Waiting on the Lord

 

During the approximately 4 ½ months between when I left my previous job of 20 years in mid-May and started my new job in early October, I did a lot of things. I traveled a bunch and played golf 50 times. I kept a full calendar of professional meetings for purposes of networking and job search. And I spent a significant amount of time journaling about the entirety of my life experiences and the themes and lessons contained in them.

But perhaps the most important thing I did was wait on the Lord.

Waiting feels and is passive. Waiting is the opposite of acting. And yet, in a very real way, waiting requires intentionality. Because of our general impatience and my own action orientation, it feels like waiting is an act I must choose. And, for those 4 ½ months of uncertainty, I did indeed choose to wait on the Lord.

To be sure, waiting on the Lord includes prayer, Bible reading, and other active forms of communing with the divine. But, it also includes the opposite of action, to the extent that action is intended to accelerate something being accomplished, an outcome being determined, a destination being reached. Waiting on the Lord, while an act of will, is an act of will to not act, but rather to…wait. To slow down and just be, rather than try to speed things up.

The Bible records a lot of humans in the act of waiting on the Lord. It is a demonstration of faith, of obedience, and of trust, in God’s unshakeable presence and goodness and provision. It is, naturally, something we humans are terrible at, and something we humans would benefit greatly from. It is, to hit closer to home, something I am terrible at, and therefore something I benefitted greatly from this year.

Something that helped me through this uncomfortable act was to remember that waiting in the present to know what will happen in the future becomes easier when we reflect on how this all played out in the past. If God was faithful all the other times we were in the same situation, it makes it easier to trust He will be faithful this time too, and therefore it makes it easier to wait for that faithfulness to become manifest.

Of course, time is weird. I can think back on my own life journey from birth to today, and see all the highs and lows and patterns and trends. What I can’t do is see any of those things in the future. So, regardless of how much evidence there is of God’s faithfulness so far, it is an act of faith to trust in God’s faithfulness to come.

My current job is only my third ever, having worked at my first for 10 years and my second for 20. Something I reminded myself a bunch of this year was that, at the same point before my first and second jobs, I was similarly in the dark about what my next opportunity would be and when it would materialize. So while I suffered from a lot of anxiety, dread, and regret along the way, I could also fight to keep myself in the serenity of knowing that just as I was similarly blessed with the arrival of my first and second jobs, so could I look forward to the perfect provision and timing of my third job.

It was good for me to wait. I didn’t always do it well. But I did it. And I’m better for it.

Gotcha

 

Tomorrow marks 21 years since we met Jada for the first time and began our parenting journey. Speaking of travel, this little girl has become a cosmopolitan woman whose passport has way more stamps than mine. Go Jerds!

Enjoy the Moments, Don't Wait for the Memories

 

Facebook has a wonderful feature called "Memories" where it calls up your posts from the same date in previous years. As someone who prolifically posts about their family, that means a steady diet of pics with the wife and kids, literally different snapshots in time.

I'm sure that my reaction to these photos is similar to that of other parents. First, that we can scarcely remember our kids being that young. Second, that we ourselves, the adults, looked so much younger then than we do now.

Time is undefeated. The adults age, and the kids grow up. This is natural and good, and I am lucky that for my family I am hopeful that life will just keep getting better and the future is bright.

But, "Memories" on Facebook is also a stark reminder to enjoy the moment. We will never be as young as we are now. If we are feeling old - which I do every morning I wake up to the normal aches and pains of a middle-aged man - we will feel even older in 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years. It's fine to joke about our getting older, but if all it is is ungratefulness, I can tell you that the version of us that is lucky enough to be alive 30 years from now would kill to go back in time and have today's body. That's a helpful cue for me to be thankful for the health and vitality I do have in the present day.

And, we will never get to enjoy our kids at exactly this age ever again. They too only age in one direction, so today is the only day we can interact with them at this exact age. To give a contemporary examples, there are days when Asher's bedtime is exhausting for me, if he is being difficult or I've had a long day. But I know that it won't take long for me to think back to when I got to have a bedtime routine with him and think to myself that I would pay a lot of money for one more chance to do it again. It helps me not only to survive the night but embrace it.

A life well lived is full of good memories. The best of which are those in which we were fully present to enjoy them in the moment. It's what I try to do every day.

Blogging On

 

Across my two blogs, "Huang Kid Khronicles" and "Musings of an Urban Christian," I am coming up on 8,000 posts which have garnered an aggregate 2.2 million views. MUC debuted in February 2003, midway through a year-long sabbatical I was taking in my first job, during which I worked offsite and ran my organization's fledgling consulting practice (Cities Beyond), worked on my first political campaign (David Oh for City Council at Large), and birthed the blog as a platform for self-reflection and self-expression. HKK launched in June 2005, after we'd been matched with Jada but before we headed to China to meet her.

