This past weekend my youngest daughter was married.  It was a wonderful ceremony for a very special couple.

As with many marriage ceremonies there were the typical highlights.  I got to walk my little girl down the aisle.  I gave her to her new husband.  I watched them take their vows.  I saw them introduced as one.

But another highlight was watching my oldest daughter, Sarah, give what I thought was the most tender, loving and insightful toast to her little sister.  I was so moved, I asked her to write it down (being the actor that she is, she operated without a script).

Here’s what she said:

When I googled How to give a Wedding Speech I was told I was supposed to introduce myself.

So, I’m Sarah, sister to Michelle and Jesse, daughter of Jerry and Sanderijn, wife of Jeffrey and mother to three sons.  And now, I am Elan’s sister-in-law, too.
Actually, in the past 10 years I’ve been the one introducing people into our family either by marriage or birth so I would like to take a moment to thank Michelle for helping me out on that.  I can only have so many kids.

Michelle and Elan, as this is your wedding, you will hear a lot of advice about marriage.  Last night at the rehearsal dinner we talked a little bit about marriage advice, and I said I was saving mine for today:

I will start with a quote from Barry Schwartz: “The key to happiness is low expectations”

Well, I’m not going to go that far.  But I think the key to a happy marriage is actually no expectations.

You see, marriage isn’t what you expect it to be.

Marriage, is fluid, it changes.  Just like you are fluid, and you change. You may find yourself waking up one morning thinking that marriage isn’t what you thought it would be… but that is okay, that’s good.  Marriage has stages just like you do, and if you let it, it becomes what it needs to be at that time.

When you set your expectations on your marriage and each other, you limit each other, you don’t allow each other to grow, you don’t allow your marriage to grow,  and you don’t allow each other to change together.

So, love each other without expectation, be kind to each other without expectation and care for each other without expectation, and then you can see how wonderful marriage can be.

Because it is when you have no expectations, that your life together and marriage will exceed even your wildest expectations.

As I listened to my daughter’s sage advice, only one word came to mind.

Amen!

A story about my father on Father’s Day.

I was seventeen and wanted to buy a Fender Rhodes electric piano.  One problem.  I didn’t have the cash to buy it outright.  And since I wasn’t eighteen I’d need Dad to sign the papers so I could finance the purchase.

Know this.  I was a hard worker.  The day I turned 15 I started working as a stock boy in the linen department of the Maison Blanche just up the road from East Jefferson High School.  I took other jobs too.  Worked at a health club out at the lake front.  Worked as a greenskeeper at City Park Golf couse.  I was no slouch.  I was a hard worker.  At least I felt I was.

I remember making my case.  I forget whether it was at home or in the car.  That was where my Dad and I had a lot of our best conversations – either in the den of our house with Dad on the LazyBoy and me on the rattan couch or the two of us sitting (unbuckled) on the felt bench seat of a Ford Fairlane.

I laid it all out.  I had nearly one hundred dollars, good for well over twenty percent of the purchase price.  How I’d save money over the coming months and make the monthly payment.  How I’d finance the ongoing expenses.  How I’d save for this and spend for that.

I was thorough.  I was confident.  I had it all figured out.

I could tell Dad was genuinely interested in what I was saying.  He wasn’t much interested in the substance of it all but seemed fascinated in what I was trying to accomplish, and how I thought I could make it work.  But Dad, being Dad, couldn’t help but probe and test in a number of different areas.

Did I really think that spending all this for an electric piano was the best thing I could do with the money?  Were there any other alternatives?  Would I actually follow up and dedicate time to playing the piano and making it all pay off?  Did I really think there was any future or benefit in playing in a band?  Would I devote time and energy to make it successful?  And if I thought I could, how was I going to do that and still work, be a member of umpteen social organizations, stay on the high school golf team and meet the other obligations that I already was having a hard time meeting?

As usual, Dad was cutting to the heart of issues I was ill prepared for.

And the more Dad pushed, prodded and probed the more testy I became.  Finally, there seemed to be nothing left of the logic or practicality of my plan.  My beloved Fender Rhodes was quickly becoming an empty, silly, foolish exercise.  So I blurted out:

“Look, Dad, I’m paying for all this.  It is my money and it is what I want to do.  I’m paying for it.  I’m working for it.  I’m not asking you for a handout.  Besides, it is not going to cost you anything.”

Dad smiled.  Dad smiled a grin that at the same time expressed both admiration and pity.

I could tell that he was delighted by my drive and independence.  But I also knew from his face that he was disappointed that I was missing something very fundamental.  There was something I wasn’t getting.  Something very basic that Dad had hoped I would understand, but I didn’t.

Dad went quiet.

Then he smiled at me and said in a very deliberate but kind and loving tone.

“Son, let me explain something to you.  It is all my money. 

I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, or to make me feel good.  It is just the way it is.

You may think that you’d be paying for this.  That’s not quite right.  Whatever you spend, your Mom and I have to make up for somewhere else.  Whatever you spend on this is money that you don’t spend on something else … car insurance, school expenses, clothes … the list can get pretty long.

Now I want to help.   I admire that you want to work and earn and save money to make it happen.  But don’t ever think that when you spend money on something like this it isn’t costing other people money.  It is.  It always does.

One of the biggest mistakes is to think you are independent, that what you do doesn’t affect someone else.  It does.  Especially when it comes to family, time and money.  Because what you spend in one place, is something that you don’t spend in another place.  It’s all one. 

