​There are levels of exhaustion where you can catalogue how tired you feel while continuing to function reasonably well throughout the day. Then, if it gets worse, you have days where you are toast – burned out, unable to move.
 
I bring this up because of friends who have become grandparents. It’s a common refrain in discussions with them.

Multiple friends and relatives in my age bracket (more or less) are helping to watch their grandkids, either one or two days a week. That seems to be the norm.
 
They love the job. They wouldn’t give it up for anything. But, they’re exhausted when each baby/child-watching day is done.

It’s understandable. As one put it, “God gave us the energy to have and raise kids when we were much younger, not after the age of 60.”  So true.
 
With age, the ability to bend over, pick a kid up, crawl around the floor, stay alert for hours on end becomes a chore, regardless of how much you love your grandchild. You wear out.

After hearing over and over the refrain of “how tired I am when I get home,” I posed a question to them: “What are your levels of exhaustion?” Quite intriguing hearing back. Funny, and they paint a realistic picture. Here’s one scale:
 
1)Could do it full time
2)Could easily do it another three days
3)No problem with another day
4)One full day is good enough and I’m tired
5)About halfway through the morning, I’m thinking of Happy Hour
6)By mid-afternoon, I’m trying to devise a game they can play by themselves for the rest of the day
7)Wondering how long we can play hide-and-seek before I pass out, or they can do it by themselves for the rest of the day
8)Put on the longest acceptable movie our daughter and son-in-law permit and take my nap
9)Glad I don’t have kids at our age
10)Tell my wife I’m not feeling well and retire to the guest bedroom at 1 p.m.
If you care for grandkid(s), you can relate to the scale above. You probably have a creative few of your own that you could easily add to the list.
 
Your level of tiredness depends on many things. Are you watching one kid or two (or more)? What ages are the kids? As they develop, you must grow yourself in terms of figuring out ways to keep them busy and engaged. That, in and of itself, adds challenges to your grandparent kid-watching agenda.
 
Here’s another short rating scale I received from my inquiry:
 
1)Mildly tired
2)Need a longer nap
3)Mindless
4)Exhausted
5)Collapsing
Notice the “napping” need. You wear out and want to crash. “Please let me close my eyes for a few minutes, Lord.” It’s a simple and fair prayer.
 
The problem would be that you wouldn’t just nap for 12 minutes. You’d crash, lights out, into dreams that you’d have to swim out of to return to consciousness. And then, you’d have to hop to, and get right back into the fray.
 
Every person I queried LOVES watching their grandkids. They would never give it up. They want to help their kids in any way possible. Maybe we need to invent a position where we hire someone to watch the grandparents so they can get some timeouts during a stressful day. There could be a niche there for the opportunistic entrepreneur.

This could be one of those sappy columns. Be prepared.
 
This past weekend, my wife and I attended the wedding of the brother of our son-in-law. Joyous times. Also, this past weekend, a big name in the basketball officiating community (not someone I know personally, but someone I know well through his talented work for college basketball officials) passed away suddenly. This gave me pause.
 
I wrote a few things down that came to my mind: heart, soul, mind. Life is crucially about these three things.
 
When we have a major impact item occur in our lives, we (at least I do) think a bit differently about the world in which we live. I step back, contemplate, embrace the joy, wallow a bit in the misery.
 
It makes me think: what’s important? What are we made of?
 
After jotting down those three words, I thought a lot about them. We’ve been given something inside that drive us – the heart.
 
You hear the phrase “they have a lot of heart,” and the meaning is deep. It’s something inside you that drives you to care, to do good things, to move on from the bad and seek what’s next in life.
 
“Mind” is deeper, because it delves into more areas. Critical thinking, for example, and how much you apply this in your life. How do you learn? How do you use your knowledge and experience?

The mind drives you. You speculate. You desire. You think. You consider. You mull options.
 
As you go through the mind process (over and over and over every day), there are big and small decisions to weigh where you must operate effectively to address life hurdles. Master the mind – know how and why you think what you do in this world – and your behavior will be more reasoned and consistent. You’ll make good decisions and minimize those bad ones. And hopefully put yourself in positions throughout life that make more sense rather than less sense.
 
Yeah, we get thrown curve balls. But even that spinner can be addressed well by the mind because you’ve prepared. You have the mental framework to adjust accurately. The mind is thoughtfulness, logic, problem solving.
 
Finally, there’s the “soul.” Written and talked about in different ways by different religions and in different ways of life.
 
It’s that energy inside you, perhaps your aura, that comes out. It’s you at your purist sense. Fundamentally, what type of human being are you? What is your soul like? What are you made of? Where does your soul go when you pass?
 
Recently, we spread the ashes of my father-in-law with most of our immediate family attending. It was a somber occasion. Looking around, I thought how all of us grieve and handle those types of moments in different ways. We’re affected in the heart, mind and soul.
 
Those are times we pause and ponder. What’s important in our lives? Are there adjustments should we make?
 
This past week I saw a T-shirt at the workout facility that read, “Make Adjustments, Not Excuses.” It’s a great saying, and relevant to the heart, soul and mind. Make adjustments. Use your mind, think it through. Lead from the heart. Share your soul.

