Category: Reflections

  • Another Brick in the Wall

    Another Brick in the Wall

    I was out getting my steps in this morning when a song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall came through my headphones.

    I cannot even remember what playlist I had been listening to.

    I remember stopping it.

    Some albums you listen to; others wait for you.

    I had heard The Wall many times before. I had watched the movie many times before. When I was a teenager, people used to joke that you had to be under the influence of one substance or another to truly understand it.

    Maybe we had that backward.

    Maybe you just had to live long enough.

    So I stopped the playlist and started the album from the beginning.

    And somewhere along my walk, I understood the wall differently.

    Not as this strange, theatrical thing belonging to somebody else’s tortured imagination.

    I understood the bricks.

    Your mother hurts you.

    A brick.

    Someone you love betrays you.

    Another brick.

    Someone humiliates you.

    Another.

    You trust somebody who teaches you that perhaps you shouldn’t.

    Another.

    You are frightened, disappointed, rejected, abandoned, embarrassed. You learn that showing pain sometimes invites more pain, so you decide you won’t show it anymore.

    Brick.

    Mortar.

    Brick.

    Mortar.

    Eventually, what started as protection begins to look like architecture.

    And there you are, standing behind something you built yourself.

    Safe.

    Maybe.

    But alone.

    That was the part I understood this morning in a way I don’t think I could have understood as a teenager.

    Because I have built walls of my own.

    For years, when something bothered me, I often wouldn’t say anything. If I was hurt, I kept it to myself. If I was angry, I swallowed it. If somebody crossed a line, I sometimes moved it and convinced myself that keeping quiet meant I was handling it.

    I thought silence was control.

    It wasn’t.

    It was storage.

    And storage eventually reaches capacity.

    Sometimes everything I had refused to say came out at once. Anger became rage. Something that might have deserved a sentence received an explosion instead.

    Then came the embarrassment.

    The regret.

    The knowledge that whatever legitimate reason I had for being angry was now buried beneath the way I had expressed it.

    So what did I do?

    I added another brick.

    I became quieter.

    More guarded.

    More determined not to let it happen again.

    Which meant I returned to the very thing that helped create the problem in the first place.

    Silence.

    That is the cruelty of some walls. They convince us that the cure for what is hurting us is simply more wall.

    I eventually began talking to someone.

    Even now, it feels strange to admit that I needed another person to teach me something that sounds almost ridiculously simple:

    You are allowed to say you are angry.

    Not scream it.

    Not throw it.

    Not make another person afraid of it.

    Just say it.

    “I am very angry about what happened.”

    “That bothered me.”

    “What you said hurt me.”

    “I don’t like the way you treated me.”

    Simple sentences.

    I spent years carrying entire storms because I never learned to announce that it was raining.

    There is a difference between feeling anger and surrendering yourself to it. There is a difference between expressing pain and weaponizing it. Learning the first may help prevent the second.

    That is part of what I heard differently in The Wall this morning.

    I heard a person building protection around wound after wound until there was almost nowhere left for the wounded person to go. And when everything finally burst through, I heard something familiar—not an excuse for cruelty or destruction, but the terrible sound of emotions with nowhere healthy to live.

    Maybe that is one of the dangers of emotional walls.

    We imagine that the wall keeps everything outside.

    But it keeps things inside, too.

    The anger stays.

    The grief stays.

    The humiliation stays.

    The conversations we never had stay.

    The sentences we swallowed stay.

    And eventually we may discover that we haven’t built a fortress at all.

    We’ve built a pressure cooker.

    I am still learning this.

    I still get angry.

    I still get hurt.

    I still have moments when the old instinct tells me to say nothing, swallow it, keep moving, not make trouble, and not let anybody see that they got to you.

    I am not perfect.

    But I haven’t had one of those episodes in a long time.

    That matters to me.

    Not because I believe I have arrived somewhere, but because I know how far I have walked.

    And maybe healing sometimes looks less dramatic than we imagine.

    Maybe sometimes healing is simply catching yourself before you reach for another brick.

    Maybe it is saying, “That hurt me,” while the hurt is still small enough to name.

    Maybe it’s letting someone trustworthy stand beside you while you figure out why you started building the wall in the first place.

