Life continues to get more expensive

Life changes.

Constantly.

Life has stages and, hopefully, progressions.

As you go through these steps the cost of life changes.

You get more responsibilities.

You gain dependants.

You clarify your sense of purpose.

You start school…

You start puberty…

You have you first long-term relationship…

You become sexually active…

You get your first job…

You finish high school…

You complete any higher education…

You learn how to drive…

You become a legal adult…

You gain a pet…

You progress in your profession…

You move out of home…

You get engaged…

You get married…

You buy a house…

You have kids…

You change professions…

You retire…

You become a grandparent…

Of course, this process then continues as your children grow…

They learn to walk…

They start school…

They start puberty…

They start dating…

So on and so on…

Life continues to get more expensive.

How do you know? 

Because your mistakes mean more.

If you live at home, without anyone keeping you accountable, then life is fairly cheap.

You have few people depending on you.

You can, relatively, do as you please without major knock-on-effects.

But, then life gets more expensive.

The cost of your choices and, especially mistakes, increase.

Now, your mistakes take on a greater cost.

You hurt others.

You suffer greater financial consequences.

You live with the ramifications for a longer period of time.

As a parent, you also get to see the cost of another life increasing.

Their mistakes become more expensive.

And, thus, so does the cost of your life increase by proxy.

As my girls get older my cost of life increases as theirs does.

And, every time it does, the older I feel…

The modern effect of misunderstanding kairos & chronos time

Currently, I’m teaching my year 7 classes about time.

I like teaching this introductory topic because it reminds me just how tricky the concept of time is.

For, we think we confidently know far more than we actually do.

The length of a year?

The number of year we are in?

The order of the months?

All of these are far more complex than they appear on face value.

In fact, how the time students think about time harkens back to the Greeks - chronos and kairos. 

Time can be linear and ordered - chronos - or time can be segmented and highlighted by moments of significance - kairos.

The easiest way to display both is on a timeline. 

Only moments of significance are added to the timeline and the timeline itself is a chronological representation.

But, modernity struggles with the two differentiations.

Why?

Because we create reels instead of photo albums. 

Reels document every chronos moment. 

Photo albums are reserved for the kairos moments.

Nowadays, our holidays are punctuated by 1500 pictures instead of 50 photos.

We take pictures of food instead of being present for meals.

We live moments through our screens, not seeking to cement them in our memories.

For kairos is expensive. Chronos is cheap.

Before we documented, shared and judged every chronological moment in our lives, the restrictions of price and time restricted earlier generation to commemorate only kairos moments.

Random Graham Revisited

Back in 2011 I did a blog post called Random Graham. It was a post about small somewhat-interesting tidbits about me. 

I found the post a stumbled over the post while looking for something else and, a decade-and-half later, I figured it was time for a revisit and - where needed - additions and amendments. The amendments will be in italics.

