NON-LINEAR LIFE

You think Shaquille O’neal will ever wear a Lakers uniform again? Doesn’t really matter but I never thought he’d be in Boston, Cleveland or Phoenix. I watched him at Louisiana State University in the early 1990s. I never thought he’d be a Laker in the first place. He was tearin’ down backboards literally and redefining the game of basketball. He was “the master of disaster…7’3” according to his line in the Fu Scnickens “What’s up Doc.” He’s not 7’3″ but you know how Shaq is when he starts talking. Shaq is an example of the non-linear life – the anything-but-a-straight line existence in which life ebbs and flows. I’m a lover of progressions and some things are anything but progressive. You date someone, you break-up and you generally don’t return to revisit the relationship on a second go if it’s truly done. Remarriages of divorced spouses occur but not so often. Going back to jobs you once left are uncommon practices and it’s likely because of the perception that life should be a trajectory. And that trajectory can’t have stops on it that appear to be duplications. Somewhere we learned to deduplicate and we’re really good at it. But what happens if the place, the person, the apparatus is the same but your role has matured?

Is it possible to cycle through familiar places with heightened perspective? Alas, the true test of maturation may be in how willing we are to serve in the places we’ve been. Chapman University barely resembles the school from which I graduated in 1997. If it was a human, it surely be the $6 million man a la Lee Majors. And with such transformation I can assume that there may be new directives, new goals or insights for today that were inconceivable 13 years ago. The point? I have a fear that I wonder if anyone shares? It is the fear of HO HUM. New is exciting and rightfully so but old can be new if you are not the same as you were your last trip through. The non-linear life can move from left to right and seemingly back to the left (no poiitical implications intended here). What appears to be “Been there done that” is likely “Went there once so long ago I’m excited about doing this.”