​Several weeks ago, one of the guys I chat with while working out in the morning saw my pair of socks and couldn’t help himself. “Last in the rotation, eh?,” he said to me.
 
I laughed, knowing exactly what he meant: every other pair of socks must have been in the laundry for me to pull out the gaudy pair I was wearing. While that wasn’t actually the case, there was merit in his point.

One thing I do regularly is wear my clothes. Seems simple. When saying, “I wear my clothes,” I mean “all” of them. If I don’t wear a shirt, pair of pants, shoes, jacket, whatever, for an extended period of time, I put that item into the recycling bin for our local reuse store, Salvation Army or Goodwill.  Better off that someone else gets to wear it if
 
The socks I wore that morning had a Christmas theme. Santa playing golf or something like that. So, given it was August, my buddy at the fitness facility knew something was up. Not Christmas, so these socks shouldn’t be in the rotation. Hence his comment, “Last in the rotation, eh?”
 
His phrase made me laugh. It implies what you’re wearing is outrageous or outdated, something like that. So bad that someone will comment.
 
Sometimes I wonder if I wear things like those socks to see if they will elicit a comment. See whether people are paying attention. That might have been the case here, I don’t remember.
 
When flying, I wear a shirt to see how people will react in the airport. It has a set of golf clubs on it with the phrase, “Life is filled with difficult choices.” I love it. It’s amusing and says something about life and decision-making. I wear that shirt because I want to see if people will read and react. Start a conversation.
 
Engaging others is part of T-shirt slogans. We wear that kind of stuff to see what others have to say. While my socks weren’t on that morning to serve this function, they must have been out-of-place by enough to ring my buddy’s buzzer.
 
When he explained the “rotation” phrase to me (where it originated), it made even more sense to me. His “rotation” story came from a friend.

His friend was fond of wearing an electric orange shirt. Considering the color, it stood out. But, it sounds like from my friend’s description that the orange was a bit over the top. A color no one would wear in public. You’d only wear it if it was last in the rotation.
 
The phrase is good for a chuckle, mildly mocking while recognizing the individual’s crazy fashion style. Which reminds me of another classic, “Hey, did you get dressed the dark?” That’s another story.
 
Seriously, I rotate my clothes. As they emerge from the closet or dresser drawer, it’s the items that have been hanging around the longest that I wear next. This leads to Christmas socks in August.
 
Yeah, sometimes I shake it up just to shake it up. Otherwise, I actually attempt to match up the colors of my shirts with my shorts and socks. That was likely the case that morning at the workout facility. Regardless of the rationale, it sparked some laughs and there’s a lot to be said for that.

Several months back, a friend from high school asked me an unusual question. He asked me to write him a letter. Not sure of his intentions, I let the request percolate for multiple weeks, probably out of laziness more than anything else.
 
Writing a letter takes thought. You need to consider what to say, how to say it, craft the messages in each paragraph so there is something worthwhile.

There’s no reason to write a letter that doesn’t have anything to say. What’s the point? Boring or mundane subject matter doesn’t lighten up anybody. 
 
There’s a certain nostalgia value to writing and getting letters. My friend might have considered that in asking me to write, I don’t know. You have to wait for the mail to arrive. There is anticipation. Then you take your time reading through what is written. You hold the paper in your hands, and that’s something, too.
 
I come from a letter writing family and a letter writing time in history. Our family lived in Brazil for two years when I was in sixth and seventh graders. Our maternal grandfather, a newspaper man himself, sent us weekly updates from Closter, N.J., filled with humous anecdotes and the goings-on of the neighbors, local animals and our aunts, uncles and cousins. Perhaps I took the hook then.
 
You couldn’t wait for the next letter to arrive. It was like getting a present in the mail.
 
In today’s rapid-fire world, that doesn’t happen. With instantaneous communication, we don’t wait. We launch. Someone texts you and within seconds you respond. This continues until the dialogue fades away. Do you remember what was said?
 
A letter, instead, is more consumable. You savor it. You take your time. You think more about what was said. Implicitly, that gives it more meaning. Plus, you know the person writing to you at a bare minimum took the extra effort to commit words to paper. That means something, too.
 
Another value of writing a letter is the point of “thinking.” You must think ahead, plan your words, sentences, statements, messages, stories. That typically creates more meaning.

Again, if you contrast that with the back and forth that occurs in electronic transmissions, you gain emotionally, mentally and psychologically from a written letter (whether writing or receiving).
 