​You probably know someone like this in your life. This is the person who knows best, the individual who can “top” anything you say with something better.
 
We’ll coin this person a “topper.” Because, no matter what you say, they’ll top you.
 
That phrase came to me during a workout session recently from one of my great idea sources. During weekly conversations, he regularly comes up with thoughts, ideas, concepts, situations that I steal and use for this column. He’s a great guy. He shares openly. He dropped the “topper” phrase on me during one of those morning stretching sessions and I thought, “Hmmmm, have to write this one down and explore it a bit.”
 
Let’s say you’re going out to dinner and looking for an Indian restaurant. You’ve heard good things about a local place, the Clay Plot. You mention this to the topper in passing.
 
“Oh no, you should go to the Indian Palace, not the Clay Pot. The Indian Palace has the best food, great spices and a wonderful variety. I’d never go to the Clay Pot,” the topper replies.
 
Now, though the paragraph above is invented, it is also instructive because the topper doesn’t solely offer information or an opinion. That would be okay. We can all use additional information and most of us will listen to an opinion.
 
No, the thing about a topper is that they have to demonstrate how their place is better than your place. As if they need to be number one regarding KNOWING what makes the best Indian restaurant when we all have different barometers for measuring.
 
Another good example has to do with vacationing. Let’s say you enjoy going to the beach and you have a favorite idyllic location based on your personal desires.
 
You’re talking with the topper, “We’re heading to the shore next weekend in Delaware. We’ve been there several times and love it.”
 
The topper replies, “There’s a much better location if you head down to the beach in Maryland. It’s not that far and you’d like the boardwalk. And they have the best ice cream place and cotton candy.”
 
All that is well and good. Nice to hear. Thank you. The topper has once again topped you and let you know how your choice just doesn’t match up.
 
They know better ways to travel, books to read, TV shows, movies.  And don’t get me started on cooking. Yeeeeeeeesh.
 
“That’s how you cook your spaghetti!!??!!,” the topper says, aghast. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”

And they go on to explain in detail how to best boil the noodles, how long to simmer the sauce, what to sautee first and all the ingredients that you left out which would make the dish the best spaghetti ever.
 
“Well, topper, I don’t really care about making my spaghetti to your specifications. Mine tastes pretty darn good and people seem to love it. So,there, take that.”
 
The thing is, we never seem to say that to the topper. We swallow, roll our eyes, say to ourselves, “Here we go again,” and listen politely to hear how their way is the best way.

My workout buddy and I wondered how much the toppers know about the way we feel about them, whether they know a term has been coined just for them and it’s not a positive.

A lot has been written this past week on the bad behavior of U.S. fans at last week’s Ryder Cup. Here’s a different observation on what occurred.
 
If you watched the first two days, you saw the U.S. get waxed. Fans were jerks, jeering the Europeans and cheering when they hit a poor shot.
 
Focusing on the negative, the Europeans thrived off the goading U.S. fans. They stepped up. They played great.

Conversely, the U.S. players were not invigorated by the poor sportsmanship. They didn’t have much energy.
 
Sunday, what happened? U.S. fans focused on cheering for their team. Though not perfect, for the most part, the stood up for their team and focused on positivity.
 
And, what was the result? Instead of folding, the U.S. almost staged one of the greatest comebacks in golf history.
 
What does this say? I’m not going to argue the change in the direction of the fans focus from negative to positive (for the most part) improved the outcome, but I will argue it contributed to the U.S. resurgence on Sunday.
 
Here’s why. Over and over and over and over again, I see in sports where fans target sports officials (referee and umpires) with their ire. They finger point. They assess blame. “They blew that call and that’s why we lost.”
 
As a basketball referee myself, I see this syndrome constantly. A coach berates you. His team plays with a nasty edge. The players take on the personality of the coach.
 
One of our enforcement tools is a technical foul. When you hit the coach with a deserved technical foul for his verbal harassment, ALMOST ALWAYS their teams starts to play better.
 
Here’s one example (I could insert a multitude of examples, but this will suffice) from basketball games I’ve officiated in recent seasons. There was a 15-year-old male coaching a fifth grade girls team. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he thought he did.
 
The girls must have thought he did, too, because as he began to mouth off in the first half, they played worse and worse, taking actions against the other team (causing us to call even more fouls on them) as their coach yelled at us. Enough. I gave him a technical foul. Things calmed down.

Early in the second half, he went off on my partner. No brainer for me. I assessed another technical foul and tossed him from the gym, then went over to the parents and suggested one of them needed to coach. A woman came over.

She supported the girls, used an encouraging tone of voice. Holy cow, the girls responded. They handled the ball better, made better decisions, closed the gap a bit in a game where they were decisively the inferior team. They improved.
 
I’ve seen this happen again and again on the basketball court. When you hit a coach with a tech for their out-of-control behavior, they start to coach rather than blame the officials for the bad play of their team. Players respond to the change. Momentum swings
 
Many U.S. fans at the Ryder Cup need to understand this (and perhaps a segment of US society as well). Quit being nasty jerks. If you cheer, if you act in a positive manner, people respond, teams respond. You get the desired result. Attacking others doesn’t get you where you want to go. Our country can use that reminder.