Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”

The word of the year this year is “get to”: Everything I do, I get to do. (Hat tip: Ethan.)

Inspired by part of this interview with Lisa Silvestri, the author of Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change, which I may read soonish with my friend Neill—after I finish:

• Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),
• parts of Stricken by God?, another of Neill’s recommendations after he read my essay about the Cross, and
• Watchmen, recommended to me by both my son and my wife—

here is a list of what bothers me:

• barriers to walkability,
• the predominance of solo, receptive, junky entertainment,
• words whose poor definitional boundaries cause moral problems,
• faulty exegesis,
• parroting, and
• roadkill.

I cannot reliably control my circumstances. I cannot at all control other people. But I can control my (current) self. Herein lies happiness.

A truism, perhaps. But one worth repeating, especially to someone like myself who scores, mostly to his chagrin, as an 8 on the Enneagram.

Proverbs so often puts the locus of wisdom on what we say.

Kitchen towels are much more effective at soaking up water if, instead of constantly moving them around, you let them rest. My attention is a kitchen towel.

I don’t feel at work the stress I feel at home, where stress accompanies not only the drive to get things done, but even the desire for recreation!

Why the difference? I’m not certain. But my surmises are several:

• For one, I’m explicitly working for other people. That relieves me of the kind of internal pressure I feel when I’m working on my own stuff.
• It also helps that those other people for whom I’m working are trustworthy and trust me. That means I basically have liberty to do as I please.
• I have liberty to do as I please as long as I color within the lines a distinct mission: To maximize the security, resilience, utility, and accessibility of DiamondBack’s information. That unity of purpose helps.
• Finally, five days a week I enjoy eight-hour expanses of time in which do the work.
• Oh, and I’ve largely managed to avoid working under deadlines.

Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :

• I can view myself as explicitly working for God.
• God is trustworthy and trusts me to do as I please.
• The unity of purpose is easy to identify: The great commandments.
• As for time: Why so serious? What’s the rush? All of life is a gift.

From that last point, maybe the shorthand of it all is to feel that I get to do all the things: Whether I’ve actively decided to do something or that something is decided for me, it is all gratuity. Even adversity stimulates thought and the growth of wisdom and resilience. That’s how I feel at work. (How fortunate is that?) May I bring that feeling to bear in the rest of my life.

I tend to hold in tension my intentions with your own ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Crosby, Stills, and gnashing of teeth
Wanna keep the young away
It’s not that I don’t wanna fight no more,
It’s just that I had a bad day. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.

Familiarity breeds laxity.

By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.

I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.

Goodbye, Facebook. “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”? Ha. I should have shut down my account five years ago.

Today was the first day I had “If reading a book, read the book” on my to-do list. It appears at 5 PM instead of at the beginning of the day so I’m not prompted to read a book over lunch, which is always a matter of divided attention and never long enough to give the book the time it needs to actually enter my mind and be fully enjoyed. I’ll read articles over lunch when I’m eating alone, sure. But sometimes I even question that, wondering whether the time might be better spent fully enjoying my food or allowing my mind to wander.

Anyway, I just dedicated all my attention to reading a mere half a chapter of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper. My reading pleasure in doing so, was, like triple that when I was reading the same book while also eating. This is the way.

Have the folks at Google been trying to sell you a storage subscription because your Google account storage is running full? Is your Gmail the primary taker upper of space? Worry no more! They have provided an alternative solution free of charge: Open a second Google account and then follow the Get only old messages instructions here to effectively turn the second account into an archival repository.

Then delete your wayback emails, now safely archived elsewhere, from the original account by:

1. searching for all your messages from before a date (e.g., mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/before:2014),
2. ticking the checkbox column header at top left of the table to select all messages in view,
3. clicking Select all conversations that match this search to go beyond just the messages in view, and
4. clicking Delete.

The import process will take several days. Once it’s complete, you’ll want to disconnect the new account from the old one so the new one doesn’t become a second account whose storage space you have to worry about.

I can’t sleep at night.
Why?
It’s the problem of the heels.
I can’t win this fight.
Why?
It wasn’t part of the deal.

All I want is to feel the same
We could be walking on the ocean
But something’s always wrong ✏️ 🎤 🎵

I’ve gotta get a hold on my face ✏️ 🎤 🎵

I do wonder whether my having become a lighter sleeper has something to do with me working in our basement and thus having less exposure to natural light.

My ideal workstation is in something like a climate-controlled, outdoor telephone booth:

Geez, Steve
We’re gonna need you to leave
We’re just trying get some work done
 
Please, Steve
Don’t act so bereaved
Can’t you see we’re working under the gun? ✏️ 🎤 🎵

percentage of adult household members holding a full-time job ∝ (frequency of dinner guests hosted by that household)^-1

Uncommitted time I anticipate with pleasure, but planned time I often anticipate with a low level of discontent, even if it’s time I planned for pleasure. Why is that?

[edit, 8/13/24]: I think it’s planned social time that evokes the mild discontent—and I think it’s because I still hold an idolatrous candle for solo productive time. After all these years, GTD is still my god. Sigh.

Switching costs and triskaidekaphobia be damned: We ought to ditch the Gregorian calendar and replace it with a this (Scotian?) alternative:

• thirteen months of the exact same 28-day length,
• New Year’s Day as its own intercalary one-day week, and
• every leap year, a two-day New Year’s Week.

Accountants would be happy about this. Computer code would be simpler. And no one would have to remember “Thirty Days Hath September” any more.

Productivity slash peace of mind hack #372: Use a custom stylesheet to hide all but the first item in any list on the web version of the to-do list app I use. Now the endless to-do list, so important to this man’s reliable participation in modern life but sometimes so very peace-ruffling by its sheer volume, presents itself to me just one task at a time.

Dr. Seuss should’ve entitled it Oh, the Mistakes You’ll Make!

Today I am taking Focus up a notch: For 100% of day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night—I am allowing zero Messages and WhatsApp notifications to come through from anyone other than my immediate family, people with whom I have appointments in the next two days and, during the workday, my workmates. I am coupling this with a morning clearing and an evening clearing, rendering how I handle my instant messages more like how I handle my email. This experiment will last either forever or until I observe it’s unloving.

So folks will still get text replies from me twice a day. If that’s not fast enough and they need my attention more urgently, let them place a good, old-fashioned phone call. It’ll be like time travel back to 1993 (minus the coiled cords and dial tones)!