The Chud Soundtrack of 2023

Listen to the full playlist here.

Top 10 Life Lessons of 2023

1. There is a fine line between maturity and copping out. I’m old enough now to have gone through my fair share of heartbreak and disillusionment, but somehow I can’t shake my idealism. Being married to my childhood sweetheart probably doesn’t help my attempts either. Times change and people do too, and there is most definitely a wonderful maturity to be found in letting go. Yet, I find myself optimistically resonating with the words of Victor Hugo I read on the front of the Nelson Atkins Museum half a lifetime ago: “the human soul still has greater need of the ideal than the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”
   
   
2. If you want to know where your heart is, watch where your mind goes when it wanders (hat tip: Chris Pratt). This little tip has made me more mindful (pun unintended) about where my thoughts are heading and what it reveals about the people and the things I care about the most.
   
   
3. Leaders are ones who learn to absorb pain without passing it on to others or to themselves (Hat tip: Richard Rohr). In a season where I wonder sometimes if every human on the planet is simply hanging on by a thread in the midst of their own trauma, I question the role I have to play in carrying it all. Chavanne posed the question of how a man is measured, then answered it himself: “By his burden. What he can undertake.” Rolheiser says elsewhere that whatever pain is not transformed is transmitted. I like to think it’s possible to share the loads of others with the lightness of burden that Jesus described. I’m still here to learn it.
   
   
4. The fundamental goal of school is not to help students learn information, but to help them learn how to learn. I introduced a new unit this fall based on the question of what every high schooler should know before graduating, and my students’ responses were fascinating. My task as a teacher is to equip them with the curiosity and confidence they’ll need when they leave my guidance. Westerners believe learning happens through a transfer of information; easterners believe learning happens through discovery. As I watch fellow educators squirm in the uncomfortable and unknown new context of artificial intelligence, I wonder if we too might have something to discover rather than fear.
   
   
5. Be intentional about building a family story (hat tip: Bruce Feiler). As Feiler reports, the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness is based on how much they know about their family’s history. I want my boys to be aware of the legacy they are a part of, both in how it shapes their own sense of self and in how it draws them out of themselves and into a bigger narrative.
   
   
6. The separation of objectivity and subjectivity is a false dichotomy. While each perspective has its merits, the true goal should be an undivided, integrated life (hat tip: Parker Palmer). I used to demand my students remove any trace of the first person in their writing; after all, I’ve been taught that reason and emotion shouldn’t overlap. In light of a fragmented world hungry for congruence, I’ve begun to ease on that conviction. As David Brooks notes, “Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it.”
   
   
7. No sin or success happens in isolation. Good or bad, there are consequences to our choices that have far-reaching effects (whether or not we acknowledge it as fact). Each of our lives reverberates in the lives of others.
   
   
8. The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life (hat tip: Esther Perel). After mentioning a trip I was soon to take along with several old friends, a mentor complimented us for the work it took to maintain those meaningful relationships. His encouragement has remained with me as I increasingly recognize the rarity of such friendships. Since then, I have put much reflection into what it means to be truly seen and known, trying to analyze the moments and people who have created that sense for me. In a recent interview, Bono suggested that you are really known by someone if they know your memories, which is an intriguing take. If nothing else, I want to be a quality friend who knows and sees others.
   
   
9. I would rather be gullible (or at the very least, curious) than cynical (hat tip: Pete Greig). When reports of a spiritual awakening in Asbury, Kentucky came to dominate much of the conversation in Christian circles back in February, I found Pete’s reflections to be particularly helpful. This statement has provided a guiding framework in many situations since.
   
   
10. Use less words to say more. Einstein famously said that “if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don’t understand it yourself.” That’s welcome advice for me. I tend to be slow to speak, but once I rev up my vocal chords, I can get a little carried away. This is especially true in confrontation (ask my wife). My personality enables me to see from lots of vantage points… there’s just no need to include them all in my explanations. In fact, I should probably stop writing now.

Top 10 of 2023

1. Wingfeather Saga
   I have long been a fan of Andrew Peterson, and I knew my Wingfeather day would come, but I wanted it to arrive alongside the attentive ears and wild imaginations of my three boys. When we set off this June on a road trip from Kansas City to Alaska, we began the journey in step with the Igiby clan. I can’t adequately summarize the four books except to say that they embody something special, full of life lessons and adventures and suspense and warmth. This saga has marked my family and my own heart. May we all walk in the shadow of Janner Wingfeather, throne warden of the shining isle of Anniera, selfless and sacrificial and loving to the end.
   