A letter helps you put issues in perspective. You’re not instantaneously reacting. You’re more often pondering.
 
There’s one more plus. It’s also about the differences in comparing a written letter vs. today’s yo-yoing messaging.
 
I believe in letter writing, you more clearly hear your voice. You take the time to understand where you’re coming from and where you want to go.
 
And, I think that also cuts to some of the agitation we see and hear about online these days. When you react without fully understanding your voice (of without considering what you really want to say), uglier things come out. You say things you shouldn’t. The mean spirit arrives.
 
My friend has not responded to my letter yet. In time, I believe he will. Perhaps he is waiting for something significant to occur in his life so he can craft the story on paper. We will see.

Part of the fun and joy is the waiting, the anticipation. There is no instant gratification in letter writing. There’s a lesson in that.

​If you didn’t read last week’s column, the brief summary is that our lives don’t turn out the way we think they would. We imagine futures, but that projection never becomes reality. Check it our here.
 
As a follow up to that, or perhaps as a corollary or response, it seems to me we often establish routines. We do this for many reasons. One, I believe, is to fight the uncertainty of what we don’t know. Or, when our world doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would. The routine helps even out our false/inaccurate projections, and gives us a sense of balance.
 
You have many examples in your life, I’m confident. When I bicycled close to 4,000 miles across North America in 1982, I faced the unknown. Each day was as new as it could be. I had no idea what to expect. My life was cut loose.
 
Not knowing the road ahead, the weather, how people driving by me would act, the terrain, I needed a rope, a security blanket. I didn’t know this at the time. I realized this later.
 
What happened over the four months I pedaled was that I established a routine to root myself, to make myself comfortable. It started each morning.
 
Waking up to the rising sun, I’d get out of my one-person tent, take the mandatory leak, and grab my water bottle, dosing myself for the hard day ahead. Food was next. Some granola, perhaps an apple or banana, and I was fortified. Take down the tent. Fold the sleeping bag. Pack them both on the back of the bicycle. Brush my teeth. Enjoy the early morning. Saddle up, and off.
 
I took each step in an order. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. It felt normal, good.
 
In retrospect, these many years later, I realize how important that routine was -- centering myself, to ward off the chaos of not knowing what was ahead.
 
We have this need to build environments for ourselves that help with our mental safety. When we have that, the next steps of our days become more manageable.  There’s comfort in that.
 
Think about your daily life and the routines you use. You probably commute the exact same route to your job every day. For breakfast, I imagine you choose a similar dish each morning. You probably eat lunch and dinner around the same time. You go to sleep regularly at an appointed hour.
 
Some routines are simple and make sense. You get used to eating certain foods and at certain times, so that becomes your standard. They give you stability – you don’t have to think about creating a new dish, shopping for all the ingredients and flipping the pages in a cookbook to bake something unique.
 
You can get stuck in routines though, good or bad. Rather than branching out or challenging yourself, you fall into a rut. That’s often when we commit to change.
 
Trigger points for me certainly come at those times where boredom sets in or I realize something isn’t going right in my life. Then it’s time to examine the circumstances and recognize that eating fistfuls of M&Ms is contributing to my tight belt.
 
Routines root us, provide comfort and help us navigate the day-to-day. And, sometimes you need to break them. Only you know when it’s time.

​Why don’t things work out the way we think they will? Have you considered this? I mean, really thought about it, how we examine an upcoming situation or event and project what will happen?
 
I presume you have thought this way. Most (if not all) of us do. We look ahead. We presume what is going to happen. Then it doesn’t. The situation may come close to our imagination, but there are always details or actions that don’t match how we looked at it beforehand.
 
This is strange. Why do we look ahead? If we know things won’t turn out the way we expect, what is it that still drives us to see the future in terms that won’t meet those expectations?
 
We can over-expect and things turn out worse than we thought. Or we can under-expect, and WOW, things are so much better than we thought they’d be.
 
Let’s take an example, like getting a new job. When you interview, you ask questions of the hiring manager. In turn, you ask that person a few to determine what the position will be like. Will you like it? Will it embrace your skill set? Do you see it as boring, repetitive, challenging? What are all the duties?
 
This back and forth will give you (hopefully) a strong sense of what’s involved. But, will you “know” really everything that will happen to you in that position? Of course not.
 