    And maybe strength isn’t proving that nobody can get through.

    Maybe strength is realizing that you need a door.

    This morning, I started my walk trying to get my steps in.

    Somewhere along the way, I found myself thinking about all the bricks I have carried.

    Some were handed to me.

    Some I picked up myself.

    Some probably saved me when I didn’t yet know another way to protect myself.

    I don’t hate the person who built them.

    He was doing what he knew how to do.

    But I know something now that he didn’t.

    I don’t have to keep building.

    One day at a time, I can learn to put the bricks down.

    And perhaps that is what growing older sometimes gives us.

    Not the chance to go back and live without wounds.

    The chance to finally understand what we built around them.

    And the courage to leave an opening.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Apparently, I’m a Sir Now

    Apparently, I’m a Sir Now

    The first time someone called me “sir,” I looked behind me.

    Surely a man stood there in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. Someone who understood his insurance policy. Someone who came into the store specifically to buy sensible trousers.

    There was nobody behind me.

    They meant me.

    I’m still working through that.

    I’m Generation X. Technically, I’m in my fifties, but I don’t see myself as old. Somewhere inside me is the same young man who could stay out all night and still have plans for the following morning.

    He’s still there.

    He just doesn’t make the schedule anymore.

    These days, the idea of drinking all night sounds like something I would need to recover from financially, physically, and spiritually. Tell me the party starts at ten, and my first question is, “In the morning?”

    Because at ten at night, I have already made several commitments to being comfortable.

    But “sir”?

    I’m not that old.

    Yes, I make a few extra noises when I sit down. And when I get up. 

    Sometimes a small sound comes out in the middle, as my body considers whether we’ve made the right decision.

    I don’t remember agreeing to this soundtrack.

    I used to stand up and go somewhere. Now I stand up and give a brief statement.

    Still, I feel young.

    I’m even ready to throw hands if the need arises.

    Although I would appreciate knowing in advance. I need the right shoes on, and I’d prefer we settle whatever this is before dinner.

    I’ve accepted other truths.

    I love the wagon I use to take out my trash.

    Love it.

    There was a time when I might have carried everything in one trip just to prove I could. Now I load that wagon with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has solved a problem.

    Let the young people demonstrate their strength.

    I have wheels.

    And my slip-in, no-tie shoes? Those are a gift.

    I step into them, and we get on with our day. No bending down. No negotiations with my back. No little bow I have to make before I’m allowed to leave the house.

    I didn’t realize how much resentment I had been carrying toward shoelaces until someone offered me another way.

    Apparently, this is where my rebellion has led.

    Then there’s the music.

    I love hearing songs from my teenage years over the speakers while I’m shopping. A familiar song comes on, and suddenly I’m smiling, remembering who I was the first time I heard it.

    For a moment, I feel young.

    Then I realize the store is using music from my youth to help people choose produce more comfortably.

    That requires a minute.

    I came in for onions. I wasn’t prepared to confront the passage of time beside the bell peppers.

    And somewhere during this emotional event, a young employee asks, “Can I help you find anything, sir?”

    Yes.

    The person I was before you finished that sentence.

    Of course, they’re being polite. I know that. I appreciate good manners.

    I just didn’t expect to be the one receiving them so soon.

    In my mind, fifty-something still leaves room for a little mystery. A little danger. The possibility that I might do something spontaneous.

    And I might.

    I could go somewhere without checking the parking first.

    Let’s not rule anything out.

    Maybe I am becoming more mature. Maybe I’m finally learning that feeling young doesn’t require making every decision my younger self would have made.

    I can enjoy the song without staying out until sunrise.

    I can take care of my back without apologizing to it.

    I can let someone call me “sir” and accept the kindness in it, even if a small part of me still wants a second opinion.

    I’m still me. There’s plenty of life left, plenty to laugh about, and apparently a growing appreciation for things that roll.

    So go ahead. Call me sir.

    Just give me a moment to stand up.

    There’s usually a sound first.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Price of the Right Path

    The Price of the Right Path

    I usually don’t let things bother me. I’ve learned to keep my head down, do the work, walk my path—even when that path is quiet, lonely, unglamorous.

