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1989. I was being courted by a business owner looking for new, fresh leadership. The business was located where Rhonda and I most wanted to be, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas. The kids were in elementary school. Early elementary school. Life had been hectic for the previous 3 years. Situations had changed that were beyond our control – things that we didn’t feel were favorable for training and raising our children. So, we took our aim for Texas – DFW. It was Rhonda’s home and we were familiar with it.

Among our reasons – and in this order – church. Spiritual reasons were at the very top of our list. Next, the kids. Where did we feel we could give them the best advantages spiritually, educationally, personally (future spouses), and careerwise? DFW checked all the boxes for us when we began to strategize ways to accomplish this goal. That was somewhere around 1987. It took me a few years to pull it all together. By the end of 1989 I had started the process. By the end of the school year, May 1990, we had made the transition.

Sometimes it takes awhile. Our goals – what I now call “our ideal outcome” – don’t always happen as quickly as we’d like. This ideal outcome was one we had time to carefully consider and plan for. There were days we questioned if it might happen. Mostly, it took over 2 years before I was given the opportunity to make it a reality.

That was then. This is now.

In 2018 another life situation provoked Rhonda and I to ask, “Now what?” The clarity we experienced in 1987 didn’t happen this time. It would come much more slowly, like the slow turn of a focus knob on a telescope. In fact, it took a couple of years – not for the opportunity, but for us to even figure out what we might want. “What is our ideal outcome?” was the question we wrestled with. And it was anything but easy or clearcut. Not like life back in 1987. That focus came faster for us. The decision was more easily made beforehand back then because the path seemed evident to us. Not this time.

But this time was different. This was a gut punch. Back in the 1980s it was more of a slow burn. Our knees weren’t buckled in the 80s. This time, they were. And that takes more time. To catch your breath. To get back on your feet. Besides, things were well beyond our control mostly so we were having to figure things out in real-time. Deciding how you’ll react – asking yourself how you can make the wisest choices – can take time.

When the stakes are high we felt we needed to get it right the first time. There may not be an opportunity to correct it. You don’t know.

For me, the barometer has always been regret. Will I regret doing this? Will I regret not doing this?

Back in 1987 I knew – Rhonda did, too – that we would regret staying where we were. We had to make a move. For the welfare of our children. But I admit I hated that we had to do it. It was a move I wished we wouldn’t have had to make. It was a sad decision because of what once was – and what could have been. But life does that to us. Throws us curveballs that we must figure out how to hit.

Today, things are different. There is no sadness. I’m not romantic or sentimental about what once was or what could have been. I’m just ready. Ready to move on. Ready to grow. Ready to embrace a new chapter – our encore chapter.

By 2020 our focus was clear. So much so, that by the end of 2021 we had put our money where our mouth and our fantasies were. We bought a piece of property in a place that had captured our heart. A place of solitude. Respite. It was likely because when our knees buckled it was the place we went to sort things out. That was our first encounter with the place. Maybe that made it more special. I don’t know, but I do know we found it beautiful. And the closeness of the community, the diversity of the positives (trails, lakes, creeks, trees, wildlife, golf courses, mountains and more) was appealing.

It only had one downside.

It wasn’t in DFW. And DFW is where our entire tribe was thanks to our decision back in 1987 (and the execution of that decision in 1990).

Grandkids didn’t exist back then. Now we had five.

Lots of things had changed. Many of them blessings. Some of them curses. But the tribe was all blessing, all the time. But…

We weren’t (aren’t) prepared to leave the tribe and our happy place is only 5 hours away…so it made sense to us, in the short-term to spend time in each place. The plan was to spend way more time in Texas than in Happy Serene Village, five hours away. We figured we’d get over to HSV (Happy Serene Village) 3 or 4 times over the 12 month transition.

What transition? Transitioning from what to what? Or from where to where?

That’s the rub. We’re navigating a number of transitions.

Transition 1: Selling a house we’ve been in for 25 years and moving to a new place.

Transition 2: Buying another house in Happy Serene Village and spending more time there.

Transition 3: Creating new career chapters – both of us – as we march toward hitting full-retirement age for Social Security.

They’re all pretty big and they’re all intertwined. There are many moving parts to our life right now. Frightening and exciting.

Being open to opportunities has always been our way of life – just like cash flowing life. Sometimes we’ve been more open to them than at other times. Determined mostly by our comfort level or lack of. Whenever we’ve been most comfortable, we’ve been much less open. That is, when things are going well, we’re not real open for opportunities. Why mess up a good thing, right?

