Drop Into ‘The Gray’

There is a space that exists between light and dark, mastery and failure, accomplishment and frustration.

It’s the gray.

That place we go over and over again until we get it right.

It’s the place where inability and capability grind together in order to break us down and then build us up.

It’s the place that even when you crash and burn you’re succeeding simply because you’re there putting in the work.

But where exactly is this ‘gray’ located and how do you get there?

The convenience of the gray is that it’s with you at all times and in all things.

It’s an ecosystem that exists only in your mind.

Whether its relationships, personal development or fireground skill sets, the gray is where we go to work it out.

As you could realistically imagine, the gray isn’t always simple. It has its exhilarating highs and more commonly, it’s bone crushing lows.

What’s bad about the gray for some is also what’s good about it for others. It allows you to accomplish as much or as little as you put in. You will never get out of it more than you put in, that’s for sure.

As long as you’re in the gray though, you’re gaining ground.

Throughout my life I have been exposed to two cultures that make heavy use of the gray. Two cultures that though seemingly quite different on the outside are rather similar on the inside.

As a young kid and throughout high school many of my friends were skaters, though I was not. But most of us had other similar interests, such as art and photography, that drew us together.

That, combined with our small isolated neighborhood, created a group of friends with widely different upbringings and abilities, but with a common goal, get outside and have fun when ever we could.

For many of our teenage years that meant spending time at our friend Jason’s house in his back yard at the half pipe. Though I only actually tried it a handful of times, I spent many hours there hanging out and photographing those who’d become quite good at dropping in.

At the time I saw it not for what was really happening but just as a place to spend time with friends. Today, I see it as not only that, but so much more.

The reality of spending day after day hour after hour at the half pipe was that we were socializing with our friends and developing baseline skill sets.

For the skaters it was about learning, perfecting and developing the tricks. For the rest of us it was about learning, perfecting and developing skills in photography or drawling.

For all of us it was about learning to exist within a culture, it was about developing friendships and crashing and burning over and over again with the girls.

I didn’t see any of that then, but through the years I’ve come to appreciate those days for all of the lessons that I learned even though at the time I would have said we were just hangin’ out.

It wasn’t until I became involved in a second culture with a similar mindset that I began to see the value of what I had experienced as a kid.

There is a part of the fire service whose members are underground, non-conformist and seen by the mainstream as something different. A different that not all consider good.

My friends in Jason’s back yard, they didn’t dress the same, they didn’t have the same hair, they didn’t necessarily fit into the nicely designed boxes of the mainstream. But they had something, something that so many wish they had.

They had a tribe. They had a group that didn’t care what they looked like or came from. They had that because they had a common love and a common goal.

They loved skateboarding and they all wanted to be the best. They had something that so many others didn’t, they had the desire and drive to spend countless hours in the gray.

Their whole lifestyle submerged them deep in the gray. They were always dealing with the grind of non- conformity, of misunderstanding and of wanting to be the best at what they did.

They were the underground, yet, they had what all of those mainstream kids were looking for and could never find.

In the fire service there is an underground and they face so many of the same issues, nonconformity, misunderstanding and a drive to be the best that they personally can be.

But this underground currently exists in a culture that does not accept them, that makes them out to be a problem, that uses them as a scapegoat to draw attention away from their own inadequacy issues.

The members of this fire service underground are the ones who are out in the bay, alone, drilling at night when they could be watching TV. They are the ones paying for their own trips to conferences and trainings. The ones who put the time in every shift, no every day, in the gray. Those who thrive while being ground down and built back up.

They’re the ones we need more of. The ones who have come to an understanding of what’s at stake for them and for those we serve every day. The ones who have realized that in order to thrive in a hostile environment and succeed, you’ve needed to put yourself in that environment before and not only before, but as often as possible.

These are the ones who ‘drop in’ to the gray time and time again until they master that one basic skil,l that one movement in the line of many others. These are the ones who do it until they can’t get it wrong.

The others, well they are laughing and posting on social media from
the recliner. They are the ones who are too afraid of failure in front of others to do the work necessary to succeed at their sworn duties. They are the ones who are two lazy, to self-centered to take time out of their day to get good at the things they are really there to do.

Those kids on that half pipe, they wanted it.

They spent hour after hour falling and getting back up. Scrapes, rips, splinters and even some fractures did not stop them from coming back. Nothing stopped them from coming back.

Their culture has one thing ours struggles to clearly define and work out.

They had a tribe.

And that tribe didn’t just talk about stuff, they lived it. They lived their culture, they showed up they dropped in and then worked it out. It didn’t matter if it was a basic skill or an issue between friends, they basked in the gray and did the work necessary to figure it out, overcome the problems and crush their goal no matter what the price to pay.

Come to think of it, there were no recliners, there were no jeers, there was no tearing each other down. When someone hit the boards, the others stood and watched, they observed and learned and advised and supported.

Sure, there was razzing, but there was no ego. There was no fear of their turn in front of everyone. That was because they knew they were out for a common goal, hang out with good like-minded people and be as good as they could at the thing they loved.

They had collectively realized the value of the gray and got out of it as much as they could. Not because it was generous, but because they committed their all to it.

Two cultures, so much alike, yet so different. Different only in mindset really.

A mindset of ‘I am responsible for becoming better every day vs. a mindset of ‘I’m ok being only as good as they make me be.’

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see who those in society, who judge so much, would pick to be?Which of those mind sets would they choose? I’d bet a lot of money that they would never get it right. I bet they’d be shocked and disappointed.

Drive, determination and success do not always look the way one might think they would. The gray is a hard place to step into, a hard place to exist in, but it has everything to offer.

Judge less, grind more.|