    But this week has been different. I’ve been sick at home, just me, the couch, and the endless hum of YouTube filling the silence between doses of medicine. Then I clicked on a video from one of my favorite channels, Knight Talk. The title said it all: I’m Sick of This Sh*t.

    Within moments, I understood why. An OnlyFans creator was on-screen, laughing and smiling, casually showing the receipts of her success: $82 million.

    Eighty-two million.

    I stopped the video. Couldn’t finish it.

    It hit me harder than I wanted it to. Not because I begrudge anyone making a living—we don’t know her life, her circumstances, her hunger. But because it felt like something else was happening in that moment.

    Something spiritual.

    I work hard. I try every day to keep my hands clean, my conscience clear, my choices deliberate. I try to stay on the right path—even when the wrong one looks easier, shinier, faster. And then I see something like this, and it’s as if evil itself leans in close to whisper:

    All this can be yours.

    And I wonder if the wrong path is the only one still paying.

    This is not a new question. It is as old as Job’s lament, as old as the desert where Christ was offered the kingdoms of the earth. It is the voice that says, Why wait for goodness when you can have glory now?

    And it’s not really about OnlyFans.

    It’s not even about money.

    It’s about the way we are asked, over and over again, to watch the rewards of shortcuts pile up while we keep grinding away for pennies and peace of mind.

    Some days it feels like we are all contestants in a rigged game: who can stay righteous the longest while the world parades its golden idols in front of us?

    I know this is part of the fight—the invisible war that doesn’t make the highlight reel. If doing the right thing were easy, everyone would do it.

    But it is not easy.

    It is not fast.

    It is not glamorous.

    It is what Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in the same direction”—the slow work of continuing to choose what you believe is right.

    It is the quiet refusal to cash out your dignity for a quick hit of security or fame. It is choosing to build something that will last beyond your own life, even if it means watching someone else build a mansion in the time it takes you to lay a single brick.

    And maybe that’s what bothers me most: not the money, not the platform, but the gnawing truth that integrity is slow work.

    Slow enough to feel like punishment some days.

    I don’t have a neat ending for this. No sermon about how it all evens out in the end.

    Maybe it doesn’t.

    Perhaps the wrong path is truly profitable—for a time.

    But I know this: staying on the right path is shaping me in ways a shortcut never could. It is building something in me that eighty-two million dollars cannot buy.

    And maybe, when the whisper comes again—All this can be yours—I will have the strength to whisper back:

    No thanks. I’m good.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Blood on the Page

    Blood on the Page

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  • Nobody Tells You When You’ve Made It Through

    Nobody Tells You When You’ve Made It Through

    I used to think I would know when I had made it through something.

    I imagined a clear moment. A door closing behind me. A morning when I woke up, and it was gone.

    That rarely happened.

    Most of the time, what hurt didn’t disappear. It became a little less sharp. I still thought about it while cooking dinner, but it no longer followed me to bed. I still had difficult mornings, but somewhere along the way, I began having ordinary ones too.

    I didn’t notice the first time I made a meal because I was hungry, instead of because I knew I should eat. I didn’t mark the day I laughed without feeling guilty afterward. Those moments were too small to announce themselves. They were easy to mistake for nothing.

    When you are living through a hard season, you learn its details. You know which thoughts arrive when the house gets quiet. You know what it takes to answer a simple question like “How are you?” You know how much effort can hide inside getting dressed and stepping outside.

    Then, slowly, some of that effort goes elsewhere.

    You wash the dishes. You call someone back. You notice the weather. You make plans for next week and realize, only later, that you expected to be there to keep them.

    This does not mean what happened was smaller than you thought. I am careful with that. Distance can soften a memory, but it cannot tell the whole truth about what it cost to live through it. If it was hard, it was hard. The fact that I can carry it now does not mean it was light.

    Still, there are days when I look back and think, Maybe I could handle more than I knew.

    I do not always like that thought. Sometimes it makes me wonder why I had to learn it this way. But I can sit with both feelings. I can wish things had been easier and be grateful that I kept going.