From the beginning, it's been a lot of musing at MUC and a lot of chronicling ("khronicling"?) at HKK. For those who have read, whether loyally or in and out, I thank you for your attention and hope I have enriched or at least amused you along the way. I hope to keep blogging for many years to come!

How I Solo Travel

 

Today's post is not meant as a how-to, in fact I suspect very few people will find my way of thinking on travel to synch up with theirs. This is merely to document my thought process for posterity, with all of this summer's trips in the rearview to draw from as reference. Please note these are musings about solo travel; when I travel with others I do try to be mindful of what works for them, which may or may not be my first choice, whereas today's musings are about how I roll when it's just me. 

Where to Go

I've shared at length how I arrived at my world travel bucket list so I won't repeat anything here. I'll only add that this summer's choices were influenced in part by convenience (where's close that I can get to fast to maximize fun and minimize travel time) and in part by what would be fun to do with those I was traveling with (Singapore since Jada was already there, Cabo because Asher loves mangoes, Manhattan with Amy because we could just walk and talk to our heart's content).

What to Do

There's infinite help online for what is must-see, so I research there but not exhaustively, meaning I could delve deeper about what's really worth it and what's a dud but I choose not to, and in fact sometimes I know little to nothing about a place as I'm arriving at it, just that it's been recommended to me. I also tend to want to cluster multiple things per day based on what's near what, so sometimes a site gets dropped if it's a "maybe" but out of the way, and sometimes a site gets added if it's a "meh" but near other things. I guess I'm thrifty too, so while I'm happy to pay for entrance to gardens and museums, things that are free are not likely to be dropped.

Spending Money

Besides travel and accommodations, food, shopping, and entertainment are the other major travel budget categories, and for those I tend to be way below average. A lot of what I like is free, namely taking pictures of city architecture and nature settings, so while I'm more than game to pay for admission to museums, zoos/aquariums, and gardens when worth it, my entertainment spending tends to be pretty low. I love to window shop but rarely buy, not even souvenirs, so my shopping spending is even lower. And food is very low too: a typical day on the road might be free hotel breakfast, for lunch it's fruit and snacks that I procured at a grocery store, and so the only other spending might be an affordable dinner or a drink/dessert splurge along the way.

How to Get Around, Where to Stay

Maybe later in life when I travel more I'll be more brand-loyal to rack up the points and be treated like a VIP. For now I'm driven by price and convenience, so any airline or hotel will do if it's cheap and works for my itinerary (the right time for a flight, the right location for lodging). Since I pack my days, the quality and size of my accommodations matters very little to me as I won't spend much time there, and in fact I'm toying with trying those "coffin" places in big Asian cities where all you get is a small capsule for your bed and belongings and everything else is communal.

How to Pack

Unless I'm bringing my golf clubs, I try hard to go light. For Singapore, I packed 3-4 days' worth of clothes along with supplies to hand-wash in the sink, which I did three times on my 12-day trip. So, between clothes, workout gear, laptop/chargers, and bathroom supplies, I could fit everything in a medium-sized backpack that didn't even need to go overhead let alone get checked in. I also carried a second, smaller backpack, which had a bunch of food for the long flight there, as well as things I needed on the go, namely meds, hand sanitizer and wet wipes, sunscreen, and water bottle.

The Benefit of Cross-Training

 

Whether it is college students in my professional orbit (being involved at Penn, meeting up with the kids of my colleagues) or supporting the two college students whose tuition I pay (Jada at Drexel and Aaron at Kansas State), a common exhortation I offer is to try new things and dig into different perspectives. 

To give a tangible analogy, in the sports world, it's well-established that, even and especially in an era of early specialization, kids should not go hard in their core sport all year round, but should either rest, cross-train, or play other sports. It reduces injury risk, keeps things fresh, and provides body and mind with varying angles to enhance whatever your primary sport is. 

And so it is with careers, that even if you're dead set on a particular professional track (e.g. nursing, business, engineering), it's good to take classes and do internships and seek out knowledge in lots of different disciplines. For one, most teenagers aren't dead set on a particular professional track, and if they are it's not likely they have an understanding of what else is out there that might be even better for them. Even if you're one of the rare ones that knows what they want at a young age and end up in that very profession, your success in that profession will only be enhanced by having connected with content and people in other professions.

Innovation, after all, lives primarily on the edges of multiple disciplines, and is rarely found solely within one field. My favorite example is one of the first I was aware of, in which my freshman year statistics professor at Penn, a true renaissance man, was responding to some of my hotshot Wharton classmates who knew they were going to go into finance and so why bother with science classes while in college if they could just load up on all the finance offerings this great institution could offer.

