Fighting off the status quo

This is a small town state…

I love how it’s networked together like a web. However, in that web there are some spiders of the status quo (life as usual) that try to pen us immovably in those places where tradition rules over flexibility. And unbeknownst to us we may find ourselves doing something just because that’s the way it’s always been done, which may mean perpetual stagnation rather than the preservation of the sacred ways.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That’s true mostly because he doesn’t want to learn them.

The other day, my father-in-law was so amazed when he saw us connect our phones to the TV wirelessly and cast what was on our phones to the TV screen. We watched a five-year-old choir director give Steve Harvey fits with precocious answers to Harvey’s questions. We laughed at the screen as my father-in-law watched amazed.

“Now, how’d you do that? What button do I press to do it? Ya’ll are going to have to teach me this,” he said. And we walked him through the process, step by step. He was eager to learn something new. And I believe that’s what keeps him young at heart, vibrant in spirit.

I want to be as eager to learn as the group of 70-year-old women I saw one day at the Apple store taking a class on how to utilize the email features on their iPads. They were unwilling to slow down and say that this new technology had passed them by, unwilling to say it was for another generation.

So, one of my most earnest prayers is that I’ll never tire of learning new things—that I won’t live in 2047 and dress the same way I did in 2017. Aging is inevitable but getting old is a choice.

As I’ve begun to recognize my age I’m realizing that life can be a whirlwind of days, weeks and years. And we find ourselves clinging to a sense of home as the blizzards of children, marriage and responsibility pull us away from the time we need to even consider staying young. Paying the mortgage, feeding the kids and getting them to bed, or the demands of work threaten to entangle us as we are focused on trying to “make it.” Before we know it we look up and the world has passed us by.

Aging is a right of passage to some extent, something that even the best of us go through. It can be the day when Michael Jordan finds himself in a Wizard’s jersey, a day that Tom Brady has yet to see. Often times, we have to find ways to reinvent ourselves. Brady plays for one of the most forward thinking organizations in sports. Just like Nick Saban and Alabama football, they remain the enemy of the status quo.

It’s the status quo that wants to box us in, that wants to keep us trapped.

Life tries to force us to stay in our boxes, where it’s safe. Those boxes could be a segregated church service, our exclusive clubs, doing business the way we’ve always done it. Like anyone else, I’ve begun to enjoy change less and less, but I realize I need it.

Be willing to travel down the road not taken. Visit a church where you may be the minority from time to time, drive a different route home from work, figure out what freedom means to you and do that thing that you don’t naturally want to do.

Maybe it’s how we get from being stuck. Comfort zones are the playpens of yesteryear. We’re safe in those spaces.

It feels like Enterprise is stewing, as if forces beyond our knowledge are powering it into a climactic season of growth. Don’t be afraid to grow, to avoid worshiping at the altar of tradition.

After all, this is Enterprise, the City of Progress.

Chandler Collins is a staff writer for The Southeast Sun and Daleville Sun-Courier. The opinions of this writer are his own and not the opinion of the paper. He can be reached at (334) 393-2969 or by email at [email protected].