    These days, I try to become a better person in small ways. I try to listen long enough to hear what someone is really saying. I try to apologize without explaining away the hurt. I try to make something good to eat and share it when I can. Some days, doing better means resting before I grow bitter with exhaustion.

    None of this makes me a finished person. It gives me a way to live today.

    Perhaps that is how I make it through. A choice here. A gentler word there. A little more patience for someone else, and sometimes for myself. Over time, those choices have changed the shape of my days.

    I still cannot always tell when I have made it through. Maybe I am waiting for a sign that doesn’t come.

    But every so often, I find myself in the kitchen, tending to something on the stove. The day has had its trouble. I have had mine. And for a few minutes, I am simply there, thinking about supper. I remember when even that small peace felt far away.

    I turn down the heat. I set out a plate.

    Tomorrow may ask more of me. Tonight, I have made it this far.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Change-in-the-Weather Flu

    The Change-in-the-Weather Flu

    Fall is here.

    You can see it arriving before the temperature fully agrees.

    Halloween decorations begin appearing on porches. Balloons drift across the morning sky. Grocery stores stack bags of freshly roasted green chile near the entrance, and the smell follows you all the way to the car.

    Soon, there will be green chile stew.

    There should always be green chile stew.

    But for me, the changing season brings something else.

    What I call the change-in-the-weather flu.

    I know this is not an official medical diagnosis. No doctor has ever looked over a clipboard and solemnly announced that I have a severe case of autumn.

    Still, I know what I feel.

    The scratchy throat.

    The stuffy head.

    The sudden desire to remain on the couch and cancel every responsibility that requires shoes.

    It seems to happen whenever the weather begins changing its mind. The afternoons are still warm, but the mornings have developed an attitude. You leave home dressed for summer and return wondering why you did not bring a jacket.

    Mother Nature is rearranging the furniture.

    My body notices.

    Over the years, I have developed my own treatment plan.

    It begins with homemade chicken soup.

    Nothing elaborate. This is not the time for culinary ambition. The soup only needs to be hot, comforting, and able to make me believe I am taking care of myself.

    Something about chicken soup feels older than medicine.

    Maybe it is the steam rising from the bowl. Maybe it is the warmth settling into your chest. Maybe it is simply the memory of being cared for.

    Sometimes comfort works because we remember it working before.

    Then comes green tea with lemon and honey.

    The honey soothes my throat. The lemon brings a little brightness. The warm cup gives my hands something to hold while I sit beneath a weighted blanket and consider whether I have the strength to choose another show.

    I usually do.

    Binge-watching is an important part of recovery.

    The show does not have to be especially good. In fact, it may be better if it is not. A complicated plot requires attention, and I don’t have it when my head feels stuffed with cotton.

    I need something familiar.

    Something that will continue playing if I fall asleep halfway through and wake up three episodes later with no idea what happened.

    The weighted blanket completes the prescription.

    Something about its gentle pressure makes the couch feel less like a place where I have collapsed and more like a place where I have intentionally chosen to recover.

    That distinction matters.

    We sometimes treat rest as though it must be earned. We push ourselves until our bodies make the decision for us. Then we lie down reluctantly, still thinking about everything we should be doing.

    But the changing seasons offer their own instruction.

    Slow down.

    Make something warm.

    Pull the blanket a little higher.

    Let the world continue without your supervision for an afternoon.

    Perhaps my change-in-the-weather flu is simply Mother Nature’s way of telling me that summer is over.

    The long days are shortening. The air is cooling. The season of open windows and cold drinks is giving way to soup, tea, blankets, and the quiet comfort of staying home.

    Outside, the balloons will rise.

    The Halloween decorations will multiply.

    Somewhere, someone will begin making the first pot of green chile stew.

    And I will be on the couch with my tea, my soup, and my weighted blanket, accepting the message my body has been trying to deliver.

    Fall has arrived.

    Apparently, it would like me to sit down.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Villain Who Made Me Think

    The Villain Who Made Me Think

    Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

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    Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero?

    I have.

    Magneto.

    And I liked him before I ever really knew him.

    I was a boy when I saw Stan Lee being interviewed on television. I couldn’t tell you the program now. I couldn’t repeat the interview. Memory rarely keeps things that neatly.

    But I remember what stopped me.

