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Tonight I will be attending a basketball game at Purdue University.  The Fearless Purdue Boilermakers will be playing the Mighty Fighting Illini of Illinois University.  I usually watch the Purdue games on tv.  Tonight however I will be in person.  It is cool I get to go with my father to this game.  Seeing a sporting event in person is just different than watching it on TV.  I am grateful that tonight I get to witness the events live for a change.

I was watching the local news last night and there was a lot of talk about a coming winter storm.  They talked about the coming ice and snow.  They talked about how this would make conditions on the roads dangerous.  We were told to prepare if preparing was our kind of thing to do.  The storm was supposed to hit us overnight.  I woke up and the storm did not in fact hit.  I am grateful there was no large winter storm last night.

I am mostly grateful that the storms we are warned about rarely actually hit.  I am starting to realize and believe that much of the impending doom, storms or otherwise, is rarely impending.  I am grateful to have realized that.  Some people go around thinking the coming storm is always going to come.  That is a lot of weight to carry with a person I think.  Carrying the weight of everything that might happen is a great weight to carry.

Sometimes the storm does hit.  Until it hits I find little need to carry the weight of the storm with me.  I have storm supplies ready, but I don’t worry or give this impending doom much thought.  I am good at this with storms.  I should be better with this with all the other impending dooms that I allow to add weight to my life.  Things happen and then we react, there is little reason to worry about things that might happen.  We would all be dead 10 times over if all the impending dooms out there actually hit us.  Impending doom is everywhere but really it rarely hits us, or hits us hard.  Anyways I am grateful it didn’t storm last night and ruin any of my plans.

We spend a lot of time passing through places.  We pass through the store.  We pass through the subway station.  We spend enough time in these pass-through places that what happens in these places starts to impact our lives.  The people we interact with in these places start to become more than just a stranger.  We start to have a context and ongoing dialogue with the people in these places.  We start to have the lightest of relationships.  I spend so much time in the library I am starting to have this kind of relationship with many of the people that work there.  I am grateful for this kind of relationship I have with my library friends, these friendships are just a cool thing in my life.

Every day I hangout at the library I am greeted by these friends.  We chat a minute or two and then we go on with our days.  I don’t know much about some of these folks, we just chat a little bit.  I don’t know most of their last names.  I don’t know much about their lives, and I haven’t told them anything much about mine.  We exchange a few greetings and that is it most of the time.  These interactions are not profound, they are not deep, but they are just nice.

Having places we go that we know people will be nice and greet us with a smile, that is a beautiful thing.  I think our library friends, our grocery store friends, our gym friends, these people and relationships are what helps hold a community together.  These friendships make our value of life better. In fact when you think about it, we see these friends more than the oldest and best of our friends.  These friendships are more tinsel on the Christmas tree, and every tree needs more shine.

Taking time to work on our minds, and our states of being is important.  Our “mental game’ is important in pursuing success.  This preparation and mental maintenance can take many forms.  A practice that is used by many people is meditation.  It has been used with great success for centuries to help people manage and develop their minds.  I have discovered it and been using it myself from time to time in my life.  I am grateful that it is easy to do, and that it can come in many forms. 

Most of my true meditation has come from using the Calm app.  I mostly just follow the guided mediations they offer for free there.  I started out doing it fairly frequently.  It seemed to help me with some things.  It helped me better manage my own thoughts better.  By better managing my thoughts I was able to help get over some rage that was bubbling under the surface a lot of the time.  I am much more calm after having done some of this meditation.  These qualities have seem to maintain themselves even though I don’t meditate often anymore.  Even though I don’t sit down and meditate often I still do things that have meditative qualities to them.

Many things seem to have some meditative like qualities and benefits to them.  Going for long walks clears the mind and does some of the same things for me.  Working out hard does the same thing, you must be very focused to lift a heady weight or you could become very injured.  That is very much like a focused meditation in my opinion.  Even things like cooking and chess can give me something resembling a meditative boost.  It is cool that I can get that kind of meditative “bump” from lots of places.

This bump is what I want from my meditation sessions.  I just want things to be a little better.  I want to think a bit clearer and have a bit more energy, that is about all I want from this practice.  I am happy I can get this bump in a lot of ways.  A guru might tell you something different, but if something works, and it helps, well I’m going to keep doing it.

Yesterday I drove to the library the other day for another day of camping out in the corners and writing.  As I pulled up, there was water everywhere and lots of big trucks in the streets.  Perhaps the library would not be a good place to campout today.  Being a human, access to things like water, restrooms, and other fluid delivery and removal systems are important.  I would have no such things at the library that day, the library was not the place to set up camp.  I would have nowhere to work from on this day.  I would be forced to stare blankly into space at home until the next day.  Today I am thankful for broken water mains and surprise days off.

This broken water main was like an adult version of a snow day.  Working from home is problematic at best for me.  I hangout in the library and do my work because of this.  However this day, it wasn’t much of an option.  I got a day off, and I got rest. 

Rest is such an important thing and I am really bad at it.  This day forced me to just throttle back and hangout.  I got some rest in the afternoon.  I got a good walk in at the park.  I went to bed very early because I wasn’t wound up from grinding away on a computer.  I got some rest I needed, all because a water main broke.  This day off just dropped into my lap.

I am grateful for all the times that God drops some good things into our laps.  Sometimes he drops good things into our laps and we would be much happier and wiser to accept these things.  Yesterday I needed a day to rest and replenish.  God dropped me such a day into my lap and I went with it.  Sometimes he drops things into our laps that we could use, and well we get mad.  We get made because OUR plan changed, well I suppose we could run with God’s plan instead.  This seems like the wise happy path. 

