Persistent consistency

# Chapter 337

Persistent consistency or it consistent persistence? This the superpower of the ages, even when you don’t feel good about whatever, at the end of the day you will be able to look back and see all that got done, all that you accomplished somehow. Perhaps it is short of what you aspired to complete, perhaps it feels like you are struggling throughout the day, perhaps you did not find the long windows of uninterrupted time to do the very very best you are capable of, or perhaps you battled with motivation to continue in the course of the day, yet persistent consistency and consistent persistence wins the day every single day. Maybe all of these “perhaps” in the previous sentence happened to you and me while we were trying to be persistent, yet if we had failed then nothing would have been accomplished.

In other words, you might be encouraged if you look at it in the negatives, and yes I know, that sounds like an oxymoron. But if I had not persisted in pedaling yesterday I would be somewhere in south York County not moving forward. If I had not persisted in pushing that lawn mower the grass would be taller. If I had not persisted in grinding my way methodically through all the client material, that list would be almost 900 long. If I had nor persisted in continuing to write one more word and then one more word, in each client letter, I would have finished exactly zero. While my ambition may have been to complete more and better than I did, much was finished that would not have even been started if not for persistent consistency and consistent persistence.

Can’t you hear the grass growing?

# Chapter 336

You have to decide, and its more difficult than it should be it seems. But you have to decide. I did. I got up off my lazy duff and I got the yard work done. Yes it was hot as blazes and yes it hadn’t been done properly for two weeks so it was extra difficult and yes these and more reasons are why I was delaying delaying delaying, but hey that grass is still growing even while you delay over and over and that means the difficulty only gets worse and worse the more you delay and delay. Do you see the cycle here? The delay only harms you or makes the work worse when you finally do decide and hey, you will finally decide. Delay is not the decision, delay is a strategy and usually a poor one at that.

I mean you have too much self respect to allow your yard to become a jungle, so you will cut it and trim it and finish it. At some point this will happen. There is no ideal time to do the work, so make the decision already! Block out the distractions that are convincing you to use the delay strategy and do the hard sweaty work. The grass is growing, can’t you hear it?

Delay is a subtle strategy mind game where you convince yourself that there is a better time to do whatever, in the near future rather than right now. The near future never being defined, so that it can continue being “the near future” in your delay strategy. My dad is even noticing that I don’t play this game often. If he mentions there is a job to be done, then I want to get started! I think this is a fine way to counter the seduction of the delay strategy in my third third of life.

You can’t change . . . the past

# Chapter 335

Long road trips. These are good places to think . . . sometimes. Other times they are just places to worry about all that is happening in your car engine, the other drivers around you and all that could happen in the endless hours ahead of you. There comes a point where you have to decide how you are planning to spend these hours. I confess that I split my time about 50/50 on this particular trip. I had some non-working instruments on the dash and they kept me hovering constantly over the working instruments so that I could make certain that I did not blow the engine. Otherwise I would have, I like to think, spent more time thinking and less time fretting.

We all face such life dilemmas regularly. It would bode well for the best outcomes if we decided ahead of time what we wanted more with the opportunities that come our way, and even what we plan to do with the distractions that cause the dilemmas. I can’t get these last two days back. What I did with them I did with them and there is no going back and changing anything. I can only change the future, not the past. You have the same challenge. When will we become future focused just enough to live in the proper present and not let it pass us by with regrets? Even at 60 years of age I am still striving for that precise balance. So it is not an easy task to solve and its kind of squishy and ever-changing in that no two situations are ever the same, so there is no way that you or I can make ONE decision and it work for each day. But we can still decide each morning that we are gonna use this day in this particular way.

Cringe and mold

# Chapter 334

Another crazy intense trip in the books. Lots accomplished and lots completed and lots of fun along the way. Plenty of disappointments as well. This is life and what are you taking away from this? You can grow from this, or you can cringe from this, or you can mold from this. Growth is the healthy one on my opinion. Take the wins and enjoy them. Plan for more in the future. Minimize the negatives as much as you can and learn from them. Rinse. Repeat. Love life. This is clearly the way to go.

