The Wild West. What images come to mind with those words? Adventure. Opportunity. Gold. Land. Freedom. Frontier life also came with danger and risk of great loss. Uncertainty.
Earlier this month my family headed west on our first real road trip together. We were visiting family in northwestern Montana, a cool 33 hours door to door. The Gateway National Park offered our first views west. Then Badlands National Park to Big Fork, Montana and Flathead Lake…to Glacier National Park. We headed home through Yellowstone and a drive south through Wyoming crossing several lengths of the Oregon Trail and the path that thousands of early Americans traveled.
Sometimes we choose to leave our comfort zones. Other times, we are thrust out of a place of comfort and contentment to a place of fear and anxiety. In fact, our lives are filled with personal frontiers, are they not? Perhaps opportunity lies ahead, or maybe we are traveling our personal frontier road out of necessity, not by any choice of our own.
Enter stage left, 2020: a year that has welcomed each of us to our own version of the wild west. “Comfort zone? What is that?? Welcome to the jungle all you comfortable folks” 2020 chuckles nefariously.
A couple of weeks ago, an old letter dropped from a drawer in our home, including some encouragement to my then 10 year-old son. The topic? How do we keep our momentum when we find ourselves in an unfamiliar environment and well outside the bounds of our comfort zone?
One word recurred through the letter: engage. Much like the gears of a fine watch, when we engage, we fulfill our purpose. When we remain engaged,
- prudence tempers our fear.
- enthusiasm and curiosity overcome boredom.
- challenging relationships offer opportunities to learn and love differently.
- anger gives way to thoughtful communication.
- rest becomes a tool to fuel rather than a distraction to diminish productivity.
We learn. We serve. We follow. We lead. We live well when we engage well.
The number of families that we see walking around our neighborhood every evening tells a piece of the engagement story in 2020. The way our RPG team and workforces around the country have come together to continue serving their respective mission suggests a level of engagement that will pay dividends for years to come.
At times in our lives all the engagement we can muster may be to ask the hard questions – why me, why my family – and to keep our hearts open to significance and purpose.
Back to watches. A colleague wears an Omega, among the most admired watch brands in the world. Omega watches became popular for their ability to tell time…quite well…regardless of circumstance. From the trenches of world wars to the cockpits of the Apollo spacecraft, the gears of an Omega remain engaged through conditions in which others slip.
Today an Omega is more than a timepiece and illustrates nicely our opportunity to steward our legacy through engagement – especially when we find ourselves outside of our comfort zone, tempted towards anger or fear or apathy. Engagement recognizes purpose. Purpose lives on through our legacy. Let’s stay engaged.
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