    He was talking about the X-Men.

    Professor X, he explained, could be seen as closer to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    Magneto was closer to Malcolm X.

    That was it.

    I needed to know more.

    Until then, comic books had mostly been what comic books are supposed to be when you’re a kid.

    Heroes.

    Villains.

    Costumes.

    Powers.

    Good guys trying to stop bad guys from doing bad things.

    But suddenly someone was telling me there were ideas underneath those costumes.

    History underneath those battles.

    That a fight between two men with extraordinary powers could really be an argument about how people survive in a world that fears them.

    That interview made me an X-Men fan.

    More importantly, it helped make me a serious comic-book reader.

    And when I began reading Magneto, I found something much more complicated than the villain I expected.

    He frightened people.

    He threatened people.

    Sometimes he did terrible things while convincing himself they were necessary.

    I understood that.

    But I also understood something else.

    Magneto believed his people were in danger.

    And he had decided they would never be helpless again.

    That mattered to me.

    Because underneath the helmet, the powers, and all that anger was memory.

    Magneto remembered what happened when people decided another group was different.

    He remembered what happened when different became dangerous.

    And he knew what could happen when dangerous became something people believed needed to be eliminated.

    So when Professor X looked at humanity and saw the possibility of coexistence, Magneto looked at the same humanity and saw evidence.

    That doesn’t make Magneto right.

    I think that distinction matters.

    Understanding someone’s anger isn’t the same as approving of what they do with it.

    Magneto could become the very thing he claimed to be fighting. Protection could become domination. Fear could become hatred. The determination to keep his people safe could become permission to hurt someone else’s.

    But even then, I could never dismiss him.

    Because I understood the question underneath his anger.

    What if they come for us again?

    Professor X believed humanity could become better.

    Magneto wasn’t willing to bet his people’s survival on it.

    One offered hope.

    The other carried memory.

    I know people have discussed the Professor X and Dr. King, Magneto and Malcolm X comparisons for years. I also know those comparisons can become too simple. Dr. King was more complicated than the peaceful dreamer we sometimes reduce him to, and Malcolm X was far more complicated than the angry counterweight history sometimes makes him out to be.

    Real men don’t fit neatly inside comic-book metaphors.

    But as a boy, I didn’t know all of that yet.

    I only knew someone had opened a door.

    Comic books could be about more than heroes defeating villains.

    They could ask questions.

    About prejudice.

    About power.

    About identity.

    About what people owe one another.

    About whether peace requires trust, and what happens when history has given you very little reason to trust.

    I started reading differently after that.

    Maybe I started looking at villains differently, too.

    Because the most interesting villains aren’t necessarily the ones who make us wonder how someone could become so evil.

    Sometimes they are the ones who make us uncomfortable because somewhere beneath everything they have become, there is something we recognize.

    A wound.

    A memory.

    A fear.

    Maybe even a truth.

    Magneto never made me want the villain to win.

    He did something more important.

    He made me understand why the villain believed he should.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • A Tourist in the Place I Once Called Home

    A Tourist in the Place I Once Called Home

    This morning, I needed Maps.

    That should not have bothered me.

    People use Maps every day.

    We use them to find restaurants, stores, roads we have forgotten, places that have moved, places that did not exist the last time we were somewhere.

    But something about needing directions here unsettled me.

    This is supposed to be home.

    Or at least, it used to be.

    I drove through streets I once knew without thinking.

    Streets where a bicycle had been enough transportation.

    Streets where friends lived.

    Streets that once led to malls, comic book stores, familiar corners, familiar faces, the small geography of a boy’s world.

    Back then, I did not need a map.

    Everything I needed seemed to be here.

    Now I find myself slowing down at intersections.

    Looking at street signs.

    Listening to a voice from my phone tell me where to turn.

    And somewhere between one unfamiliar building and another, it occurred to me:

    I am moving through my hometown like a tourist.

    There is a strange arrogance in memory.

    Memory convinces us that places belong to us because we once belonged to them.

    We leave, carrying a version of a city in our heads, and somehow expect that version to wait.

    The old store will still be there.

    The neighborhood will still look the same.

    The route we walked home will still make sense.