But far too often we focus on the negatives and we spend our time cringing. Waiting for next shoe to drop, the next thing to happen, looking for trouble and finding it. Wishing for more wins, but often failing to take action and make them happen. In this all too common scenario the negatives are the focus, the wins barely felt, planning revolves around negatives. Far too much of this going on.

And then you can just mold. Keep things emotionally dark and rainy and decide that action is pointless so you take none. You just sit there and mold. You dig your roots in to doing nothing and this becomes your normal. It is a difficult place to break free from and gain some traction. The longer you are here, the more strength this place has over you. It is an easy place to come to and a difficult one to leave.

Just stay away from cringe and mold positions in life. They are blood-sucking parasites that give little in return for all that they take and demand. Be healthy, choose healthy, stay healthy.

Energy management

# Chapter 333

Made it through the difficult challenging day and most things came together, in spite of the lack of quality sleep. This proves that you can turn it around and have a different day than you are heading toward, if you apply enough effort to turn it around and head in a different direction, get a different result. There are always going to be difficult days, there are always going to be distractions, there are always going to be options about how you respond it. And there is the real crux of the matter for me - the energy to respond in a helpful way.

There are three parts to that sentence and idea - energy, response and helpful. All three are necessary in order to have a positive outcome. When I don’t get enough sleep, energy management is critical. I feel like crap when my sleep gets shorted, and that skews my decision making matrix and my willingness to compromise or flex (which is always critical because other people may be having a crap day too) and my willingness to do anything productive other than piss and moan about how much I want to sleep. So to choose a different response takes an intense intentionality that I don’t normally have. You have to dig deep on these days to find that need or inspiration to make this effort. And to make it helpful. It is more difficult than it sounds I assure you. Mostly I just want to hit a punching bag or something I am such a grumpy ass, but this is not helpful. Helpful is setting aside all your legitimate complaints and situations, and looking for a way to move forward, help others, get it done, finish the job, and then sleep much better tonight.

Turning it around

# Chapter 332

Awake too late and up too early. This is the normal pattern for my most difficult days. And it makes them worse. The cause is apparent, the solution not so much. If I only could take naps, that might really be the only and best solution. Of course we could be done with difficult challenging days, but that would mean . . . nah we will just keep on chugging our way through difficult challenging days. Ok on a different but same note, I hate the voices of every single early morning TV personality, they grate on my nerves far more than fingernails on a blackboard. No amount of caffeine or sugar can seem to counter their effect on my mind and soul. And this daily writing process is taking twice as long as it should and normally does. More complaints forthcoming.

Unless I can turn this around. Turn around my resentment first and foremost. Turn around my tiredness and find the energy to accomplish all that needs attention today. Ease through all the nearly conflicting pieces that have to come together in some form in such a way that it brings completion to each part without sacrificing the priority list. And perspective, understanding that while things are scheduled to be really busy today and you just want to go back to bed, nothing is life critical today. Yes you have spent lots of time and effort on arranging these matters, but you didn’t die before arranging them, and you won’t if they fall through via overbooking or some other flaw in the day. Turn it around.

Organization

# Chapter 331

There are details and then there are details. It is imperative to complete the details on my refinancing, to get every tiny thing done and all the figures to be accurate to the penny. As the closing date draws near, I have to keep a close eye on my email and phone because the banker is constantly asking for more details. Those details filled in the gaps of knowledge that he has, or is required by the state or bank to accomplish and know. They are often difficult to chase down, and it keeps me plenty busy, find the right document and getting it to the banker in a form he can manage and see. This is tedious work, and I am more practiced at it than I would like to be, having purchased a house recently, the process is similar for the refinancing task.

