🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Gambler🎶
Planet Zero🌎
Guiding Value✌️
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- My father-in-law, whose birthday it would have been today. He passed away in early 2021.
- A probably-no-rain forecast for the second day of our baseball tournament.
- A fun home to retreat to after a day of peopling.
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five.
Wordle 1,044 5/6
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨
⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: PERFECTO!
Connections
Puzzle #322
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
The song in my head when I woke up: “The Gambler,” Kenny Rogers. This is Wifey Poo’s fault.
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: And the best that you can hope for/Is to die in your sleep”
Ballpark Tunes: The drive to the baseball tournament yesterday turned out to be about double what it was supposed to be, as the original field we were supposed to play on was unplayable because of rain. So instead, we drove to Ellisville and listened to Shinedown’s Planet Zero album
- 2184
- No SLeep Tonight
- Planet Zero
- Welcome
- Dysfunctional You
- Dead Don’t Die
- Standardized Experiences
- America Burning
- Do Not Panic
- A Symptom of Being Human
- Hope
- A More Utopian Future
- Clueless and Dramatic
- Sure Is Fun
- Daylight
- This Is A Warning
- The Saints of Violence and Innuendo
- Army Of The Under Appreciated
Something I’m looking forward to today: Day 2 of our baseball tournament. Our team has come so far in the fundamentals of the game. I’m super proud of every single kid.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Boy The Younger’s choir concert on Thursday.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: The family-like atmosphere among players, coaches and parents we’ve built with my baseball team.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved no writing other than the Puzzle Pieces. It was kinda busy!
What I’ve written: Why Buy When You Can Borrough? Rahul Srivathsa’s company was born just as his MMM experience began. He shares how the program helped get his business off the ground and focus it for future success.
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “The highest power is … no power, if you desire nothing.” — Seneca
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Calculated indifference, my friend. That is the great equalizer. No one can have any sort of power over you if you don’t care what they think of you. Go about your life and be good and do good, but don’t do it in any sort of way that would make you beholden to another.”
Round-about December of 2023, I was talking with my therapist, who is relatively new in my life. We were talking about some foundational stuff after being deep in the weeds of some stubborn problems that I just hadn’t been able to work my way through — including the proverbial thorn in my side that I’ve written about. So we went back to the start and did something of a values clarification exercise to see what it is that is driving me at this point in my life.
Turns out, in runaway fashion, it was peace.
No matter what situation was put in front of me, no matter what other value was put up against it head-to-head, peace won. Every. Single. Time.
And it makes sense. To say my past five-plus years have been marked by a disturbing absence of peace is an understatement. It’s more accurate to say “Pick a time period in my life — the last 5 years, the last 10 years, the last nearly 50 years — and it’s easy to fill that jar with example after example after example of a lack of basic peace.”
This isn’t to suggest that I expect a life devoid of conflict or unsettledness. I am very well aware of the fact that the most important and prolific growth happens not during time of peace but rather during times when a person feels discontented with the current situation. My truth, though, was that I’d done plenty of growing for a human being over the past [insert time period here], and all I wanted was a time of comparable peace.
So this is what I wished for as a new year began, and whatever it is that governs this universe (I choose to think of it as some sort of God I don’t even pretend to understand) said, “Oh really? Isn’t that funny.” Early 2024 life seemed to be increasingly chaotic. There were the things that happened to me, and then there were the things I willingly chose to address that created my own temporary disquiet. None of it involved peace.
Still, I held true to what I value most: Peace. It has guided every big decision I have made this year — from the choice to directly address the situation with an unstable and tyrannical supervisor to the choice to directly address the situation with my birth parents as it relates to Boy The Elder’s upcoming wedding and any relationship beyond that. And, oh, yeah, there was the thorn.
In every single instance, as soon as I directly addressed the situation, boldly stepping up and saying, “This needs to change,” things changed. Every situation in which I did this temporarily became more chaotic — until it wasn’t. And then it was better.
So as I move into the rest of 2024, I still hold my central value: Peace. And now I hold the knowledge that to find peace, I have to stand up and deal with things. This is the lesson from the past five years, from the past five months. When I stop beating around the bush and address the problems that need to be addressed, change happens and peace follows.
It gets worse. But then it gets better.
I somehow feel this is an important life lesson.
Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?