Four Burners

I recently heard on a radio show a very interesting lesson. According to the host, it has its roots in Australia, but the little snippet of wisdom is applicable to really any nation or culture.

The host didn't know how to put it concisely and I haven't figured out how either, but here it is: Life is like a stove-top. You've got four burners (maybe five...but usually four) and your time must be split up between those four burners. You can have four things cooking at any given time, but no more.

That's about as concise as I can get with it, but its still not complete thought, really. I want to talk about all that this little saying really means and just how true it is.

When you're cooking in your kitchen at home, you've got four burners on your stove to cook with. If you have six different dishes you need to make (lets pretend all of those dishes need to be fried or boiled) you're only going to make four of them at any given time. The other two dishes that aren't on that stove will not cook. They're going to stay raw, get cold, or even spoil. You need to finish one or two of your four dishes before you can add in the extra two which have been set aside. Which dish do you cook first? Which takes longer? Which is more important? Which is more pressing?

The perfection of the lesson is that it is inherently implicit of something that is just as true of life as cooking itself, and that is "Time." The amount of time something stays on a burner is vital, and so is the amount of time that you have in your life.

There are so many things that can be done in a given day, and there are so many things to actually focus on. There are many people who thrive on having a full task list. I'm not one of those people, as I tend to get overwhelmed if I have more than five significant things to do in a day. But those tasks don't really count as things you would have on a burner. Those barely fit in to the picture that this little saying paints. If the hum-drum errands had to fit in this picture, they would be represented by a short trip to get something out of the fridge, or perhaps dicing something while the four burners sizzle their respective dishes.

In fact, the saying could be rephrased like this: "There are four things that you can actually focus on and be good at in your life."

Here's another way to phrase it, "There are four things you can choose to spend your life with, and what you choose will be your legacy."

And another for good measure: "Pick four things to love, and forget everything else."

It's an incredibly heavy and sobering picture. It's a reality that has been lingering in my day to day thoughts, continuously pressing against my forehead like a stern mother. I have 24 hours in a day and 6-8 of those are spent sleeping. And there are a LOT of dishes I would like to cook in my life. But I can only ever be cooking four at a time. (Maybe five if I'm really skilled.)

Let me share what this means in my own life. I want to love my wife above all others. She is having a baby (a fact that is simply too exciting for words. I can't wait to be a daddy...I'm scared out of my mind though.) When baby is born I will be nurturing and raising my child. So my wife is one burner, my children are another burner.

I go to work every day for eight hours. There's a burner.

So I have one burner left. One burner to balance church, my extended family, my dearest friends, the errands of life, reading all the books I want to read, playing the games I want to play, learning the things I want to learn. Every moment of my free time or personal time is on that one burner, which translates to...on average? about 3 hours a day. But my baby also hasn't been born yet, so I expect that to go down to about an hour in a few months.

I don't have a perfect grip on life and schedules change, of course. There are some days when I have the entire day to myself. There are some days when I can actually put two burners together (spend time with wife+friends+church) or (Take the whole family camping. Thats two dishes cooking on one burner) but mostly, all the extra stuff in life is on one burner. If I am to be truly knowledgeable about something, or truly a master of a specific craft (like writing, for example) then I need to spend more time cooking that dish on that one burner. And chances are, that one burner is going to be the thing that people identify me with. Because that one burner is most likely going to be my hobby, my passion, the consumation of my thought life and the thing I quietly look forward to when I'm doing something otherwise boring (of course I'm going to think about my family too, I'm just trying to drive home the point.) and the thing that I talk about when people say "What have you been up to lately?"

If you're an average joe like me, You've only got one burner too. So...whatcha cooking?

Mornings

This post is going to look more like a diary entry than an educated rant.

I was painting an apartment through this morning and early afternoon. It's a task I perform now and again for our landlord, who graciously deducts a bit from our rent as payment and goodwill. It has allowed us to keep a healthy and respectful relationship with the man who could kick us out on a whim and has served as a nice supplement to income. Besides that, I like doing it.

The apartment that I'm currently painting for him is the...maybe the 6th one I've done for him. Considering how small the complex is, thats actually a huge number. The funny thing is, the first time I painted an apartment for him, I had never done any painting before in my life. He gave me a quick lesson, offered some advice upon my calling him for Q&A and then inspected it with me there once I was done. The first couple of times he gave me some advice on what to do next time, general tips for speedy work and other such words of wisdom.

Now that I have become more comfortable with the task, I can actually think about OTHER things while I am painting. It has become something that I can be relatively at ease about (though I wouldn't call myself even an amatuer by any stretch). So today I was thinking. Why do I read the news so much?

Ever since I moved to Pennsylvania, I have been reading the news everyday. Quite a bit of my reading is tech news (my favorite) but it is almost always supplemented by business news, U.S. News and politics. I will read basically anything on the internet that classifies itself as "news". And this is something that I have only been doing since I have been married in the state of PA. Until today I hadn't really thought about WHY.

Listening to the podcasts that I do, Car Talk, What the Tech, A Life Well Wasted, The Game Informer Show, The Motley Fool, 60 Minutes, Truth for Life and Focus on the Family, I noticed that I often dream while I am listening to these shows. When I'm listening to cartalk, I carefully soak in the facts that are communicated to the callers about what could be wrong with their cars and how nice it will be when I finally know how to fix them myself. In What the Tech, I carefully listen about the occasional conversation that takes place about programming languages and operating systems. Listening to Game Informer, I wonder about how hard it would be to actually make a simple game, like something that would look like it came from the original Nintendo or even the old Atari systems. Then when I listen to general radio shows like 60 Minutes I think about how fun it would be to have my own podcast and interview people. That would rock.

But mostly when I am at home and I have nothing pressing to be doing I will just read the news. and today I finally realized it: It's because I don't have a constructive hobby. Back when I first got married I wanted to the be best man that I could be for my wife: I wanted to get up extra early every morning so I could get an early start on the day and get loads of stuff done before she even had a chance to wake up. But the fact was that all I could do was write. I could work on my book, write poetry, maybe do some blog work. The thing is, our apartment is so small that when I type on the keyboard (something I am exceptionally loud at...and proud of.) It would wake her up. In addition to the waking, it is a sound that also annoys the snot out of her. So unless I was willing to sit outside or go to some coffee shop (we aren't close enough to one to justify it...and I ain't sitting in the grass with a laptop. That's lame.) doing any kind of writing on the computer is out of the question. At the time I was writing some letters to friends and loved ones, but in this age it is both uncommon and inconsistent to receive a timely reply. So it's not something I could do every morning.

I think at one point, I decided I would just get up early, have some ME time and goof around on the internet. Aside from facebook and youtube, basically the only other thing you can do on the net that doesn't involve typing is reading the news. And so i developed the terrible addiction of being a news junkie. My wife pointed this out to me just a few weeks back. But it actually soaked in today.

If I actually took my mornings and focused; if I woke up with the purpose of doing something constructive, I'm willing to bet this bad habit could be broken very easily. Hopefully when we get to Texas, Amber and I will be able to get a two bedroom apartment, where I can close the door of the second bedroom and get some writing done without disturbing her. Or maybe I could learn to program, or record and edit sound, or write games? For those who are willing to wake up in the morning, there is a whole world of opportunity to be seized before 10 A.M.