Tonight I am met with uncertainty and a sense of despair. The cause doesn’t look significant on the surface, but an earthquake seems insignificant until what is happening beneath the surface disrupts the seemingly stable life that rests above it. All catastrophic tremors develop and build where no one sees or senses them.
I have started Greater Than Zero Apparel and media as a way to encourage people around me and to attempt to build a brand that would help me leave swing shift. Swing shift has been great in someways, but the mental toll it has on me will forever be misunderstood, overlooked, and inevitably treated as “just one of those things.”
In my journal, I carry a note that my middle son wrote in the summer of 2023 when he was playing his first year of baseball. He had a game on a day I had to work and these things are normal occurrence because I have to work different days every week. I had to work one night after that and he had slipped a note in my lunch box that I found once I got to work that says “I wish you ckam to my game” (and yes, he spelled came c-k-a-m which made it that much more difficult to read without feeling the sorrow of missing out).
The note reminds me of how much I miss and how tired I am because of work. I’m writing this reflection even now with tears welling up in my eyes as I sit in my control room at work. Something had to be done and I thought maybe GTZ was the way. But as I was doing a task at work on night shift tonight, I had my ear buds in (which is against the rules and I shouldn’t have), I began listening to what is likely my most favorite song of all time: “Time” composed by Hans Zimmer for the movie Inception. This song is the song I play when I need to reflect and examine things within myself to try and find root cause. Tonight was a night I needed to do that because earlier I had reached out to a couple of my friends with a text that said “ Considering just stopping by GTZ. It’s all too much to push and build with everything going on.”
As I listened to the song as I worked, a wave of clarity came over me as I posed the question to myself “why do you do GTZ? What’s it all for?” And i quickly realized that it wasn’t to create a better schedule for myself or to build a brand. It was deeper than that. So what conclusion did I draw as, again, a tsunami of emotions overtook me in the moment as the horns start playing in the song:
I just want/wanted my life to mean something.
And just like that, all of the things that are happening in my life started to lead me to the end of my life. And as I meditated on what my life was going to add up to be at the end was just going through the motions of survival feeling like I was never anything worth remembering by my family as I struggled to be a good husband, a loving father, and a supportive friend. I began thinking about the 12 hour days of sitting in a control room watching a screen that could be spent pursuing my family more. The night shifts that I stay awake at work so that when my family wakes, it’s my turn to sleep and not get to spend it with them. And the sleep isn’t good on nights either. It’s 4-5 hours in between two 24+ hour days sometimes. I think about how I’m not doing anything wrong by doing what I have to in order to provide for my family, but how much money can someone make when the cost is time?
Then I started thinking about if something tragically happened to my wife or one of my kids and their life ended too soon. Did I spend what little time I had with them angry or checked out due to exhaustion instead of embracing who they are and learning to love them in ways that they’d never forget if I was gone or in ways I wouldn’t regret if they were gone.
My heart wants to make a difference, but not for me. I just want to feel like it all mattered and at the end of my life I can say i didn’t waste it doing what I had to but I spent it doing what I wanted. Is that unrealistic? Is that a pipe dream? All of it seems so far away that no matter what I do, I can’t claw myself out of feeling like I do.
All of this to say: Greater Than Zero, with all of its aspirations to help others get enough control of their life so that they don’t end up having these same thoughts and struggles that I have experienced, is coming to an end. Though I love to do it, I simply cannot squander more time and missed memories.
Let me leave you with one last thing: your life will be over soon. Soon it will all seem like it passed you by and you didn’t get a chance to enjoy it. The noise will be gone. The stress will be gone. The aggravations will be gone. You’ll have wished “this season” would pass because of how difficult it is and you’ll inevitably say “where did it all go” as if a genie was there and instantly granted those wishes.
As a Christian I know in eternity it will all be fine. But right now, I am not fine. Not like this. And I don’t wish for anyone to wake up one day and feel like I do in this moment and many that I’ve had just like this. So, as you move closer toward eternity, may you live and love so much in a way that the transition is less of a sense of relief from the pain and more of the continuation of a life that you have built doing everything you can (and not doing a lot of things) to find peace and joy.
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