Then there are the details that are more structural in nature, rather than fine nuances and infinite units and components to be juggled. These details are more like what process to use to groom the fields for planting, or which mowers to use for which cutting, the order in which certain things must happen for the best outcomes, how you organize all the informational pieces of your life, which filing system you use and how well you implement it. The more organized you are, the easier the above paragraph can be to complete. The more you understand the outcomes of your labors the more this paragraph applies. The trick is to be just well organized enough to get whatever job completed that you have on your schedule and radar. If you are too well organized and then you have lost hours, days, weeks keeping a pointless system in place. Too little organization and you will lose hours, days and weeks trying to find obscure documents and data the once or twice a year that you actually need them. Find just the right amount . . .

Sanctuaries

# Chapter 330

Rest days, Sabbaths, weekends or whatever you want to call them, are a critical part of great health. That meant for me, a motorcycle, winding roads, cool mountain vistas and wind in my ears for hours and hours. For you it may mean something else entirely. As long as you weren’t doing your “regular” everyday email, social media, or going to the office, whatever that may mean for you in the modern world. Anytime I have my phone with me I am in mortal danger of being “at work”. Its one of the best upsides to being in Georgia and working on the farm, in that I often can’t have my phone with me while doing farm chores. And that was the point of the 2.5 hour trek through the mountains on my motorcycle yesterday, while my phone was physically with me, it was inaccessible while navigating those roads. Perhaps it will help you if you build some blocked out time and days to rest. A good break requires practice.

Not the partying drinking kind of practice, but the quiet, solitude, contemplative, unplugged, I-am-in-neutral kind of time where you stop all forward motion and just be. This can be so very challenging to achieve/find in our hustle-focused world. But you need this and you likely won’t believe that until you are experiencing it and realize this gapping hole of need that you had inside for a quiet moment and some peace. I recently had one of those moment on the Chesapeake Bay on my friends boat. We had a rocking storming Saturday night with tremendous lightening and thunder, and then a supernaturally calm Sunday morning where all kinds of important conversations happened, and fishing happened, and communing with God happens. Best sanctuary ever. Slow down or die early.

Building your soil

# Chapter 329

We have oaks, sweet gum, green giants, pear, loquat, plum, evergreen, pine and magnolias growing on the property. They all grow at different speeds even though 100’s of them were planted at the same time. Some are slow growth, and others are magna fast growing trees. Some are planted in bad soil, others in terrible soil. We don’t have much good soil here in MooCow GA. Even though these trees were planted at the same time, they vary in growth from 3 feet to 16 feet! Its all about the soil, the sun and the moisture they get. On the other hand, over 100 of the trees I planted have died in the five years since I put them in the ground.

Development and skills are just like that in our lives. Some are slow growth skills, others are quickly developed with a bit of consistency. The quality of soil you develop for your life is centered around your inputs. If you have healthy inputs and you use judicious restraint in your eating and exercise every day, there is great hope for the quality of your soil. Sunlight is the Truth shining into your life, and rain/moisture is friends and foes who will challenge you to be more. These pieces aren’t the easiest in the world to come by, but they are priceless jewels to be constantly sought after. A person with these elements in their life, will have rich resources for producing all kinds of life-enriching skills and abilities. Build your soil!

The news ain’t news

# Chapter 328

Things aren’t as bad as the news casts are telling you that they are, I mean listen to the tone they use, that tone that screams “emergency” “dire warning” and “urgency”. It is their primary method of keeping you from changing the channel or turning them off. When someone, anyone, constantly is using this tone of voice, their believability drops a corresponding amount. Yet I watch everyone’s anxiety ramp up with each word coming from the news caster’s mouth. The news basically throws gasoline on every spark they can find, hoping for great ratings and a good fire. Things aren’t as bad as they are making them sound and the motives and focus of the people and events they are “reporting” on aren’t anywhere near what that news caster is telling you.

Let me tell you one of my own personal experiences with the media. When I was a young clergyman in Leesburg Florida, one Saturday I was in the barbershop with four others, waiting my turn in the chair. There was the barber, me, a reporter and a local shop owner. The subject turned into a mildly ribald discussion about the color pink and why men should never wear pink. We laughed and laughed and had a men’s moment. Imagine my surprise when most of my contribution to the men’s moment showed up in the Orlando Sentient’s Sunday morning edition newspaper! But not one single quote was in the context in which it was shared. Read that again. Yeah exactly. Each quote was framed to put me in the worse possible light and to keep readers diligently on that page reading. That was 35 years ago and the “news” is far worse now than it was back then and that was bad enough.

