely awake–I walked away from the Pepsi Center with hopes of finding adventure in the city. On my way out of the parking lot I peeked through the windows of a cool bar inside of a historic brick building. In the five or so years since that trip, I’ve recalled the site of that building and wondered what has become of it. I was hoping on this trip into town we would maybe drive by. The crazy thing is that one of the events I spoke at was in the basement of that bar. How awesome is that?

It is satisfying to reconnect with a place that once new. The shimmer is gone, but in it’s place is something that is better–familiarity. I am at a point in my life where traveling for the sake of traveling is not as rewarding as it used to be. If I do travel, I want to bring Candyce and Norah with me. And if that’s not possible, the next best thing is to travel to an area that is familiar.