1. My first ever sermon was given at Katoomba Anglican Church. The passage was Hebrews 12:1-2. I had the entire sermon memorised. 
2. My first pet, a bird named Sam, was found hung in his plastic ladder by my sister when she was around 10 years old. He is still buried in the back garden with the ladder around his neck. 
3. I've owned three (now five) cars in my life. Cecil, Gerald and Big Red. Gerald was crap. My last car was named Speedy and my current car is named Ernie.
4. I've kept a daily diary for the last 14 years. (I actually gave this up a few years after this post. But, I’m still hoarding all my old diaries)
5. I chew quietly to myself when I sleep. I'm told, so does my sister. It must be a genetic thing... 
6. My first kiss was in a park. Her name was Rachel. 
7. My first kiss was my (ex)wife was on a dance floor. A seedy, seedy dance floor. 
8. The place my parents got married is now a car park. 
9. I went on schoolies three times. 
10. I returned from my first schoolies with bright yellow hair. 
11. Subsequently, I had bright yellow hair on my 18+ proof-of-age card. 
12. My first cat never died. He just disappeared. 
13. I used to wear one hard contact lens in my left eye. 
14. I wore glasses in primary school. To help strengthen my lazy right eye I had a yellow smiley patch over my left. The look was not attractive. 
15. I almost always cry when I watch Forrest Gump or the final episode of M.A.S.H. 
16. I've kept all the letters my (ex)wife has ever written me in my bedside table. I’ve still got a few of them, but I also keep every letter from my current wife.
17. I still have the sign in sheet from my first week at youth group. I was in year 6. 
18. I once had the name Graham Baldcock on a boarding pass. When this is a rugby trip, the name sticks. 
19. When I was a teenager I cut up a heap of my childhood photos to make a collage for Mum. I never did make the collage. 
20. When I was a kid I slept with a seal. 
21. I used to be deathly afraid of Freddy Kruger as a kid. I watched "Nightmare on Elm Street 3" at my sister's birthday party. 
22. I can name every WWF/E champion from 1978 to approx 1999. I can also name every Wrestlemania main event for the first 20 years. 
23. My Mum would stroke my nose to put me to sleep. It still works to this day. 
24. My first job was working at a deli. 
25. I had the name "weasel" on the back of my year 12 jersey. 
26. I sing in the shower. 
27. It annoys me that I can't pronounce my name. 
28. When I cry at my child's birth it will be as much about become a father as it will be that my Dad won't be around to see it. (Actually, it was more of a solitary tear, not a weepy flood.)
29. I flirted with the idea of getting tongue surgery to fix my speech impediment. 
30. I only had one girlfriend before dating my wife. 
31. I used to steal cigarettes from Mum and Dad to smoke at the park in year 6. 
32. I used to steal loose chance from Dad to buy micro machines. 
33. My two favourite authors are Agatha Christie and Valerio Massimo Manfredi. And Mary Beard.
34. I have a chipped tooth. I chipped it biting into a chocolate freckle. 
35. I can't ride a bicycle. (WRONG! I just can’t a bike confidently. Every holiday I’m dragged bike riding by my wife. I can do it just fine as long as the terrain is flat. I can’t really do the whole out-of-the-saddle-so-you-can-ride-up-a-hill thing.)
36. I couldn't swim confidently until I was 17. 
37. I've read through the entire bible twice. The first time took me 1 year, 8 months, 10 days. 
38. I've never been in a fight. 
39. As a kid, I once put a knife into a toaster. There were sparks. 
40. Years ago, I got a mobile phone from Dad when mine stopped working. It still has a video he took of my niece. You can hear my Dad's voice in the background. I miss his laugh. 
41. My Dad and I both got snooker cues for my 21st. I beat him at snooker. Often. (The snooker cues are now missing. That makes me a little sad)
42. I once broke a water pipe connected to someones water meter. I just kept walking. 
43. I was paralysed for a short time when I was hit over the head with a pillow. 
44. I've had my appendix removed. And three of my wisdom teeth. 
45. I've never used a razor to shave my face. (WRONG! This is now all I use. I converted from electric around 2016)

Now… some new random facts.

46. I used to carry in my wallet a small army figurine from my childhood. I found it when I was cleaning my bedroom while I was till living at home. He was the last survivor. I carried it around as a reminder that I’m a child of God. I had that in my wallet for around a decade before losing it.

47. I used to have the newspaper obituary from my dad. It was kept in a pile of papers stored at my mums. It got water damaged when her garage flooded and then fell apart. I wish I still had it.

48. I’ve been “learning” German on Duolingo for approximately 6 years. My current streak is 2321 days. Honestly, I’m still functionally illiterate, with my vocabulary far excelling my pronunciation or grammar. I suspect I’ll finish the entire German course by the middle of the year. I’ll then aim to do a course face-to-face.

49. The next language I want to learn is Latin. It must be the historian within me…

50. I’ve been doing the same bible reading regime (working through a book/segment of the bible my reading it and then studying/reading a number of commentaries) since 2022. To complete the entire bible will take me until the end of 2027.

