“Untitled V,” by Willem de Kooning

Ten Things I Worry About a Lot

I've got to find that balance that everyone else that I know seems to have. I don’t really know if they have it, but they do a really good job of appearing as if they do. At least on Facebook and Instagram they do. Regardless, I do know I need balance and if those on the outside looking in were to guess, they’d say, “yea you got it going on.” but the reality is, I’m treading as best I can.

In no particular order, here’s the stuff I worry about every day.

1. Money-I think we all worry about it. We want more and don’t have enough. I hate that I’m not like a majority of my friends and peers who appear to be primed and ready to retire. I also hate the fact that I have a mortgage eating me alive and I also hate the fact that my vacations for the last 14 years have been twice a year to Youngstown, Ohio. The parallels to money are that it’s not cheap to spend 2 weeks up there and in general it runs somewhere between $1800 and $3000 every time. I would love to, just once, spend that money on a real family vacation before our kids splinter off to do their own thing. That window may be closing. The bottom line is always the bottom line.
2. My wife and I are annoying each other. I know it, I’m not sure she knows it but she would agree that my actions, words and deeds are bothering her. I’ll take the blame here. One example is, I coach basketball at the high school level. I’m an unpaid assistant and it’s a pretty hefty commitment and thus I don’t get home until 8 or 8:30 on most nights. I know that bothers her. She’s told me so. I love hoops, I love coaching it almost as much as I loved playing it but it has definitely driven a wedge into our relationship. I can fix that. The time that is spent on coaching probably should be devoted to my marriage. So yea, I worry about me and my wife getting along.
3. My job has been a non-stop saga since 2010. I’m a ‘consultant’ which means I do contract work. I work for myself. I don’t work for a big company and thus if I don’t have gigs, if I don’t look for work, if I don’t network and if I’m not constantly on the look-out for work, I don’t get paid. It can be so exhaustive mentally, especially if you don’t get paid on time, which happens more often than you would think. I’m in a pretty hot industry, (tech) so there’s always potential for work but the sucky part is I have no PTO (Paid Time Off) I have no baked in 401K, I pay my own health insurance, I pay my expenses, I do my invoicing. It can be challenging to balance that high wire act as some of you surely know and it never ends unless I go and get a job working for another company. It’s always possible and maybe that’s the answer? I don’t know.
4. Our house-Look, I’m grateful that I have a house but the mortgage we have, is untenable. I had no idea what I was getting into, and neither did my wife and to be honest, we had no business being approved for the house we bought. We bought it in 2004 and 14 years later, it still needs a ton of work done to it and yet the mortgage is so out of whack with what it is worth, that we’ll never get ahead. It’s a lost cause. Great location and I suppose it has served as a great base for my kids when they were growing up, but we may have reached our limit of trying to make that nut every month. Hurricane Irma did us no favors either.
5. My mortality-I don’t think I worry about it as much as I just want to squeeze in as much as I can into this life, while I’m still relatively healthy. The only way to do that, is to get, no pun intended, my house in order. I do however, find myself thinking a lot about some of my decisions that I’ve made over the years, both the good and the bad. The regrets, there are a few, but for the most part, I’m ok with where I stand on those. I think it’s truly the remarkable human being who can say with a 100% certainty that they have no regrets. That being said, it’s time to get to work on the bucket list.
6. My family-Fractured would be a good word. I have 2 sisters. Same mother, different fathers. I barely speak to one and I haven’t spoken to the other since 2009. Long story short, I worked for my sisters husband. I moved to Naples, Florida to work as I had no choice. I built him a great online component to his thriving direct response marketing company and 4 years after moving, he let me go. I calculate that I helped him gross about $9 million in that span of time, My reward? My walking papers. It has been the singular most traumatic event in my life. It rocked my world and my wife’s world and changed it forever. My sister? Said nothing. To this day, I cannot forgive her or him for that. My other sister? She lives in South Carolina and send me the occasional text usually on my birthday and Christmas. I, in turn, do the same thing. It’s kind of an odd relationship. I also have an uncle (my mom’s brother) in Seattle, who I call during Christmas and that’s it. He never picks up the phone. I’m closest to my two uncles on my father’s side. We talk constantly and clearly we are cut from the same cloth and I thank God for that. Without them I would be putting the D in dysfunctional.
7. My beliefs-both political and religious. I went to a Catholic boarding school for seven years and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. However, somewhere along the way my belief systems have matured and changed somewhat, but the Catholic church’s has not. I belief in a higher power and a higher being and I do want to belief in some type of afterlife, I just don’t know about the whole heaven, hell and purgatory thing. I also find myself questioning the existence of a god sometimes when he or she can let things happen like the shootings in Sandy Hook, Las Vegas or Parkland for example. What are we supposed to believe in, in times like those? On a lighter note, sometimes I chuckle when a player of the game thanks god for his performance. Who does he blame when he fails? Politically speaking, all I can hope for are three things: One is that term limits should be instituted across the board for every elected official; two, money from lobbyists should not be allowed and three, the power of our voice and our votes should never be silenced or discounted.
8. My Legacy- I think about this a lot. I think we all should leave lasting legacies of good stuff. Whether it’s leaving an art collection, a building in your name, a book you wrote, a play, a poem, a manuscript, a collection of stories, your drawings, your paintings, your leadership, your impact on children, your love to a senior citizen, your volunteerism, your time as a coach*, your mentorship, your acts of kindness, or your lawnmower, whatever it is. We have to, you have to, leave this world in a better place for those that come after you. But if you don’t think about it and you just take up air and space, it’ll never happen. It should be our duty as citizens of this earth.
9. Karma. I believe in it. I believe that it’s a bitch and I also believe that in paying it forward, it almost always results in you getting it back. You may not notice when it happens, but when it does, it’s always good. Coincidence? I drive down the street at night and an overhead street lamp goes out. I always take note of that. I notice when butterflies are around me. I constantly will read a word at the same time as I hear it, whether it’s in conversation, in a TV show, or in a song. It happens a lot. I don’t know entirely why these things happen but I attribute them to signs. Of an afterlife? Perhaps. But the beauty of when these things occur, is that I realize that they did and it causes me to think.
10. My kids-I want them to continue to be cool. They have turned out to be the best of what my wife and I have to give to the world. It gives me great hope that these two awesome people will be part of this puzzle, part of this planet. They are great people, both unique in their own ways. They are ‘good’ people. My challenge is to give them the tools and resources and opportunities to make it happen. I don’t want to hand it to them, but they do need my guidance, as well as my wife’s. It’s an interesting time for them and it’s equally interesting to see them processing it. I don’t want them as well, to make some of the same mistakes I made. I guess that’s what parents are supposed to do.

These are the things that I think about every day.