Make the trees fall

# Chapter 327

Persistence is the best superpower. It has consistently brought me all the best gifts in my life. It has become such a integral part of my life, that I don’t even think of it as persistence or really anything. If there is a job to be done, then get it done. That is why when the farm work was completed yesterday at this location, I went to a different property and continued working, because there was . . . well, more work to be finished. That is one kind of persistence, yet there are other expressions, but they all same this same component - staying at it until the job gets done. It’s how our weekly communication piece gets done - for 28 years. It’s how you finish your doctoral studies and dissertation while working a full-time job in a foreign country. It’s how you speak multiple languages. It’s how you come to hold the senior position in your office. It’s how lunch gets put on the table decade after decade. It’s how you get the girl you have been chasing, the love of your life. It’s how you survive parenthood. It’s how you navigate elder care. It’s how you grow as a person, self-development is all about persistence.

It is also how you reach your goals, grow your portfolio, reap the rewards of your investments, and produce value over the course of your life. It’s how you find what you need and get what you pursue. It is how you and I make progress in all that we aim for and strive to achieve. Persistence is your friend and superpower. Stay at it, chip away at it, keep nibbling at it, continue chewing on it, and every tree will fall to your will in the end.

Competing with chaos

# Chapter 326

Where is your focus? Not just the target of your focus, but the power of your focus? Why can you read or play games or listen to music while there is chaos going on around you, but you can’t think and process? I would argue that you can, but at a reduced efficiency. There are fundamental differences in reading, games and music, than there is in thinking. Thinking requires consecutive thought processing and the more inputs you have going on around you, i.e. chaos, then the less possible your speed and depth and quality of thinking.

And the less accustom you are to the inputs assaulting you, the more difficult they are to block out and work through. My wife and I don’t have any televisions in the house. We never listen to this particular intruder. My dad listens to the TV at his house and loudly. The net result on me is that I think I would do better standing in the middle of the interstate highway with all those fast cars whipping around me, than I can do deep working while competing against the television, especially these news casts! Alone time here at my dad’s is nonexistent unless you are in the bathroom, so there isn’t really another time frame that would be better than any other. You can find your focus though, reduced it may be, through sheer willpower and pushing through the noise. There is always noise in the world, and yes certain noises are more powerful and intrusive than others, but keep our forward motion and we will make progress.

The coffee is almost ready

# Chapter 325

Coffee is almost ready, and I am more than ready for it. When I was a kid, my thought was “how can something that smells so good taste so bad?” Fast forward 50 years and I don’t know how to live without it. That is not something I am proud of, but I am trying to face it head on and enjoy the ride. One of the most fascinating parts of my coffee ride was when Brenda and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean for our 30-32 anniversaries. Here is a ship, with 5000 people on it, for a week in the Gulf, and there was practically zero coffee available on board. I mean real coffee, we aren’t talking Folgers here. The two tiny coffee shops that were onboard, always had long lines and long waits. It certainly had me scratching my head, and as well had me struggling to avoid a caffeine headache.

I have moved on an Aeropress mode of making coffee, and I have a mobile version that I can take anywhere and do. The cruise was a blind spot for me, because I expected a boat filled with Westerners would be flush with coffee options. Wrong assumption. Now I cover my bases better, and make sure that I have a coffee options. Everything just goes better when it starts with coffee at the beginning and middle of the day. I literally have three coffee grinders, and three French presses, one at every locale I spend a lot of time at. I am so thankful that I have access to good coffee and that there are varieties available to me that I can enjoy every day. Its a great blessing.

Where am I?