    The place where we bought comics, ate lunch, wasted afternoons, met friends, waited for rides, dreamed about getting older—all of it should remain exactly where we left it.

    But cities do not wait.

    I left.

    The city did not.

    It kept moving.

    Businesses closed.

    Buildings came down.

    Other buildings went up.

    Roads changed.

    Neighborhoods changed.

    People arrived.

    People left.

    What was important to one generation became irrelevant to another.

    The places that once formed the boundaries of my life became someone else’s before I realized I had surrendered them.

    There is nothing cruel about that.

    It is simply what time does.

    Still, you feel it.

    I have been staying at the Blackhawk Hotel.

    The building has been here since 1915.

    It has watched generations arrive dressed for weddings and funerals, business meetings and celebrations. It has watched automobiles change, fashions change, fortunes rise and fall.

    And somehow it remains.

    Standing where it has stood.

    A foothold of tradition surrounded by a sea of change.

    There is something comforting about that.

    Perhaps because so little else seems willing to recognize me.

    The hotel does not remember me, of course.

    Buildings don’t remember.

    We do.

    But sometimes an old building gives memory somewhere to rest.

    A wall still standing can feel like evidence.

    See?

    You did not imagine all of it.

    Some of what you remember really existed.

    Some places from childhood survive only inside us.

    Eventually even the buildings disappear.

    And when they do, memory becomes the only address left.

    I’m not sure whether the changes here are good or bad.

    I don’t think that is mine to decide anymore.

    That realization may be the strangest part.

    There was a time when I might have looked around and said:

    What happened to this place?

    As though the city owed me an explanation.

    As though the version I knew was somehow the correct one.

    But the people who live here now get to answer that question.

    They know which restaurant is good and which one used to be better.

    They know where to go without opening Maps.

    This belongs to them now.

    Not in the legal sense.

    In the intimate one.

    They possess the current version of this place.

    I possess an older edition.

    And perhaps that is what returning Home eventually becomes.

    Not a return to the place itself.

    A return to the distance between what was and what is.

    We use the word Home as though it describes geography.

    But I am beginning to think Home may have more to do with time.

    Maybe my hometown was never merely this collection of streets beside the river.

    Maybe it was a particular moment.

    When my friends were here.

    When bicycles were transportation.

    When an afternoon at the mall seemed like an event.

    When comic book stores were destinations.

    When adults knew where things were, and I did not yet understand how quickly places could disappear.

    That version of the city existed.

    I lived there.

    But it doesn’t exist anymore.

    And neither does the boy who lived in it.

    There is grief in saying that.

    But perhaps there is freedom too.

    Losing it does not mean it meant less.

    It belonged to a time that finished.

    We understand that loving someone does not guarantee they will remain with us forever.

    Maybe places deserve the same grace.

    So I drove around this morning.

    A little lost.

    A little amused by being lost.

    A little saddened by it too.

    Maps telling me where to turn in a city where I once would have laughed at the idea of needing directions.

    And for the first time, I stopped trying to make the place match my memory.

    I simply looked at it.

    What it has become.

    Not what I wanted it to remain.

    There is humility in that.

    The city does not owe me preservation.

    Time does not owe me continuity.

    The people who live here do not owe my childhood a monument.

    They are busy making memories of their own.

    Maybe someday one of them will return after many years and drive these same streets.

    They will look for a restaurant that disappeared.

    A school that changed names.

    A store where they once spent entire afternoons.

    Their phone will tell them to turn left.

    They will realize that the place they called Home has continued without them.

    Maybe that is when we understand that leaving happens twice.

    The first time is when we go.

    The second is when we return and discover the place we left has gone too.

    I am not sure I can call this Home anymore.

    Not in the way I once did.

    It is the place where I grew up.

    That is different.

    It is the place that helped make me.

    That is different too.

    And there is no bitterness in saying it.

    Only recognition.

    The Blackhawk still stands.

    The river still moves.

    Some streets still carry familiar names.

    But I no longer live inside that version of it.

    I carry it.

    Maybe that is what Home eventually becomes for some of us.

    Not somewhere we can return to.

    Something we take with us.

