Five Stages in Personal Change, According to Podcaster

On one of his recent Mindset Mentor podcasts, personal development coach Rob Dial repeated a show I've heard before, but have felt to be one of his more significant and applicable topics: what makes people quit their goals.  I guess at this time a little more than a week after many people have started out with their New Year's resolutions, a large portion of them are having second thoughts about them...if not giving up altogether.  Citing Don Kelly and Daryl Connor, who first presented their Emotional Cycle of Change in 1979, Dial lays out the five stages in goal development:

1 Uninformed Optimism-great enthusiasm and misplaced confidence

2 Informed Pessimism-dawning awareness of the goal's difficulties

3 The Valley of Despair-discouragement and a feeling of futility  

  (Connor and Kelly have the 3rd stage as "Hopeful Realism"-also a bottoming out but with more optimism)

4 Informed Optimism-understanding that the goal is attainable with the means to attain it

5 Completion-the lack of ability has been replaced by incorporation into habit, becoming part of identity

I can look back into my past and see how I encountered the above different stages for various projects I've pursued. And since I've set about to structure some of my retirement with new projects, I know I will have to meet each stage as it comes.  Rob Dial suggests that, at that beginning stage, I spend some time and effort to ascertain exactly what it is that I want to achieve and why...this can be of supreme importance in not giving up when stages two and three come into play.  Dial's "Valley of Despair" makes more sense to me than Kelly and Connor's "Hopeful Realism"... then again you could just add the latter to the former and make it six stages instead of five. For me, personal projects are like adventures leading to other adventures...a lot of fun but also a lot of hard work, with failures along the way to be seen as outcomes I can learn from...

Medical Procedures Clarified, Optimistic about Future

This morning Melissa went with me to a long awaited appointment with my specialist regarding my health: an action plan for dealing with my prostate cancer, recently diagnosed.  It's medically classified as localized, and I chose surgery...that will happen in early March.  I am grateful to finally have a clear treatment course laid out before me, and as I had stated in an earlier article, I am at peace with the whole process and confident of a successful outcome, with a full, active lifestyle to follow recovery. And beforehand as well: I just signed up to run the Mary Andrews half-marathon in Hawthorne on this Sunday, January 19th...it's organized by the Florida Track Club and will be my third straight year running it.  Before this prostate issue arose, I had considered doing the full marathon, but decided for now to stick with the shorter distance, deferring any future marathon races until after I recover from surgery. In the meantime, life is good...

NFL First Round Games This Weekend

Yesterday the National Football League playoffs began with the wild card round.  For much of the end of the regular season, several teams struggled week-by-week to make the postseason playoffs and the few who squeaked in at the end I'm sure feel successful.  But then reality hits and they have to play much better teams once the playoffs begin.  Yesterday I saw two good opening round games in the American Conference: the Los Angeles Chargers at the Houston Texans and the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Baltimore Ravens.  Being from the Miami area, I tend to root for whichever...if any...Florida teams make the playoffs: this year only Tampa Bay qualified.  Beyond them, I have others I tend to support.  With Saturday's contests my traditional favorite has been Baltimore, and I was glad to see them prevail.  As for the other game, I've come to like Houston for their head coach DeMeco Ryans and their excellent young quarterback C.J. Stroud...the Texans unexpectedly turned some big plays into a decisive win as well.  Today it's Denver at Buffalo, Green Bay at Philadelphia, and Washington at "my" Tampa Bay.  Monday night has Minnesota "at" the Los Angeles Rams, that game moved to Glendale, Arizona because of the LA-area wildfires.  Detroit and Kansas City received byes this week due to them having the best regular season records in their respective conferences.  At this juncture I like to think about possible intriguing Super Bowl matchups.  Let's see, of the 12 remaining teams, we have Detroit, Minnesota, Houston and Buffalo never having won a Super Bowl, and among them Detroit and Houston have yet to even get to play in one.  So any games involving the assurance of a "first" Super Bowl win is very interesting...I see the most likely scenario here being Buffalo vs. Detroit or Minnesota.  Then we have old title game rematch possibilities: Green Bay vs. Denver, Tampa Bay vs. Kansas City, Philadelphia vs. Kansas City, Buffalo vs. Washington, Minnesota vs. Kansas City, Green Bay vs. Kansas City...quite a few.  Let's see, where do the remaining teams rank according to my liking and to their likelihood of winning it all (two very different lists)?

MY LIKING:

