What’s in Your Funnel?

There’s an old plastic funnel that’s been bouncing around my garage for nearly 45 years. In fact, it’s outlasted three garages so far. I bought the thing back in 1982 for a couple bucks, in a time when I had both the emotional and physical stamina to perform oil changes and tuneups on my own cars.

Last week, I tripped over that funnel, bringing my fragile old knees into peril. While I was hanging it back up on the pegboard over my workbench, I realized that old funnel is a pretty good metaphor for my life.

When I was a kid, my parents kept the funnel full. They made sure I always had food to eat, a safe, warm place to sleep and suitable clothes to wear (even if some were hand-me-downs). They even made sure I had a bike to ride and an old dog to keep me company.

As I got older, other things began to fill my funnel. I found that I could earn money by doing jobs like a paper route and mowing lawns. That money allowed me to buy “stuff” that filled my funnel and I became a budding Capitalist. I also began to develop relationships outside my family — some good; some not so good. In fact, some of those relationships left ugly oil stains on the funnel of my life.

In my teens, I discovered girls as well as the usual misdemeanors that fill a teenage boy’s life. That’s when I began to realize just how fast happiness slipped through the funnel and I began picking up the pace of discovering new experiences.

The summer after high school, I experienced some seismic shifts in my thinking and began to realize that life has meaning and order despite the apparent chaos. I began to understand that valuing and helping other human beings, provided more meaning than anything I’d ever tried to fill my funnel with before.

Then, I went away to college, and the neck at the bottom of my funnel got wider. “Stuff” lost its ability to fill my funnel and “ideas” became the funnel filler. The problem with ideas in college is that more experienced, though not necessarily wiser, individuals are always challenging your values and making the process of funnel maintenance harder.

That’s when I met Paula and my funnel began to overflow. I tried to put a cork in the bottom of that funnel by asking her to marry me. I literally could not stand to be away from her for more than a few hours lest some calamity occur and steal her away, leaving my funnel empty and dry.

A few months after our wedding, I graduated from college and we moved back to my hometown where a job was waiting. Nature took its course, and our first child was born. My funnel was once again overflowing but “worry” kept widening the funnel’s neck and I had to work harder and faster to make sure my little family had what they needed.

Two more kids came along and somehow, we still seemed to make ends meet. I went through three dead-end jobs before starting my own company in 1988. My income grew, the kids flourished, and I spent my waking hours trying to keep their funnels filled. “Stuff” crept back into my life as the funnel filler — vacations, bigger houses, cars for three kids, and nice clothes for all of us. Keeping all those extra funnels full led to even more worry.

The Unexpected
A few weeks ago, my friend Jerrid Fletcher told me, “There’s a moment most of us have lived, when the life you planned and the life you live don’t match.” (Full disclosure: My friend, Jerrid’s an up-and-coming pastor and public speaker who made that statement to me and 500 other people in the same room.) None-the-less, the truth of his statement described my life perfectly.

In 2003, the market crashed, my clients filed for bankruptcy, and my funnel got inverted. For the first time in life, the opening at the bottom of the funnel was larger than the opening at the top. I got lucky and found a good psychologist who helped me turn that funnel back over and narrow the outlet by rediscovering fulfillment in more meaningful activities.

Oddly, I ended right back where I had been the Summer after high school. I realized people matter to the Creator of the universe and that by investing my energy in people, I was filling my funnel with something that would not so easily slip through and disappear. Nor would it cause me needless worry.

Regardless of the political, religious, economic, and cultural conflicts that inject chaos into an otherwise perfect cosmic system, at the end of the day, people are all that matters. That company you started — it dies when you leave. That big house — it becomes a money pit of maintenance needs. The clothes wear out; the cars crash; the investments dwindle; the alcohol becomes an addiction. Only the people we invest time in can reinvest their own time in others and start something that snowballs into good.

So, my question remains: “What’s in your funnel?”

A meeting of great minds who think alike