    And this morning, driving around with Maps telling me where to go, I finally understood something I had not expected to learn here.

    I did come home.

    I just came home as a tourist.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • You Know Fall Is Coming When the Balloons Go Up

    You Know Fall Is Coming When the Balloons Go Up

    I grew up in the Midwest, where fall knew how to make an entrance.

    The trees announced it.

    Green gave way to yellow, orange, and red, as though the whole landscape had decided to burn beautifully before going quiet. Then the leaves began to fall, collecting along curbs and sidewalks, gathering beneath tires, crunching under your feet.

    You didn’t have to wonder whether the season was changing.

    All you had to do was look.

    New Mexico is different.

    Here, fall arrives a little more quietly.

    At first, it is something in the morning air.

    Not cold exactly.

    Just cooler.

    Enough that when you step outside early, you notice. Enough that you remember there will eventually come a morning when you will need a jacket.

    Then comes the smell.

    Green chile roasting.

    If you have lived here long enough, you know the smell before you see the roaster.

    Smoke and chile and flame carried through a grocery store parking lot. Those big metal drums turning over fire while people stand nearby, waiting for bags of roasted chile still warm enough to steam.

    And naturally, there are decisions to make.

    Where are you buying yours this year?

    Who has the best chile?

    More importantly:

    Who has the hot stuff?

    Not the chile somebody politely described as hot.

    The chile that makes you reconsider your confidence about halfway through dinner.

    These are serious questions.

    Or at least we treat them that way.

    And while you’re thinking about chile, while the morning is still cool and the smell of roasting peppers is floating through the air, you happen to look up.

    And there they are.

    The balloons are up.

    I have lived here for years.

    Long enough that none of this should surprise me anymore.

    But I still look.

    I still stop.

    I still reach for my phone.

    I still take pictures.

    There is something wonderfully impractical about a hot-air balloon.

    It doesn’t rush.

    It doesn’t seem particularly concerned about productivity.

    It just floats.

    A splash of color moving slowly across a blue New Mexico sky while the rest of us are down here trying to get somewhere on time.

    Maybe that’s part of why I still look.

    We spend so much of our lives training ourselves not to be impressed.

    We get used to things.

    The mountain becomes the mountain.

    The sunset becomes another sunset.

    The strange and beautiful thing we once stopped to admire becomes part of the scenery we pass without noticing.

    Familiarity can be a kind of blindness.

    I don’t want that.

    I don’t ever want to live somewhere so long that beauty becomes furniture.

    So I take another picture of a balloon.

    Even though I already have plenty.

    Probably too many.

    Maybe that’s all right.

    Growing up, autumn meant leaves.

    Here, it means something else.

    Cool mornings.

    Green chile.

    Balloons.

    Different signs for the same ancient turning.

    And maybe that is one of the quiet things a place teaches you when you stay long enough.

    You arrive with one definition of how the world is supposed to work.

    Then life gives you another.

    You learn that fall does not require red maple leaves.

    Home does not require the landscape where you were born.

    Tradition does not always have to be inherited.

    Sometimes you live somewhere long enough that new rituals begin attaching themselves to you.

    You don’t notice it happening.

    Until one morning you smell chile roasting and think:

    It’s that time again.

    Until you see the first balloons and instinctively reach for your phone.

    Until something that once belonged to somebody else’s place has quietly become part of your own calendar.

    Maybe belonging happens that way.

    Not with an announcement.

    Not with a ceremony.

    Just repetition.

    One season after another.

    One familiar smell.

    One cooler morning.

    One balloon drifting overhead.

    And a person standing beneath it who has seen this many times before—

    and still looks up.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • I Chose the Better Room

    I Chose the Better Room

    I chose the better room on purpose.

    That probably doesn’t sound like much of a decision.

    People choose hotel rooms every day. They look at the pictures, compare the prices, decide whether they want the larger bed or the better view, and click the button.

    But I sat there for a while before I clicked mine.

    Because somewhere inside me, an old voice was doing the math.

    Not the math of whether I could afford it.

    I could.

    A different kind of math.

    Do you really need that?

    I know that question well.

    I grew up with it.

    When you grow up without much, necessity becomes its own kind of morality. You learn there are things you need and things you want, and good people are supposed to know the difference.