Look at the jobs you’ve had (and be honest with yourself) and aren’t there always some duties not mentioned in the hiring description or by the boss that you have to do that they didn’t discuss beforehand? And, aren’t there some things you were told would be part of your daily arsenal that you end up having nothing to do with? I would answer “yes” to both those questions. The job never turns out the way you think it will.
 
This syndrome applies to just about everything we do. You raise kids. You help them with school, sports, extracurricular activities. You see talents they have. You encourage them. They do well (or not) in various endeavors. You look ahead and see they could be good at this or that.
 
As you go through all those years, you find your children experience many more things than you expected, developing beyond what you thought they were capable of, and not pursuing talents you thought they were great at. They drive their lives.
 
Traveling is a big area where trips don’t turn out the way we think they will. We imagine beautiful sunsets, scenery, experiences. When the plane is late or the food is bad or the weather horrible, it colors how we perceive things. “Sure didn’t turn out the way I thought.”
 
Several times I’ve been fortunate to play for championship sports teams, once playing for the intramural softball championship team at the University of Illinois and winning multiple softball championships with a group of friends on a team we called the “Traitors.” Going into those tournaments, I expected good things due to our talent and chemistry.
 
Yet winning those championships wasn’t something I expected. At least for me, I lived the moment. Each game had challenges, and we found ways to surmount them, come together and create something stronger. Perhaps that was a key to victory – live the moment.
 
Scottie Scheffler, the current undisputed best player in professional golf the past three years or so, seems to have this quality of “staying in the moment” in spades. He takes things as they come. He doesn’t get ruffled. It bodes him well. He wins and wins and wins.
 
Things will never turn out exactly the way you think they will. The more you can live the moment, the more you can savor it.

​We hear over and over how much social media has changed communications in our current world, how it contributes to divisiveness, how anger rules. There are many voices speaking out on this issue through many different types of venues – newspapers, televisions commentators, magazines, online forums, and, of course, on social media itself.
 
As an older person in our society, I remember when print opinion columns ruled the day. You had to read and absorb to assimilate someone’s position, letting it percolate as you thought about what was written, what it meant to you and if you agreed or disagreed (and why).
 
As reading slowly evaporated and television news and opinion ascended, rather than taking time to think and digest, viewers instead received images (typically driving emotions) rather than reading. You were told something.
 
This evolution was slow, probably insidious. Like the frog who won’t jump from the slowing boiling kettle, us humans slowly adapted to this changeover without thinking too much about it. “Eh, did you watch Dan Rather last night? Naw, I’m a Tom Brokaw guy.” Ted Koppel came on the scene. Jack Germond and Jules Whitcover emerged. John McLaughlin became famous, bringing his classic “WRONG” phrase to political commentary, raising everyone’s blood pressure on his weekly panel (all white male talking heads, BTW; though I found and read columnists like Ellen Goodman and Bill Raspberry outside the WM spectrum, you had to take an extra step to find alternative voices).
 
Those media giants mastered the medium, built audiences. From there, the 21st century brought us the next combative step as we moved into the social media world -- public figures (and others) yanking the social media reins hard, hitting your hot buttons. Say anything (kind of like talk radio). No oversight. Damn the fact checking.
 
As a journalist watching this occur, I can’t say I saw this coming. I remember going to a meeting of a communications organization sometime before 2010 to hear a speaker on this new platform called “Twitter.” I thought, “Hmmm, this is something new. We can use this to get our message out.”
 
Which was true, initially, to an extent. Short messaging was the basic mantra of early Twitter. Write it short, send it out, connect with others, find your audience. Like any new technology, people adapted to it, and learned to use it in less-than-expected ways – hate messaging, anger messaging, finger pointing, lying.
 
The evolution in that direction occurred post-2010. Which likely coincided with growing divisiveness on the political spectrum. People wanted to be heard. Social channels provided options and choices. Say what you want.
 
Which brings me to what I’ve come to believe about social media in general: good, bad or indifferent, people want to be heard. That’s a good thing. Everyone has a story.

Where it goes off the rails is how the noisy, belligerent, ranting voices tend to dominate the various channels. They get the most play (or others seem drawn to want to watch and listen to the crazy outliers).
 
The quiet, intelligent, thoughtful voices take the nosebleed seats. While I’m sure there are many thoughtful voices getting traction, the “louds” get more play and hence rise in the standings.
 
It’s sad. It’s also easy to stop. Don’t go to the angry sites. Don’t watch the videos, TikTok or manipulated memes. Minimize or eliminate your exposure. I guarantee you that you’ll feel better. You can change a negative perspective into a positive one.