# Chapter 324

Sleep so deep that you don’t know where you are when you wake up. While I am not a fan of waking up and not knowing where I am, for that kind of sleep I would be willing to do it. Every. Night. There are far too few nights like that. Most of the time we aren’t physically tired enough, too emotionally cranked up, too mentally grinding and too scheduled to even get close to this kind of sleep. However, after the day I had yesterday I was just so physically beat up and tired that I collapsed into bed and I am pretty sure that I did not move for the first six hours I was lying there, since I woke up the the exact same position I laid down in. Got up and took care of the necessary and went right back to bed and slept three more hours.

The speed of my brain when I wake up from a sleep like that, is so much faster and energetic than most mornings, and mornings are already my best time of the day. Harnessing that speed and energy are the challenge, to get more than just feel good benefit out of it. Since it happens so rarely, and since it happened at my dad’s house, its too rare and noisy here to figure out the leverage point. But it is wonderful to report that I had that kind of sleep last night. Rest rest rest is what your body is longing for and only you can create the situation where it might get it.

Early grave or rest rest rest?

# Chapter 323

Rest rest rest was what my body and mind were calling for, but in a world where only overclocked schedules and overworked people are admired, rest gets pushed to the side and is constantly undervalued. Granted only in a weird moment of time, where I could slide in between a canceled weekend with a client, and Brenda being half way across the USA at a funeral (i.e. no grandkids here), that I could have these 2.5 days of rest rest rest. Hopefully you will not require such extreme morbid synergy of canceled meetings and far flung funerals to get your rest rest rest, but I fear you may. All the reading that crosses my virtual desk states that we are the most sleep deprived, vacation adverse, nation on earth. This is not good.

Not only that, I am in my 60’s now and taking care of myself has never been more important. Unless I want to spend the third third of my life in a wheelchair, nursing home or in chronic pain, my aging body demands I make it a priority. This means feeding it very little by American standards, and exercising it super often by American standards. Mobility is the key to independent living and we all want that more than anything. Of course in our fantasy retirement, we all want to be robust and healthy and strong and powerful and painfree until the very end of life in this body. Few ever have that experience from what I can see and read and observe. Most sabotage themselves into early painful graves. So rest rest rest or early painful grave, which approach do you want to cultivate in your life?

Margins

# Chapter 322

That peace and quiet I was mentioning yesterday? Well I finished it up with nine hours of sleep last night and woke up feeling like a new person. A little sore and stiff from the very physical day, but overall, great. This is what I want you to have. Balance. This peace and quiet has never been more needed in my life as I am heading back down to elder care world in a couple of days. The instant transitions from grandchild care world to elder care world right back to grandchild care world, have been weighing on me a great deal. These few days have given me a respite, a rebalancing, a third space to think and be, as well as some space to do. Make some coffee, do some writing, do some thinking, change some trajectories, reassess some directions, adjust others.

We all have limited time and limited days and lets be honest, limited lives. I guess you can side-hustle yourself into an early grave, work yourself to death, busy yourself right into the funeral home, but do you really yearn for that? I think not. Instead don’t you yearn for the quiet and the peace I have been describing? Don’t you yearn for some extra sleep? Don’t you have a hankering for a down day? I know I do. I was so very overdue for a down day and still, I almost didn’t take it. Oh it was tempting me, but I almost didn’t take it because of all the competing agenda’s around me, because of all the tradeoff’s I was thinking that day was going to cost me, and I was so wrong. Planning these things and making this space in your life is much more difficult when you are feeling strong and healthy, much easier when you get desperate and miserable. Don’t wait that long, choose life now.

Peace and quiet - rare

# Chapter 321

A little peace and quiet? It doesn’t happen often in my world and I bet it doesn’t happen in your world very much either. Our house is generally chaos and a party all thrown into one 24/7. So a few days of alone time is very rare. Not answering the phone, not even looking at the phone and am physically separated from it as well. This is very necessary if real peace and quiet is going to happen in your life ever. Yes I am writing on the computer, peace and quiet don’t mean I stopped thinking nor that I want to record what I have been thinking about. But I am sitting in my back yard, having a cigar and a sparkling water and where there is no noise and no grandkids and no wife and no conversation and no elder care today.

