I somehow sneezed up my shorts!

— Sullivan

Oh, that’s just dirt from earlier.

— Éa, coughing

Scott: What needs to happen for a bill to become law?
Éa: Oh, I know! The bill needs to sing a song! 🎵

When it comes time to make music, think: How is this love?

You only have so much time left with your kids in the house. Prioritize spending time with them. Make music with Éa!

Thought: For every proactive, special act of love I make toward my family (e.g., the Wynn postcard I just dropped at the concierge desk), make a proactive, special act of love toward an enemy.

How do I want something but not grow anxious at its delay, interruption, or incompletion? This question came to me in the form of “The trick is to want things without becoming anxious when I don’t get them” as soon as I got out of bed this morning. It’s this anxiety that has been producing grumpiness recently. Here’s how:

• patience,
• attentiveness,
• gratitude, and
• love for others.

EDIT (12/28): There’s one other thing I’ll need: refusal to watch television or movies designed for entertainment. (I’m looking at you, Hawkeye.) Try though I might to think otherwise, I view it as a waste of time. I have for twenty years. There’ll be no changing it.

Things I learned today:

• Orientation towards accomplishment and order is going to be hard to mix back into orientation toward people and whim.
• Local democracy is a lot of fun when it involves something you care about.
• Carla is clever and thoughtful.
• Buying presents for nephews and nieces is way fun (at least when you know what to give them).
• I’m eager to be done with the HRIS selection at work.

Things I learned yesterday:

• It is inadvisable to begin working out at 9 PM. Choose sleep over exercise every time.
• Graeme hates the Beatles.
• My “metanoiac” theory of the atonement, which I attempted to explain to Mark Troyer, has legs and probably ought to be written out.
• Wearing masks all day at work feels tiresome.
• The Christmas party at work has been canceled.

Carla’s comment about the killer “taking away [the] power“ of our main character in Secret Sunshine is illuminating for how things may have shifted since the days of Jesus: It used to be that the Pharisees could lord unforgiven-ness over people as a means of power, hence the importance of Jesus forgiving sins and—gasp!—authorizing scruffy Galileans, et al to do the same. But now, we’ve taken the requirement to forgive and turned it into an instrument for the maintenance of power. Ugh!

I’m living my life against the grain my heart. I’m hoping this realization is God answering my prayer that I do only what I see Him doing, that that’s all I want to do.

Overall, I’m spending too much time at my “helm,” that is, my computer workstation, thinking that the key to well-lived life resides somewhere in Remember the Milk, and not enough time resting and relating.

In my crosshairs as I turn toward changing my life are:

• counting beans (i.e., doing the monthly accounting),
• exercising on days when I climb, and
• time in my office in front of my computer doing things other than DiamondBack work.

Along those lines, here is what I propose:

1. I spend no more than one hour attempting to accomplish private, at-my-workstation tasks. I set a timer to facilitate keeping to that limit.
2. For exercise, I think all that I’m going to try for now is to (1) do my RDLs and perhaps squats at Climb Nittany when I have the opportunity and (2) be willing to shorten the routine on those same days.
3. Carla and I do the monthly accounting together.

“With” is the still the word of the week.

Carla told me as I spouted some of what I was learning from the Burkeman book that she suspected I don’t undertake things when I don’t think I’ll succeed at them. That’s something worth thinking about, perhaps.

My reflections on excerpts and quotations from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (2021) by Oliver Burkeman:

I think before I dive in to actual quotations, I should say that the main effect of this book on me is to solidify something I should have know: You can’t do everything you want. You won’t do everything you want. The sooner you get over that, the sooner you can move forward boldly with whatever you want to do, whether that’s oriented toward accomplishment or relationships or something else. (All in love, of course.) I think this takeaway would make the author happy.

And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get (31).

Gah, I’ve sure noticed that.

If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer vacations, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing. Indeed, it’s slide only from this position of...

“With.”

— God, in answer to another round of “What should I do?” or “How to decide what to do?”

“I only do what I see the Father doing.” Does that mean Jesus never masturbated?

Resolved: a solo screen sabbath from sundown Saturday through sundown Sunday.

Resolved: No weekend DiamondBack work unless it is explicitly required by logistics or by my supervisors.

In reply to a piece of email correspondence in which Ethan indicated an eagerness to incorporate “communion” into our weekly church schedule:

I’m not sure I’m game for the “every week” part yet myself, so let’s slow down on that and make sure to subject it to consensus. Part of my concern is procedural—ensure consensus for all such decisions—but part of my concern might also be personal: I maintain a tenuous sense of what His body being given and His blood being poured out “for [me]” even means.

Or maybe it’s not tenuous but feels that way because it’s substantially different from what I think most of us learned growing up, and I haven’t had much chance to share (and thus practice knowing) it. Maybe I’ll make it part of what I share when I tell the story of my life and the life of God in and around me.

“Died for us” and “died for our sins” are obviously crucial Jesus’ whole shebang. But I don’t want to establish a ritual around those concepts if I don’t have a firm grasp on what they...

If you find yourself upset about your inability to connect with your family and their penchant for gluing glowing rectangles to their hands or laps, don’t try to pry them away. Instead, charm them away by doing something with all your might à la the ceiling tiles in the Upper Room. It can something serious, something silly, something musical, something mundane, it can be something that you think will attract them or something that you think won’t. Just do it with all your might. Dancing. For the glory of the Lord. They’ll join you.

The important part for me in leisure is a deliberate decision to engage and stay engaged. “…do it with all your might…” Remember the lesson of the ceiling at the Upper Room.

What should leisure be? Creative contemplative, fun, generous, fascinating, playful, relational, involving the body. Two kinds: still and active.

What am I bad at? Deciding what specificlaly to do when it comes to leisure.

Why? Lack of practice.

How to solve? Practice.

Do you mean it’s going to take discipline? Yes.

When you’re in a place, do the things the place was made for. For instance, if you’re at a roller rink, go skating; don’t try to get things done on your computer, even if you can. If you’re at Highland Regional Park in Johnstown for Sullivan’s bike race, do bike race or park things; don’t try to get things done on your computer.

The nice thing about an airship is that you don’t need a garage.

— Sullivan

I double down when I’m wrong? Wait. When am I ever wrong?

— Éa