Tag: love

Ready To Go Home

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Last full day at sea. Tomorrow we’re in port, then an airport, then home.

And I have to admit something I’ve never once been able to say at the end of one of these.

I’m ready to go.

Every other cruise I’ve taken has ended with me dragging my feet up the gangway. The last day was always a countdown to reentry — back to the bills, the yard, dinner that doesn’t cook itself, the whole apparatus of being responsible for things.

Out here I got to be free and easy for a week. No clock. Nothing I had to achieve that I didn’t want to.

I have loved it. I’ve eaten more than I needed to and enjoyed every bite. Desserts. A couple of very good wines. Places I’ve never been. A whole lot of time staring at water, which I’ll be doing again in about an hour.

And I still want to go home.

What’s different is that there’s something waiting that I actually want.

I’ve spent this year working harder than I’ve worked in a long time, on purpose, on things that are mine. Which means home isn’t a pile of obligations this time. It’s a set of things I’m in the middle of and want to get back into the middle of.

I’m in the gym Sunday with my son. Monday morning I’ll get coffee, sit down, and start digging through what I’d conservatively estimate is five thousand emails. Then follow-ups with my team on what moved while I was gone, and figuring out what the next project needs from me.

None of that sounds like dread when I say it out loud. It sounds like Monday, and I’d like to get at it.

I’m not naive about how fast this turns.

It’ll be a grind again inside of two weeks. There will be a list, and deadlines, and people who needed something from me before I got back to my desk, and bills, and all the ordinary weight of a life. Restored is a temporary condition.

The stairs on this ship have also made a point I didn’t ask them to make. I’m in decent shape. I’m not in the shape I want. Something to work on.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though.

I brought my mid-year review with me. I’ve been saying all week I’d open it on the last sea day, block out a couple of hours, sit somewhere quiet and figure out the back half of the year.

I never opened it.

My son wanted to do trivia in the theater. Then karaoke, where he got up and sang How to Save a Life and absolutely leveled the room — this kid who started out with an untrained ear, standing up in front of strangers and just owning it. I watched him meet people all week and turn into somebody more outgoing than I’ve ever seen him.

The review will still be there Sunday afternoon. It has kept for six weeks; it’ll keep two more days.

I would not trade one hour of that theater for it.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

Three Hundred Dollars

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.

I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.

Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.

I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.

So I called Duncan.

She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.

She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.

She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.

So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.

I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.

The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.

I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.

I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.

She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.

Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.

Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.

A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.

At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.

I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.

And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.

That was the last time I saw her.

I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.

She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.

The Craving

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It took two days.

Two days into assessment week — a planned break between rounds of the 7-40 Challenge — and I was already craving the structure I’d stepped away from.

I’ll admit, some of the break was good. I stopped listening to audiobooks for a few days and let my mind clear out. That turned out to be exactly what I needed to get ready for the next round of learning. And I never stopped my daily Bible reading. I just couldn’t let that one go.

But the calorie tracking slipped. The water slipped. I ate off plan multiple days, some just because I could — which, looking back, was kind of stupid. And it gave me a feeling I didn’t like. I could feel myself sliding back into habit patterns I don’t need. By day three I knew I had to pivot back.

So when I woke up this morning — Round 3, Day 1 — and I had my list in front of me, I felt relief. Energy. A little pep in my step. Because I had those small moments of accomplishment spread across the day again, and they’re fantastic.

Here’s why I think that matters beyond just me.

A long time ago, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He lived for several years after his diagnosis, but he did not do well in unfamiliar places or unfamiliar routines. My grandmother — a retired nurse and a bit of a drill sergeant — kept his framework together. She kept him in line, kept him moving, kept his daily structure strong. And he was able to function for years, even as he lost more and more of his memory, because his routines stayed the same.

There’s a whole different set of blog posts in that story. But the principle is the same one I felt this week.

Our brains crave habit patterns. They are actual physical things happening inside our heads. We expect the rewards they bring. We expect the satisfaction that comes with practicing them. And that’s true for good habits and bad habits alike. The dopamine high from a good workout isn’t that different from the dopamine hit of an addiction. The difference is which pattern you’ve seeded.

Where I feel grateful is this: I’m healthy. I’m more motivated this year than I’ve ever been in my life. I feel daunted and challenged by the work I’ve set in front of myself, which is probably a good thing. Keeping myself in these habits — keeping myself moving forward — is how I prime myself for success through the seasons when fatigue or exhaustion or grief would want to stop me.