It is on a day like this that you can think about meaning, you can think about what matters, you can think about the legacy that you wish to leave behind, the life that you want to live today, the trip you want to take at Christmas, the nature and results of your life effort’s, your music and your next band gig, or forming your band, or getting a massage, or funeral that is happening half way across the country that led to you having this moment of quiet and peace, or the bed you are going to sleep in tonight, or the week you just had, or the communion you have with your god, or the just the stillness of this moment. In other words, you can think for a change. A little peace and quiet can go a long way toward important things.

What kind of neighbor are you?

# Chapter 320

People are what make the difference. It is coming up on the two year anniversary of Gene’s death, the man who owned this house before us, and his brother and sister-in-law live right across the street from us and they are processing that event and that life again in a heavy fashion right now. It led to an impromptu couple of hours of hanging out in the back yard, eating strawberry short cake, reminiscing about how they sold us this house and talking about what kind of neighbors we are - evidently we are the good kind.

As I sit here and think about what kind of neighbor we are, I am trying to figure out what exactly makes us good neighbors in these dear people’s minds?? Is it our willingness to help when they are doing something? Is it our thankfulness for their kindnesses? Is it actually how little we disturb them?? Is it the fact that we fed them when they had COVID? Is it that we took care of their critters when they were out of town? Perhaps that Brenda made her killer brownies and we took them over there? Is it that we keep the yard nice and they have an enjoyable visual experience out their windows?

They sold us the house at a loss. The deal was off market and quiet. They gave us all the furniture that their brother had, which was incredible from our perspective because we didn’t have any furniture, just a couple of suitcases of stuff since we were moving from Eastern Europe to the American Northeast, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. Whatever the reasons, people make the difference, of that I am sure. What do your neighbors think about you?

Amazing people

# Chapter 319

What an amazing infrastructure we have here in the USA. We have our garbage and our recycling picked up at our house. There are fire trucks and ambulances and police and these folks actually know what they are doing, not just in these positions because they have some connection with someone who does the hiring. Roads so smooth down South as to be made out of glass. Crops growing for mile after mile after mile in the Midwest. A technology corridor out West that is second to none. Groceries deliver to our nearby stores, supplies for our homes, and all the things we could want or need, delivered to our homes or nearby. But this is not all that important, other countries have also done this as well or better than we do.

But then there are the Pancho’s in the world of the USA. A Good Samaritan who turned around and came back to help us this week when we blew out a tire on the trailer and had no tools to get it off or change it. Brad who helped change a difficult part on the motorcycle. Kerry who is willing to help out in any way and regularly brings groceries to feed all our grandkids. Kimmy who made sure the plumbing was repaired yesterday. Steven who made certain that we got the tires we needed, and then proceeded to help change them. Jake who makes a late night airport run because he doesn’t want me to drive at night. These people, the us, are who really make America great. The infrastructure is nice, but the people are amazing.

What does home feel like?

# Chapter 318

Almost I feel like an American again. After 28 months of living here pretty much full time, its starting to feel . . . normal. I am neither sad nor proud of that statement, just glad to not feel like a fish in the wrong tank for the longest spell of time. For the last 28 years, American has kinda been like Disneyland. A quick visit, hit the highlights, maximize the fun, shop till you drop, ride the rides, spend some focused time with family, catch a few shows and then back to home again, wherever that may have been in the world. Even furloughs were just one big Disneyland trip. To actually feel like an American again, is a seismic shift in my internal landscape, in my understanding of how I see myself and my place in the world, in my psyche, in my id, in my innermost being, something is breaking free and taking a new shape.

If you have not lived for decades in a foreign country and spoke another language and have experienced different politics and police states, and have been the foreigner for every moment of those decades, then you think I am probably crazy and going mad. But if you are a person who has done any of those things listed in the sentence above, then the process I have been describing makes perfect sense, even if I am describing it poorly. This internal transformation is painful and slow, and very necessary. But I have less patience with myself coming BACK to something than I do, when I am going to some entirely new place. This has to become our home again, because it is now our home.