Walking The Walk . . .

I have two friends, and recently I realized they live in very different places.  They are close in age.  Similar backgrounds.  Grew up in the same area.  But they live in very different places.  One of my friends lives in the future, and the other lives in the past. We think a lot about where we live . . . on a map.  We live on this particular street, in this particular state, in this particular region, and that means we enjoy (or don't enjoy) this kind of weather, and we support this particular baseball team, etc.  But we spend as much time in our heads as we do in our environments.  Where we live mentally is just as important as where we live physically. I noticed this recently with a friend of mine.  He lives very much in the past.  He still listens to the same music he did when he was sixteen.  He still talks about what he did when he was sixteen.  He relives stories about when he was sixteen.  His worldview is very much rooted in the past.  When he's driving down the stree

Have you ever seen so much virtue signaling as we have today? You see it on social media. You see it on t-shirts. You see it on the bumpers of people's cars. People proudly announcing they are against hate.  They are against racism.  They are against oppression.  They are against censorship.  It gets a little silly sometimes, because I'm not always clear who they think are FOR any of these things they are so loudly and proudly against.  But you can be sure that whenever a new social or political issue comes along, here come all the changed profile pictures and a wave of memes . . . that inevitable wave of public virtue signaling so that everyone knows what a great person we are.  In the end, words don't matter very much--it's actions that matter. Words are easy things. How you live your life should reflect your values.  It's how you treat other people that shows the kind of person you are. It's how you react and interact in the world that demonstrates what you&#

The idea of retirement, like for many people I suspect, has really kept me going through some of the more difficult periods of my professional career.  The idea of staying home, and puttering around the house, and fishing when I want to.  Wouldn't that be great!  All those ideas are very appealing, and I know if I just keep going ,one day I'll get there and all that struggle will have been worth it. I thought that until I started getting closer to the date when I can retire.  The closer I get, the less appealing the idea of retirement becomes.  I don't have to retire, but the only thing less appealing to me than retiring is the idea of continuing to work at what I do now.  I enjoy my job, but I want to do something more meaningful before I head out to pasture.  I went to lunch a few years ago with a friend of mine that was coming to the same realization . . . he didn't want to retire, but he didn't want to do the same thing either.  He asked me, "if you could d

My family enjoys doing puzzles--especially in the winter.  We have a big dining room table, and we clear it off and go to work on the most recent acquisition. Now there is one disadvantage of having a bit dopey chocolate lab--if it hits the floor, it belongs to Daisy.  And if you're doing a puzzle, and you don't happen to notice a piece has gone off the edge, you'll most likely never see it again.   It's very unsatisfying to get to the end of a puzzle and discover you have a few pieces missing--especially if it's a big 1,000 piece puzzle you've worked on a few evenings. The more time and effort you've invested, the more those incomplete parts seem to bother us.  Daisy Life is like that, too.  Sometimes we fail to see the big picture.  We fail to see that we have 99.9% of the big picture complete, and instead of enjoying that part, we tend to obsess over those missing pieces in our life.  And too often, we try and find something to fill those gaps ourselves,