But that’s the ideal time to more closely look for opportunities. Strike while the iron is hot and all that. Doesn’t it make sense that our optimum time to see and jump on opportunities is when we’re riding high? But that’s not how it usually goes. Comfort forms around us like a Tempur-Pedic mattress, enveloping us so strongly it paralyzes us from doing anything different. It just feels too good to stay put. Mostly, that’s what we do – we stay put – when the better option might be to seize even bigger opportunities. After all, we say it ’cause it’s true – the rich get richer. That happens because they tend to get more opportunities, but they have to take advantage of them. Hum.

This impacts The Yellow Studio because the original is now gone. No longer in my possession. But now, here we were mere days away from signing the paperwork to sell the house, which included The Yellow Studio. We had no thought of buying a house or any other property. Moving was on our mind. Enter months of a secret I’d been holding.

Sometime in the late fall a house in Happy Serene Village caught my attention. Initially, the curb appeal snagged it. It was a new house with an attractive front. And thus began the happy accident that we never saw coming. But we were open to it.

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It’s a digital age and I fully embrace it. But I still need paper in my printer.

Let’s ruminate on these and other urgent analog matters facing us in the digital age.

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Jo Marsh is the dreamer and a scribbler character in Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women. Here’s an observation about her life in the book.

“I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.”

 

It means making a change. Improving. Doing something differently. Doing different things.

Our unwillingness to make a change is detrimental to our life and everybody else influenced by us. It’s rebellion. And selfish.

My willingness is high. I wouldn’t describe myself as stubborn, but I do know I’m resolved about some things – mostly things in which I believe deeply. Beyond religious truths, there aren’t very many things that qualify because I have lived long enough to experience getting it wrong. Getting eternal things right is important because the stakes are so high.

Eternity changes everything.

Let’s consider what it means to avoid poison ivy and to turn over a new leaf.

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Computers have a clock speed.

The clock speed measures the number of cycles your CPU executes per second, measured in GHz (gigahertz). A “cycle” is technically a pulse synchronized by an internal oscillator, but for our purposes, they’re a basic unit that helps understand a CPU’s speed.

The higher the clock speed, the faster the computer. There are other factors, but depending on your computing – gaming, graphics, CAD, video rendering, and other intensive tasks – you’ll want the highest clock speed CPU you can afford.

Humans also have a clock speed. I’m not a neuroscientist so I have no idea if it can be measured, but you know it when you see it. We talk about how fast or slow somebody is. Some of us are fast at some things and slow at other things. Some of us are fast most of the time while others are slow most of the time.

Clock speed is evident in our walking pace, communication, handling adversity, facing opportunities, navigating new or strange situations, and just about everything else. Ben Shapiro has an extraordinarily high clock speed.

 

William Buckley had a high clock speed, too. It illustrates how clock speed isn’t merely gauged by how fast somebody talks. Like Shapiro, Buckley had a high clock speed intellectually.

 

 

We mere mortals definitely are operating at a slower clock speed than these guys. I’m not sure what, if anything, we could do to rise to their level.

Let’s think about our potential, our natural inclinations and upping our performance.

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There are about 9.84 BILLION search results for A.I. – which we mostly think stands for “artificial intelligence.” ChatGPT is the latest, greatest, coolest, trickest A.I. It is pretty spectacular. For mere mortals like me, I don’t know how A.I. improvement could even be measured, but I do know there’s a data gap that is a constraint. A.I. needs high-integrity data.

I’m intrigued by artificial intelligence, but I’m far more obsessed with a different A.I.

Always Improving

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”    ― William Faulkner

We all have default behaviors driven by default viewpoints or approaches to life. One of my major default behaviors spawns from a default viewpoint that things can always be better. Not in some, “let’s give it time and it’ll sort itself out” kind of a way – but in a “what can we do to improve this?” kind of a way. It’s how I see the world. It’s also how I see most things. It’s a default because I’m not consciously trying to do it…it’s more of an auto-pilot thing for me.

Years of self-introspection and self-examination taught me that I did a poor job of properly communicating this for too many years. The power of others – seeing how others view things – proved most helpful so I could see things more clearly. Through my eyes, it looks and feels like the never-ending quest for improvement based on my belief and optimism that just about anything can be made better! It hasn’t got anything to do with dissatisfaction necessarily – although I admit I can be dissatisfied with the status quo. It doesn’t look or feel critical to me either.

The most helpful thing to me was learning the power of personality traits, specifically my own personality traits. Part of my personality that drives my passion to ALWAYS IMPROVING is summed up in a phrase I’ve seen when studying about those of us who lean toward perceiving or judging.

Making Things as They Ought to Be

That typifies my life for as long as I can remember. The judgment comes in my view of how things ought to be – that’s where that perception comes in.

The contrasting personality trait tends to be more reactionary and flexible, taking things as they come. Their default behavior makes it harder for them to focus on one thing at a time.

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