Having things like a job and a career are a good thing.  We all need money to buy the things we need to survive.  I suppose there are other options available to societies.  This is however not a treatise on possible government, economic and social systems.  Having a job is important for more things than money too.  It is a good way to contribute a little bit to society and have some utility.  There are really only two ways to have a job, have someone give you a job or create your own.  I’m grateful that I live in the United States and can start a business and make my own job anytime I want.

Being able to start a business on a whim, that’s a cool thing Americans get to do.  In some countries it is far harder legally to do such things.  There can be a lot of legal paperwork that makes the process hard.  In other countries its just not really allowed for some people.  In the United States, anyone really can do it at any time. I have started businesses before and will start more again I’m sure, because it’s a path that suits me.  It’s so awesome that I have that option to give things a try.  It’s nice that its easy to take a shot at a better life and start down an entrepreneurial path.

It is easy to start down this path, but its hard to stay on this path.  It’s easy to start a business, but its hard to make a profitable one.  Still this is relatively easy here in the United States.  There are all sorts of groups and organizations that will help you start and run a business.  A lot of this help is also for free.  It’s good to have help, that help allows you to focus more on building a good business.

The ability to focus on building a good business, that’s an amazing ability to have.  That’s one of the cool things our systems in the United States give us.  We can start businesses without too much hassle and then focus on the business not excessive paperwork, rules and regulations.  It’s great our system in this country allows for this kind of focus.  I wonder why we can’t make other part of our society similarly “easy” for people, and let them focus on what is most important.

2018 was a year of great changes, and 2019 continued those changes.  My life took on some fundamental shifts.  Some of these shifts were good, some were bad, but they all really shifted my thinking, behavior and lifestyle.  One big shift I am grateful I made is the fact that I started going deeper on my writing.

Writing has really proven to something I feel suited to.  At least I feel like the exercise of writing is something I am suited to.  I greatly enjoy the opportunity writing gives me to formulate thoughts.  I’ve always believed in writing to find ideas, not because you have ideas.  Writing is about the discovery of ideas for me.  The deeper I write the more interesting my ideas seem to be.  I wrote a book in 2019, and that really pulled me deep thinking in a way I haven’t done before.  I feel as though writing is a journey into the deep water.

Journeys into the deep waters is something I need in my life right now.  I am so grateful I can get there through writing.  I have been unemployed for a long time now.  Writing keeps my mind sharp, without it I would be in trouble.  I am so happy I have found a tool that allows me sharpen myself regardless of what jobs I have or how much money I have.  I can always write.  If I had to do it with a pen and paper, I could still do it.  I am grateful to find something that is so personally rewarding that really cannot be taken from me.  For me writing satisfies deep things within me that I have long let lay dormant.  I am glad I took the time to go out on the limb and give “being a writer” a try.

I could stand to try many similar things.  I think writing is part of the answer to many questions I have about life right now.  There may be more answers out there, that just need to be tried.  Writing is just the first steps to me.  For now I am a writer of simple thoughts and that is a good thing.

There are times in life you find things that make you much happier than they should.  I like to call this irrational happiness.  These could be things like a TV commercial that make you laugh loudly, let’s face it a commercial can’t be that funny.  I am grateful that we can have this response to certain things.  I am grateful for the joy new office supplies and back to school shopping brings me. 

I can get really excited about having new office supplies to work with.  Post it notes, good pens, notebooks are what really get me going.  Notebooks are really the best thing ever.  I want them all, every shape, size, rule of lines, no lines.  I can do the fanboy thing over notebooks.  They really don’t even have to be good notebooks.  I like the free notepads you get at a meeting, those are cool and free, so you can just destroy them with notes and writing.  I love cheap notebooks, I leave them laying around everywhere to jot things down in.  Back to school time is a fun time for a notebook aficionado.  If you hit the store at the right time, you can get them so cheap, and in so many varieties.  How can someone not love this? 

Actually I do understand how people don’t love notebooks.  They are a tool and in all reality not a very exciting tool.  To me though, they are a fun tool, and I cannot tell you why.  I am happy every time I get a new little notebook to jot into.  I’m grateful its not always the big things that can light the fires, sometimes it’s a new notebook.

I can be a weird dude.  I get really excited about things other people don’t, like Star Wars and good cheeses.  I am 100% comfortable sitting in a movie theatre alone.  I just am cool with doing things a bit different than your average dude.  The average path in life is a good path, I just don’t fit on that path.  In many ways I am grateful I have chosen and been given a weird path through life. 

I think my path has been part choice and part nudging from God.  Things have turned out bizarrely time and time again for me.  I don’t understand it, I think at this point in life I don’t care if I understand all of it.  Everyone has weird events and weird tendencies in their personalities.  It feels like I am starting to collect a few more weirdnesses than what is normal.  At first this weird path was hard to walk, but now I just let the weirdness flow through and around me.  I could not imagine walking a normal path, this weird path brings too many gifts.

This weird path has given me so many gifts, so many I am still learning what some of them mean.  The biggest gift of taking an odd path for me is that I am starting to see things differently than other people.  My life is not what someone would design for themselves, its not what I would have designed.  Going where I have and doing what I’ve done I just can’t view life with the same lens anymore.  I think this gives me a great potential to create some cool things.  I believe its easier for weirdos to create cool things than normal.  So I’m leaning into the weird.  I hope that this path leads somewhere cool, I’m not far enough down it to really know yet.

I hope all this weird I am living with moves me somewhere good.  I know this different mindset I have now is useful, so I must just use it.  Weird is a good thing.  Doing the normal thing at every turn, well that is boring.  I am not that weird.  I am just glad I’m not the average dude.