Stay Ready… But Don’t Forget To Live

JT at Arches National Park

My son is somewhere on the road between Atlanta and California right now, driving a truck loaded with nearly everything he owns.

His apartment is packed up. His belongings are piled into the back, covered with tarps and strapped down with bungee cords. And somewhere beneath all of that is a future he still can’t quite see.

JT has spent these past months training and working out as an NFL free agent.There has been interest. His agent tells him he’s on several teams’ ext man up” lists. If a player gets injured or a roster changes, the phone could ring.

So the message from his agent has been simple:

Stay ready.

What an interesting way to live. Stay ready for something you deeply want, without knowing if or when it’s coming. Keep training when there is no game on the calendar. Keep believing when there is no guarantee.

For a while, I think that uncertainty felt heavy. But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

JT packed up his Atlanta apartment, loaded his truck and headed west. And instead of simply trying to get home as quickly as possible, he decided to see the country along the way.

Zion. Arches. Yosemite. And whatever else catches his attention between here and there.

He has been hiking through national parks, completely awed by the red rocks and landscapes he has never seen before, taking picture after picture, wanting to capture it all. And several times a day, my phone rings.

“Mom, you have to see this.”

I hear his voice before I really even see what he’s showing me.

There is an exuberance in it.

A lightness.

Wonder.

He tells us about the trails, the people he’s met, the long stretches of highway and the things he’s noticing along the way. And then there was this. At the top of a mountain, nearly 12,000 feet up, JT struck up a conversation with another hiker. Somehow, they discovered they had crossed paths before.

The man had worked at Cal when JT played football there. Then he realized exactly who JT was. “I’m the editor who called you about doing the interview about your mom surviving cancer.” That interview was later published.

Of all the people to meet. In all the places to meet them. Nearly 12,000 feet up a mountain.

And I keep thinking:

My son sounds happy.

Not because everything worked out.

It hasn’t.

Not because he knows what’s coming next.

He doesn’t.

He sounds happy right here.

And that moves me.

Because he still wants the dream.

When he gets back to California, he is going straight back into vigorous training. He told me he’s ready to go “full Rocky mode.” And apparently, he’s found his Mickey.

His friend Pep, a professional trainer, will be waiting for him.

There’s an old saying: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Maybe JT is ready in a different way now.

He seems calmer about where he is in his life. Still fiercely committed to what he wants, but no longer requiring the dream to come true today in order to enjoy today.

And maybe that is what the in-between can offer all of us.

Not an answer.

A different perspective.

I think about a kaleidoscope.

The pieces inside don’t disappear when we turn it. They are still there… the hope, disappointment, uncertainty, work, love and possibility.

But turn the end just a little… and the same pieces fall into a new pattern. Maybe that is what is happening somewhere along a highway between Atlanta and California.

My son is turning the end of his kaleidoscope.

The dream is still there.

But so are the red rocks.

The open road.

The phone calls home.

The joy he didn’t have to wait for.