   
2. Three Boys in School
   Emerson joined his brothers at Cottonwood Creek Elementary School, where my own brothers and I attended some 35 years ago with similar ages between us. The open space particularly impacted Marisa, who is working hard to not let work overtake the opportunity to rediscover herself a bit, wandering through the mountains, a good book, and into the boys’ classrooms as a parent volunteer (on her own terms).
   
   
3. Family Road Trip KC-AK
   I often refer to the summer of 1989 as the best of my childhood, largely due to the road trip from Alaska to North Dakota, where we spent the hot months playing and working as a family on a dude ranch. I determined that I would do the same with my own kids when they were around the same age. So we did. And it outdid every expectation I could have set for it. When asked what their favorite part of the trip was, the boys are likely to mention their first water parks, or skinny dipping in random roadside lakes, or my aunt and uncle and their “big log cabin” in Montana. Mer and I are likely to reflect on our final night of camping on Kluane Lake in the Yukon, sharing grateful tears, staring into the fire, and listening to the breathing of the boys in the nearby tent.
   
   
4. JSB’s 40th in SA
   Heartfelt celebration of one of my dearest humans on the planet: check. Trekking through the African bush with three of the finest men I know, chasing wild dogs and poachers and stories to tell the grandkids: check. Glimpsing the every-day happenings of the family Bryce: check. It may have taken a literal trip half-way around the world to make it happen, but you do such things to find the gold of life.
   
   
5. Smartless
   Three friends that feel like brothers, two of whom are fully improvising based on the surprise celebrity guest of the hour? Yes please. These pretend adults guide their subject into the type of conversational points you actually care about, but they do so while absolutely taking the mick out of each other. Sometimes the brutal tangents of tease are five layers deep before they recover the plot of the discussion, which is probably why they feel like my own brothers. I combed through the archives, downloaded every guest I cared to hear, binged them all and am now just an entertained casual listener.
   
   
6. Knee Surgery
   It felt like a lame joke to tear my meniscus playing in an over-40 coed basketball league. Or maybe just a massive blinking sign of the times. This has been the most humbling injury of my life, and the recovery from surgery has brought new meaning to the word “patient.” God help me.
   
   
7. Early Tales of Snow & Oakham
   “Good writing … cuts us open. It exposes, in a beautiful twist, the reader as much as the author. And the best writing, following the incision, knits us back together more truly, more fully healed in some way” (Wallace Riley). Chavanne has crafted a masterpiece centered upon the journey from boy to man – a voyage crossing continents, cultures, and generations to artfully challenge the reader to join Jack in his haunting question: “do I have what it takes?” As a father of three sons, I am grateful to have discovered this epic before they come of age. It will undoubtedly inform me as much as any non-fiction work around rites of passage. At some point along the journey, I began taking notes on the proverbs scattered like treasure throughout the pages – an odd undertaking for a novel, and one that I don’t think I’ve ever done, but this is no ordinary novel. (Full review here.)
   
   
8. Summer Soccer Clinic w/Coach Chud
   My eldest brother and his family were here for an extended two months this summer. The chief highlight was watching a yard full of boys huddle up under his watchful and formative guidance to learn and grow and compete in the beautiful game. Those precious normal-feeling mornings were layered in their meaning – from my own childhood and my brother’s vocational transition and the bond of cousins in this front yard that represents so much to us all.
   
   
9. Holcombs in Seattle
   Marisa and I were meeting the Vantassels in Seattle for a Drew and Ellie Holcomb show, complete with backstage passes. Then VT’s got stuck in Alaska due to a volcano eruption (classic Alaskan excuse). Mer and I decided to make the most of it, scootering to the Space Needle and back to the venue for an astonishingly meaningful gig. It helped that we were sitting in a booth in the front row and the Old Fashioneds were spot on.
   
   
10. Faith & Boys
    I recently sang “Oh Holy Night” at our church’s Christmas Eve service; when I approached the second verse, the words got choked up in my throat: “…and in his name, all oppression shall cease.” My sister has been through the worst of life this year, and she and her boys have been forced to refuge in the house across our yard for the last eight months because of it. It has been a raw, exhausting, life-changing experience for us all. And somehow, as it often does in such seasons, the grief has collided with magical moments of family/community rising up in love where other loves have failed… watching cousins make memories that will form them the rest of their lives… holding my newborn nephew and whispering belonging in his ear… trusting that the God who writes redemption stories has something special in mind, and surely there will be a hereafter. 

Honorable Mentions:

• Beth Moore: All My Knotted Up Life
• Springsteen in DC
• The Scuttlebutt 
• Noah Kahan at AK State Fair