Dear Fellow Man

Dear Fellow Man,

Jump on the nostalgia train with me for a quick second. Remember when you tried everything? How old were you when tree forts were the epitome of construction, when art was made outside of school hours, when you unashamedly asked the unknown kid at the park to come play tag with you. Those were some days weren't they? Back before the notions of success and mistakes and limits hovered tight over your decisions.

Nowadays, trying new things is relegated to restaurants and Netflix series  - hardly the gritty and lighthearted exploration of our younger days. Over these decades of life we’ve tried plenty of things, and repeated them enough to change them from new to known. Repetition may have enabled competency but it’s come at the cost of risk. I know it’s true for me:

Give me a basketball over a baseball. 
Let me paint with words not brushes.
For heaven’s sake please not in a million years should you ask me to fix an out of commission small engine. 

Where are those places of familiarity for you? For me, they are comforting, and at times confining. 

Two weeks ago, I broke all these ingrained patterns and said yes to singing in our church’s Easter Choir. My last serious singing endeavor was 12 years ago. I sang a Patty Griffin tune to my girlfriend. Man, I was as gutsy as I was shy. My wife says now she heard a total of two audible words from that performance. My last choir experience was a few years before that, and was only because the small Bible College I attended required our participation. Wisely, our choir director threw harmonies out the window and prayed like Francis that we’d somehow approximate the melody.

So, this yes to choir was entirely unexpected. Which could be another way of saying it’s worth paying attention to. We’ve had two practices, and I learned that choirs sing this strange concept called ‘parts.’ I’ll be darned, who knew? Needless to say the pitch is something I fish for, not sing. 

I’ve wondered about the merit of trying new things. I’m tempted to dig through the smelly bin of recycled sayings and pull out the ‘adversity makes you stronger’ line. But you’ve heard that since you were little. Maybe that even dampened your spirit of experimenting. Instead, I’ll wonder about how you react to mistakes.

Has work ethic become a dependable prescription against them?
Do you numb their sharp edges with something mindless?

I employ both strategies. Because each method keeps me from acknowledging my error. 

This all points to the difficult beautiful reality of trying something new - it guarantees our failure and existence:

You can botch the melody seven times in a row. 
You can dribble your drive off the tee box. 
And you still exist. 

Our error didn’t vaporize our existence. Our imperfect attempt didn’t buzz our phone with an angsty-judgy text from our friends. In fact, it might have opened a door long since locked by our performance. Maybe connection and humility can exist now. 

So fellow man, who is, possibly, a fellow risk-averse performer.

What’s something new that you tried? 
Where did you make mistakes? 
And what room has that created?

-Jesse French
Restoration Project Executive Director