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The Just Plain Frustrating

I decided to write this post a few weeks ago and its been haunting me every since. I always have wanted to be more open and real here on the Blog and its some of the things I am going to write about here that have made me think its worth being real whenever you can.

Change is a good thing. I have always been a person who was OK changing things and re-arranging stuff in my life. Jessie (my super cool wife) and I have moved 9 times in the 8 years we have been married. And it’s normally for no other reason than that we got antsy and thought moving again would be fun (it’s not, by the way). But I have been learning a different kind of change lately, a change that I did not choose, but one that has ripped into every part of who I am. And although it would never be worth the cost of getting here, I have come to understand that there has been a lot of good to come out of it.

Let me start in February.

On the 27th I was heading to a meeting in Roseville when my Dad called to let me know that my older brother had passed away. I felt like a train had run me over. Everything in me seemed to stop working all at once. I turned around and started to head home but I really don’t remember anything about the trip back. My brother was 32 and it came as a total surprise to not have him around any more. The next 2 weeks were a blur of emotions. I am the youngest of 4 and my parents and two older sisters were coming apart, reeling from the shock. And as you can imagine I was too.

Now I am not writing this to go into great detail about the aftershock and what that was like but instead to talk about the frustration of a premature loss and what we can learn from life in times like this.

Jonah (my brother) was a crazy, passionate person who was fearless in every way. And I never thought that he would not be around. He was 5 years older than me and I always looked up to him and thought he was Superman.

I wish it ended there.

On the 25th of March I got another call telling me that now Jason had died. Another complete shock. Jason was only 36 and I had never though he would not make it. I knew he had a liver disorder but I always understood it to be a small issue and not fatal.

Jason was one of my best friends he was creative to an extreme I have never seen in anyone else. He never saw the world as a box, but instead as a bunch of ideas waiting to be unearthed.

I was not even through processing losing my brother yet when Jason died, and I was really unprepared to start the process all over again. In the middle of all this, LJ Urban was going through all the changes I talked about in Part 2 of this series. Thankfully we had started to get some of the issues under control at that point, but I knew that a few of them were still not yet stabilized and it all seemed to come together in this incredible peak of craziness. But you know what? You would think it would all be a horrible disaster, like the world came crashing down on you and you would not want to get back up. But my wife and I found ourselves seeing things in a different way, processing it all in a very clear, very deep way. We were able to see all this for what it was really worth and start to approach life with a new found understanding.

I heard someone say a few days ago that they used to think that people sucked and life was awesome but later found out that life sucks and people are awesome.

That is how I feel; I understand now why it matters what we do. I get that people are the reason for all of this and that we need to love each other and be honest with each other. I understand that it’s not about what we can accomplish but instead about who we can help and what “bad” we can make “good”. I now am more passionate than ever about making cities better places to live, but instead of doing it for the recognition and achievement, I now want to do it so that the people who live in them have a better quality of life.

Before Jason died he and I talked a lot about the Good Project and why we named it that. He always used to say that it was the first project out there that could actually be called that. He would talk about dreaming big and how he wanted to inspire people to do just that. He also wanted to start to get people to understand why living small was better. He hated that America uses 15 times the energy of most other countries and that our footprint was so large that we could never live our lifestyle without importing and exploiting other countries.

All the things that Jason used to say mean so much more to me now. I finally understand why doing good is not just for me but so that I can leave behind a legend and a path for others to follow. I want to see us stir up a movement of people who are not only inspired by doing good but intolerant of people and corporations who chose not to.

Losing people is hard and just plain frustrating. Hard like I never understood before in my life but when you step back and take a look at the big picture, you start to see that things really can be better here on Earth and that we really can make a difference.

I had breakfast with my dad today and he and I were talking about Chicago and how its such an awesome city. He mentioned that it all started with a fire. That fire was by no means a good thing but it was in rebuilding from that fire that a vision for a truly great city was born. It was the passion that came from people who suffered a terrible loss that inspired them to build a truly great city. We don’t choose the fires in our lives but we get to choose how we are going to react to them. I choose to dig in and dream big.

Levi