51. I’ve now written over 2200 Tiny Bible Bits, touching on approximately 2500 bible passages.

52. Everyday at work I wear socks with some kind of animals or characters on them. I have students guess what they are when I need to “select a person at random”. Friday is always flamingos 🦩 

53. I start each school day by handwriting my timeline for the day on a notepad I bring with me to every class. Other teachers, rightly, make fun of this.

54. I’ve been landscaping the garden at my current home for the last 13 months. It won’t be complete until the middle of the year. 

55. I’ve mapped out my reading schedule (bible, theology, leadership, history, bible reading plans) until 2055.

56. According to the schedule, I should read over the entire bible (using various methods) in 2029, 2033, 2037, 2041, 2044, 2049 and cycle back to my current 6-year study plan in 2050.

The importance of professional compartmentalisation

We all have stress.

Interpersonal stress.

Mental stress.

Physical stress.

Stress at church.

Stress at home.

Stress at work.

Life begins to feel overwhelming when the stresses of life start to pile up upon each other.

Mental stress results in interrupted sleep and, thus, physical stress.

Stress at home blends into stress at work.

Stress at work blends outside of work hours.

What we need is a hearty dose of healthy compartmentalism.

We need to establish routines to box up our stresses so they don’t catch a ride into another part of our life.

This was the beauty of my previous jobs in retail and meter reading.

I carried nothing home.

No matter what was going on professionally, none of it had any serious ramifications for my personal life.

No matter how bad a day I had, by the time I made my way home, everything was out of my mind.

Of course, it helped immensely that my jobs weren’t overly important to me.

Retail wasn’t my profession.

Meter reading was only ever temporary.

But, ministry and teaching stresses are a different matter.

These ACTUALLY matter.

But, they are also 30 minutes from home.

They could be packed away on the drive home, ready to be reopened on the way back to work.

We need bumpers in our life to allow segmentation.

Maybe, for you, it is a drive home. It could be going to the gym. Perhaps it is walking the dog. It may be as simple as sitting in your car for a few minutes once you pull into your driveway. A mental unloading while riding the lift up to your apartment.

No matter how you achieve it, with healthy compartmentalisation, the bleeding of stresses can be somewhat stemmed.

While every element of your life will be inevitably connected, having the ability to shut off your vocational stresses, can be vital for your wellbeing and provide the adequate space required for you to then deal with the obstacles awaiting you on a Monday morning.

Do we partake in educational waterboarding?

56.

This is how many assessments tasks a junior student will approximately have over the academic year at the high school I teach in.

That is a lot. 

In fact, the number has been intentionally reduced due to the sheer quantity.

But, even if the number is knocked down to 40, this is still a lot of testing for a young teenager.

But, then again, we teach students a lot of content.

If you’re in year seven in New South Wales, for my teaching subjects, you’ll be taught six separate topics over 40 weeks.

My senior class covers ten lengthy topics across 7 school terms.

Again, this is a lot.

If you multiply these figures across all of the subjects that a student takes, then they get bombarded with content.

For some students, it’s manageable.

School works for them.

They thrive within the educational structures which we’ve developed over generations.

They excel within the pressure of study and examination.

But, other students struggle.

They struggle under the cognitive load.

They struggle under the stress of exams.

They struggle under the relentlessness of the school year.

In short, for some kids, school is just too much.

It can be torturous.

A continual flood of information and performance.

So, for these teens, we could compare the way we teach - or at least amount - as the equivalent of educational waterboarding.

We force too much information down their throats until they can’t handle the sheer volume.

And, then we continue the torrent.

For some kids, it’s all too much.

They are subjected to educational waterboarding.

I wonder what would happen if we found a productive way to lessen the load.

To reduce the stress.

The spread out the content.

To slow the torrent.

The trouble is, with the structures which are currently in place, our ability to now rewire the modern education systems is an uphill battle.

Meanwhile, far too many kids will still be drowning in schools…