    You don’t pay extra for the view.

    You don’t need the bigger room.

    A bed is a bed.

    A room is somewhere to sleep.

    Why spend money on something you can do without?

    There was wisdom in that.

    I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

    Those lessons came from people who understood what it meant to stretch a dollar until there wasn’t much stretch left. People who knew that money spent carelessly today might be money desperately needed tomorrow.

    They taught us how to survive scarcity.

    The problem is that nobody tells you what to do with those lessons when scarcity is no longer your everyday condition.

    Sometimes the circumstances change before the thinking does.

    So this time, I chose the better room.

    Not because I needed it.

    I chose it because I wanted to be comfortable.

    Even writing that feels a little strange.

    My brother arrived a day earlier than expected.

    He wanted me to meet his wife, and while he was still on the road, he called me. Somewhere in the conversation, we started talking about the hotel.

    My brother has done well for himself.

    Very well.

    At some point, he mentioned that he doesn’t usually stay in places like this.

    I didn’t think much about it at first.

    Then I did.

    Because I know where he came from.

    He came from where I came from.

    And I found myself wondering whether an old voice was still doing the math inside him, too.

    I can’t say if there is.

    His reasons belong to him.

    But I wondered.

    Two brothers, years removed from the circumstances of their childhood, both successful enough to make choices our younger selves couldn’t have made, perhaps still hearing echoes from a time when spending money on comfort would have seemed foolish.

    Maybe even irresponsible.

    It made me wonder how much of our past continues making decisions for us long after we believe we have left it behind.

    Scarcity teaches you things.

    Some of them are useful.

    You learn how to make do.

    You learn how to repair instead of replace.

    You learn that expensive and good are not synonyms.

    You learn not to confuse wanting something with needing it.

    Those are lessons I hope I never lose.

    But scarcity can teach other lessons too.

    It can teach you to feel guilty when you have more than enough.

    It can make comfort feel suspicious.

    It can convince you that choosing the cheaper thing is always evidence of wisdom, even when the difference no longer matters much to your life.

    And perhaps most quietly, it can teach you to ask whether you need something when that is no longer the only question available to you.

    I am not talking about living beyond your means.

    I am not talking about buying things to impress people who aren’t paying your bills.

    I am not talking about mistaking luxury for happiness.

    I have lived long enough to know better than that.

    I am talking about living comfortably within your means.

    There is a difference.

    And I am beginning to think that difference matters.

    Maybe there comes a point when the question changes.

    For much of my life, the question was:

    Do I really need this?

    That question served me well.

    But there are times now when I can ask something else.

    Can I afford it?

    Will it make this experience better?

    Am I making the choice responsibly?

    And if the answers are yes, maybe I don’t need to summon hardship as proof that I still remember where I came from.

    Maybe remembering is enough.

    That is the part I am still learning.

    Because there is something complicated about doing better than you once did.

    People talk about success as though it simply opens doors.

    They don’t talk as much about how long you can stand in the doorway wondering whether you are supposed to walk through.

    Some of us become very good at surviving.

    So good that survival follows us into rooms where it is no longer required.

    We carry it in the way we shop.

    The way we save.

    The things we refuse ourselves.

    The small calculations nobody else sees.

    And perhaps that isn’t entirely bad.

    I don’t want to lose the boy who understood that money mattered.

    I don’t want to become careless simply because I no longer have to count every dollar the way people around me once did.

    There is honor in remembering.

    But there should also be some room for living.

    So I am sitting in the better room.

    There is more space than I need.

    There are things here I could certainly do without.

    And tomorrow morning, when I wake up, none of it will have transformed my life.

    It is just a hotel room.

    I know that.

    But perhaps choosing it was never really about the room.

    Maybe it was about giving myself permission to enjoy something I could responsibly afford without immediately explaining why I didn’t need it.

    Maybe it was about understanding that the people who taught me how to survive would not necessarily want survival to be the ceiling of my life.

    I don’t know.

    I’m still thinking about that.

    But I know this:

    There is nothing wrong with remembering how to live with less.

    I just don’t want to become so faithful to scarcity that I forget I no longer have to.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times