First Maverick Christmas (2 of 3)

Here's the second of those essays that weren't really meant for blogging, but seemed to have been tailor-fit for it...

It’s only been a year since I’ve looked across the room and said my goodbyes to a family I once built and knew. But it seems like a lifetime. After the year that has been, I stood there among a new family that I’ve built with others, a new family bustling with new life, new hope.

8:12 pm, December 19, 2002. That night was our first Christmas party. It seemed simple enough to get there, I just didn’t know the shape we were going to be in when we did. This motley crew has fought well together, but not all battles were won. But as we have fallen, we’ve picked ourselves up. Bloody and bruised, but breathing…
…smiling, while shaking hands and throwing high fives among ourselves, who’ve stood together…
… and laughing, knowing we stand taller and stronger now than we ever have.

"...I wonder if they can smell my fear? My fear of failure, my fear of reaching out for this dream and not reaching it at all..."

I can’t really say if all these people really share the very same passion that I’ve built this thing on. I started this new company with the hare-brained illusion of gathering only the most passionate of people with me. And after the year that has passed, I am left asking myself if the kind of passion I showed and asked of them was more the wrong kind. A passion that bore the bitter foundations of my own sense of pain, loss, and resentment, perhaps? One that seemed to rejoice more in the news of loss and failure of others, than in our own little victories? It shouldn’t have been so, but for much of our journey, it was. And I can only thank these people for looking beyond that, and giving me their best. I wonder if they can smell my fear? My fear of failure, my fear of reaching out for this dream and not reaching it at all. The fear of letting these people fall victim to the hubris of a foolish and delusionary man hiding behind the thick, musky smoke of his own bravado.

If they did, it didn’t show. As the laughter went on, there were laughable efforts at singing tonight. Off-key anthems to cheers of what will be, what may yet become, and simply cheers of being in this journey I’ve begun. If they only knew, I’ve conquered my fears again and again every day to the music of their laughter, and on the knowledge of their faith.

Every now and then, I find myself tired. Feeling the weight of all this too much for my poor, twenty eight year old shoulders. Then I see her. My oldest friend, who I dragged out from a cushy job to help me keep these kids in line. And I simply can’t give up. Can’t fail.

Or at the very least, I can’t stop trying to not fail. We’ll keep at it and probably fall flat on our faces from time to time. But we’ll pick ourselves up from the grime and keep running. Over and over. And we’ll be back to sing more songs off-key… and laugh, laugh, laugh…

And there it was, laughter that bubbles from them like music to my ears…

I once heard that when all the laughter has died down, clowns are the first to cry. I’ve been a clown all my life. But tonight, the laughter is abundant… tonight, this clown is king.


(Restored 2008)