Our prof told us to look up the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives, which was first expressed in the 1970s and which would eventually bring Myron Scholes and Robert Merton the Nobel Prize in 1997 (Fischer Black had passed away two years prior). It turns out that Black got his Bachelor's in Physics (and his PhD in Applied Mathematics), and when he and Scholes were creating models for valuing options, he recognized parallels between formulas that physicists had already discovered concerning thermal diffusion, specifically that just like heat from a big temperature spike dissipates gradually over time from source to surrounding areas, so do puts and calls exhibit similar behavior in reverse (at expiration the value jumps to either 0 or 1, but going back in time from there it smooths out). Black's collaborator, Scholes, had a classic finance and economics background, but Merton was also an applied math guy like Black, and Black was also influenced early in his career by a guy named Jack Treynor whose finance innovations stemmed from his engineering background.

In other words, one of the most famous and fundamental formulas in finance, which literally was Nobel-worthy, came from a group that was able to see across disciplines, borrowing insights that had been generated in one field to innovate in another. 

Which is why I cringe at the binary argument nowadays that either the liberal arts are useless or they are paramount. One side thinks the future is technical so why should we read Shakespeare. Another side thinks those who learn to use AI are evil and useless, so employers should only hire humanities majors. What we need is people, and groups of people, who have been exposed to lots of perspectives: hard sciences and classical literature, Wall Street internships and outdoor excursions, learning to code and observing a city council meeting.

An 18-year-old has so many choices before them to do just this. What classes you take, what summer experiences you seek, who you make friends with - these are all things you can do with intention, regardless of how strongly you feel about what you're good at and what you want to do in life. As a middle-aged, mid-career person, I have my own set of choices. Who I reach out to to get to know better, what books I read, what organizations I pledge my time and money to. Wherever you are in life, you will be richer, as will our society as a whole, if we diversify in these ways. 

To return to the sports world, think of Wayne Gretzky, Steve Nash, and Steph Curry, three elite athletes who have succeeded at the highest level without immediately recognizable physical talent. Gretzky (lacrosse) and Nash (soccer) played similar sports to their primary sports, which trained their minds and bodies to operate in different ways - spacing, angles, pace. Meanwhile Curry was the son of an NBA star so grew up dribbling a basketball, but an early love of golf honed both his hand-eye coordination and his consistent body mechanics. Imagine a modern-day parent or coach berating any of these dudes when they were kids for straying from 100 percent focus on their primary sport. 

We are better, and more interesting, when we cross-train in these ways. Would that we make choices to do so, and advise the young people around us to do the same.

Collaboration or Condemnation

 

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with an old work colleague who is now an elected official in a hotly politically divided state legislature. She is around my age and we've known each other for many years, during which time I have built up so much respect for the ways she gives her all in serving her constituents and her state. 

One manifestation of this, which is somewhat controversial among her younger followers, is the intentional efforts she puts into getting to know, working with, and at times supporting her fellow electeds who are on the other side of the aisle. To be sure, on most issues, they do not see eye to eye, and my colleague is quite principled and vocal about that. However, as a legislative body and as a group of public servants, they must work for the common good, and so practically what that means for my colleague is that there are times she must collaborate, co-sponsor, and stand with her counterparts.

She sees no character flaw or integrity inconsistency in this, nor do I. She is doing a job, a very public and important one, and fulfilling that job requires disagreement at times and cooperation at other times. Their being very apart on, say, worker's rights, does not prohibit them from coming together on, say, child care.

When I was young, I tended to think that I saw things clearly, dividing the world into right and wrong and pouring my energy into doing right and opposing wrong. I think this is common and good, when we are young, to think and act this way. But I worry that today's youth, like me before them, are quick to pass these judgments, and then having rendered judgment to consider "the other side" not worthy of anything but condemnation, let alone compromise, collaboration, and collegiality.

Leave aside whether the passing of judgment is correct, because for sure it is a good thing to feel strongly about an issue and to be upset when people in power act against what we see as progress on that issue, so let me give folks the benefit of the doubt and say that when they believe about an issue is righteous and that they're feeling angry is appropriate. Let us also assume that folks who raise their voice do so out of a genuine concern for themselves, others, and society, and a commitment to see the hard work through to make progress, rather than grandstanding to look good or feel good with no regard for connecting with the people or issue in question.

With all those caveats in place, I want to say that I feel strongly that in our democratic society, "the other side" is a group of people who deserve our recognition of their humanity and voice, not to be shot down figuratively or literally. And, as an elected official like my colleague, "the other side" is a group that must be recognized, cultivated, and worked with, if that elected body is to get anything of substance done. The alternative, which I don't think we're close to but I will say I'm starting to worry about, is that public discourse devolves into making and winning arguments through violence, and that the ebb and flow of democratic government consisting of more than one political party gives way to one side dominating and then power lurching over to the other side to dominate next.

If you're a politically active young person or a parent raising one, hats off to you. I hope you'll see the commitment and openness of my colleague as a good thing to be emulated and not a cowardly thing to be denounced. I certainly hope more of our electeds, and citizens in general, are more like her.