Of course Dad was right.  I wasn’t close to being self-sufficient.  And our family wasn’t wealthy.  I was a young, dependent child with the fantasy of making one transaction “independent” of everything else.  It doesn’t work that way.

My Dad’s line – it is ALL my money – taught me a lot about life.  It was a recognition that things are always more linked and related than people think.  People imagine being able to isolate or compartmentalize themselves and their actions.  Being “ownable” only to themselves.  It doesn’t work that way.  One action almost always impacts or influences something else.

Dad had the same view about family and faith.

Family is recognizing that everything you do affects the family members around you.  Everything.

And faith means that every day is a gift not a right; every action, a blessing not an achievement.

Thanks, Dad.

RIP:  FitBit

I gave up.

My Fitbit band sits on my disheveled desk face down in the havoc that is my basement.  It is there with its plastic arms pointed emptily toward the sky like a dead bug one would find in a room corner.

Rest in peace.

My wrists are now bracelet free.  No more “tap, tap” to check on my status.  No more checking on my iPhone app for my daily step count.  No more waking up by wrist vibration.  (That last one was actually pretty cool.)

And I feel better for it.

I don’t know if FitBit will make it.  A lot of people like it and have fun with it.  But it didn’t work for me.

First, it told me things I already knew.  I would sit and pull up my FitBit data.  “You walked / ran a lot steps today!” it would report.  “Yup, knew that,” I thought.  Another day another check with the app.  “You didn’t do squat today,” it scolded.  “Yup, knew that,” I thought again.

I’m a pretty active guy.  I run, work out, stay pretty active.  I also am a modest work-a-holic.  I travel a lot.  I am forgetful but good with short-term memory.  I typically can recall what I did each day.  That is, I’m quite aware of how active I am.  At least I think I am.  FitBit wasn’t telling me anything that I couldn’t figure out with a few seconds of focused thought.

Second, FitBit didn’t give me any particularly insightful analysis as to why I was sedentary one day and hyper-active another.  Perhaps I was expecting too much.  But it would have been great if there was something there that said, “you know, every time you miss your morning run then you’ve a 50% chance of being a couch potato all day.”  Or something like that.   But again, that would be information that I could figure out without strapping an electrode to my wrist.  Fact is I already know that if I don’t do my morning run there’s a 50/50 chance there won’t be any workout in the afternoon.

Finally, I came to the realization that the wristband was more a lifestyle and fashion statement than health device.  At least for me.  I wore it because I thought it was a cool thing to do.  I guess it is.  But I also found it to be a pain in the ass.

Experts say that wearable technology – particularly wearable fitness technology – is the new, new thing.  I guess so.  They are experts, aren’t they?  But it so far isn’t working for me.  My observation is that these types of things work for those who are either very competitive or very complacent when it comes to fitness.  If you are competitive, you enjoy posting step counts on Facebook pages and challenging those “so you think you’re fit?” friends.  If you are complacent you need something like a string around your finger to get you to remember to do your workout.

I am both but would prefer not to have a machine constantly remind me.

Something is happening to apologies.  I don’t find them as much as I used to.

A report will be late.  Something won’t get done.  Or it will get done incorrectly.  Someone says something harmful.  Or takes an inappropriate action.  And more often than not when I raise this with a person what I’ll get is a blank stare and an “OK.”  Maybe a question to the effect of “So what do you want me to do?”

Nothing wrong with a blank stare.  Nothing wrong with asking what I’d like them to do about it.

But no apology.

Am I asking too much?  I’m not asking anyone to grovel.  No need to tear your clothing and douse yourself in ashes.  Just makes me feel a bit better and give me a sense that you understand that you messed up.  Just so I know that you know.

So why are apologies disappearing?  I’ve got some theories.

First, they increasingly aren’t received well.  Apologies used to be viewed as the path toward forgiveness.  And forgiveness was the path back to wholeness and community.  Today, apologies are viewed less as the first step toward reconciliation and more as weakness.  That is, nowadays people often use someone’s genuine confession as a club to whack them upside the head.

All quite sad, really. I remember a rather infamous event at a business meeting when I apologized to a client for running late on a small and somewhat inconsequential element of a project, promising that we’d do double duty to catch up.  What I saw as a small acknowledgement sparked a client explosion.  He harangued me with a series of screams along the lines of “how can you …?” “how could you …?” “explain to me why …?”  “I demand an answer …!”  If that client was the only measure, I’d likely never apologize again.  The broader point is this: if apologies are disappearing perhaps it is because society isn’t embracing the apology as it ought.

Second, the apologies we do see are pathetic.  What apologies am I talking about?  Lance Armstrong.  Tiger Woods.  Paula Dean.  Anthony Wiener.  Need I say more?  Not exactly role models, eh?  If those were the only examples I had of a person apologizing, then I would never apologize either!

Finally, there may be a link between the decline in apologies and that of religion.  Let me explain.  A generation ago in the United States, religion was mainstream.  And as most of that was Judeo-Christian religion, there was a very common practice that most people learned through their weekly trip to the synagogue or church:  asking for forgiveness.  It was an apology of sorts.  It was a weekly recognition that you messed up.  In the Anglican tradition it was framed as messing up in “thought, word, and deed.”  And you asked God for forgiveness.  Then things are better.  You do that throughout your growing up and it becomes a habit.  A lot of young people today don’t benefit from that practice.

Whatever the reason, I’d ask that we bring back authentic apologies.  Let’s celebrate them, embrace them, reward them.

And if you think I’m way off.  If I have offended you, your faith, or your generation in any way.

I apologize.