My grandfather didn’t have a choice. His framework was held together by someone who loved him. I have the choice. And after two days without it, I know exactly what I’m choosing.

Nobody’s Going to Tell You to Go

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Day 76 | The 7-40 Challenge

I started reading Seth Godin’s Tribes this morning. Early in the book, he draws a line between managers and leaders that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Managers manipulate resources to get a known job done. Leaders create change they believe in.

I’ve seen both. I saw it first in the churches I worked at in my twenties — people who would see something that needed to be done and just get up and do it, while some of the ministerial staff sat back and waited for someone else to move. I saw it in my insurance office years, when I realized that whether my manager wanted something done or not, if I knew it needed doing, I had to get myself to do it. It would get noticed later. And I’ve seen it across eighteen years of corporate work — the people without management titles who became the go-to people, who took on responsibilities nobody else wanted or even realized needed to be taken on. Looking back, I can see why some of them shot up through the ranks faster than others. They weren’t managing. They were leading before anyone gave them the title.

I spent twenty years filling notebooks with goals. “Someday I’ll write a book.” “Someday I’ll get in shape.” “Someday I’ll build something.” Same dreams, different handwriting.

Those notebooks weren’t the work of a manager trying to organize a life. They were the work of a dreamer who didn’t know how to lead himself. I wasn’t just trying to manage things — I was trying to blaze a trail in a direction I’d never been before. But whether through fear or apathy or something else I couldn’t name at the time, I wouldn’t let myself move.

Seventy-six days ago, I did.

Nobody told me to go. Nobody assigned it. Nobody was going to give me permission. That was the realization — if I didn’t tell myself to go, nobody was going to do it for me. I took the frustration I was feeling at the end of last year, the things I knew I needed to get done, and I leveraged the time and the tools I had at my disposal. I’m not where I want to be yet — not even close. But seventy-six days later, I’ve lost sixteen pounds, published a novel, built a platform, and written every single day. Not because I’m special. Because I finally stopped waiting.

Godin says there’s a tribe waiting for you to connect them and lead them. He says it’s easier than ever to change things, and that individuals have more leverage than ever before. I believe that. But here’s where I’d push back — or maybe push deeper.

You have to start at the desk.

Picture a man sitting alone at a desk with a computer, a notepad, and a cup of coffee. Nobody told him what to do or how he’d get paid. Just: get to work. That man has everything he needs. He has ideas. If he can get past the noise, he knows what he wants to do. He can see the people in his space who know what to do as well. But unless he’s done the deep discovery of who he is, what he’s here for, and what work matters to him, he’s not going to find the right tribe anyway. You don’t connect to others so they can tell you what work to do. You do your work, and then you find the people who sharpen it.

The tribe matters. But the desk comes first.

My wife told me she can see a major difference since January. She can see that I’m motivated and happy. That I have energy. That I’m going somewhere on purpose. That’s not management. That’s leadership — even if the only person I’m leading right now is myself.

Godin says leadership is about creating change you believe in. Here’s the change I believe in:

We were meant for so much more than living in fear and being frustrated. By learning how to clarify what’s important to us, communicate it to others, and leverage the tools we have — including AI — we can do the work we know how to do, better and faster, and make the world better around us.

But that requires the personal work first. If we can’t communicate clearly with each other, what’s going to make us any better doing it with a computer? The human has to get clear before the technology gets useful.

And clarity, for me, started with something that had nothing to do with technology.

I’ve discovered that there is a God and that I’m not Him. That shapes everything about the kind of leader I’m becoming. I have agency. I can make decisions. But I want to be the kind of leader who partners with the leadership above me — God’s leading me, and I’m doing my best to understand where He wants me to go. So I keep my ears open, my eyes open, and I stay ready to pivot when I realize I’m not headed where I’m supposed to be.

If you’re reading this and you’ve got your own notebooks — your own stack of “someday I’ll” goals in different handwriting across different years — I want you to hear this:

You’re further along than you think you are.

The things you’ve been writing down matter. They aren’t dead dreams. They’re evidence that something inside you has been trying to lead for a long time. If you’ll lean in, clarify what you want to accomplish, and actually start — you’ll move faster than you expect. Because the dreamer who filled those notebooks already did the hard part. You just haven’t given yourself permission to lead yet.

The notebooks were never the problem. The permission was.

Day 76 of 280. Four days left in Round 2.