1 Tampa Bay

2 Kansas City

3 Houston

4 Baltimore

5 Philadelphia

6 Los Angeles Rams 

7 Minnesota

8 Green Bay

9 Washington

10 Detroit

11 Denver

12 Buffalo

THEIR LIKELIHOOD

1 Buffalo

2 Detroit

3 Kansas City

4 Minnesota

5 Baltimore

6 Philadelphia

7 Houston

8 Green Bay

9 Los Angeles Rams

10 Tampa Bay

11 Washington

12 Denver

Ran Today's Cold and Windy Depot Parkrun 5K

This morning the southern tip of a strong continental winter storm (The Weather Channel names it "Cora") swept through northern Florida, leaving the weekly Depot Parkrun 5K here in Gainesville under chilly conditions with overcast skies and gusty northerly winds.  It had also rained a bit over the previous few hours, so when Melissa and I showed up it was no surprise to see the volunteers huddled under the roofed pavilion instead of the usual site, an open area near the starting line.  According to my weather app, the temperature at race time was 55 with 99% humidity...it only got colder as time went on.  The paved pathway around the park (we do four laps) was also damp enough to cause me concern about possible slips, so that in itself impeded any plans for me to run a fast race.  Still, unlike many other bundled-up participants, I showed up "like a Canadian" in a simple tee-shirt and shorts.  Melissa walked the course as well, and after I finished I joined up with her to walk the last couple of laps.  Our Alachua County today celebrates its bicentennial, apparently established only some six years after Florida was acquired by the United States from Spain in 1819 and twenty years before being admitted as a state.  While we were in our race, they were starting to set up the park for that observance...hope they enjoyed it all: we got out of there as soon as we finished.  I timed my finishing time at 28:16, but once again they screwed up the results page, this time giving me the time of the runner finishing just ahead of me: 27:51.  Well, I rolled with it a few weeks ago when it went against me, so I guess I'll continue likewise when I'm favored...click HERE to see those results.  Now I'm hunkering down, in a heated house and bundled up like a true Floridian, insulated against the brutal 47 degrees outside...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 11

Wednesday has once again rolled around, telling me to write another article about the short stories I've been reading, at this point looking at the output from the year 1998.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I chose a science fiction retrospective anthology series whose editor harbors a deep fondness for novellas in his selections, I've often found myself slowly slogging through material. This has been one of those weeks, although the novella I'm discussing today (second of the two below) has thankfully been more readable than last week's novella.  I'm using Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection...

LA CENERENTOLA by Gwyneth Jones

This is a chilling tale discussing where we may be heading with our advancing know-how regarding the control of our own reproduction...and what kind of offspring we will be producing.  Cloning, prevalent here in the tale of a young couple traveling in Europe with their daughter as they encounter a mother and her two obviously cloned, stunningly beautiful daughters, seems to be the topic for discussion here.  Except when the narrator sees the daughters fade and vanish into thin air!  Then the story advances to beyond cloning, and into a world that maybe we don't know what we're really getting into.  The title is the nickname of another, less-favored daughter of the woman with the "cloned" daughters', and who seems to hold the key to the mysteries in the story...

DOWN IN THE DARK by William Barton

This novella examines a topic commonly covered in sci-fi tales: the end of the world.  It's not so far off into the future (2057), and humanity had already begun to explore and even settle different feasible worlds within our solar system, including the Moon, Mars, and some of the outer moons in the solar system like Saturn's Titan, where the narrator is based.  The Earth and all life on it has been recently vanquished, due to an asteroid crashing into it along with misguided, backfiring efforts to break it up in space before the strike...the planet itself is now uninhabitable.  Now only about two thousand humans are left, scattered on a few different worlds in the solar system, with their machines, food and ability to replace depleting stocks running down toward an eventual extinction.  In contrast to what happened so abruptly to the billions of Earth-dwellers, their plight is an agonizingly slow one, and with this comes the opportunity to observe how people might react to their apparently hopeless situation.  Hence this tale, which in the end is very heavy on psychology and how people deal differently both with grief and with their oncoming deaths.  But there is something else happening on Titan...is it another form of life?  I'm not telling...read on, reader: there's more to this story than the oppressing doom and gloom...

And that's it for this week: let's see what happens next Wednesday...

Country Deserves Incoming CCC-in-Chief

The incoming CCC-in Chief (Convict, Conman, Clown) is up to his old tricks, deliberately saying anything he can to steal the media spotlight from other people and events, in this case the solemn observance honoring former president Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100.  CCC is working mass and social media up into a frenzy, making hints of annexing Greenland, the Panama Canal...even Canada,,,along with renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".  The latter gesture, I'm guessing, was aimed at the hard-core voters who supported him from the start and thought twenty years ago that the old "change" from French fries to "Freedom" fries was a good idea.  When I went to school many decades ago, we had a bus stop bully who practiced the same kind of manipulation, threatening and deriding others he felt he could intimidate and always talking loudly about random subjects with outrageous statements abounding...just to keep attention on himself.  Now this dude, at an advanced age, is plaguing my high school reunion website...probably the same old narcissist he always was...sound familiar?  So, returning to our current collective problem, my country knew all about CCC yet elected him, even giving the degenerate a popular vote victory.  So this coming presidential term is on America, a country that has abandoned its sense of reason and decency in favor of self-brainwashing and fascism.  If you want to frequent Facebook (which has just abandoned its fact-checking policy after pressure from you-know-who) or those obnoxious cable news and opinion channels to get your news input, be my guest...all we're going to get in the next four years is more of the same constant, deliberately outrageous crap.  And my country deserves it for what they did on Election Day.  Enjoy...

Three Movies Recently Watched

During the last few weeks I did something I've rarely done in recent memory: watch three full-length currently-running feature-length movies.  They were, in order of viewing: Red One, Wicked and Carry-On.  Red One is a largely tongue-in-cheek comedy...with a mushy subplot...about Santa Claus being kidnapped and two unlikely allies, portrayed by Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, teaming up to solve the mystery and rescue good ol' St. Nick.  It's loaded with computer-generated imagery, as I'm afraid movies these days tend to be.  The action is in your face and abrupt...but that's also the case with the other two films I saw.  Wicked is a revisionist prequel to L. Frank Baum's classic Wizard of Oz...it tells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and reframes her image as being a thoughtful, compelling young woman, as opposed to the shallow and narcissistic "Good Witch" Glinda.  That movie, based on the Broadway run adapted from Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel, hit me like a spoof of South Park's spoof of High School Musical: a little too heavy on the song-and-dance, thank you.  It's also just Part One, so another Wicked is on its merry way.  And the last movie I saw...all of them with Melissa and the middle one with Rebecca...was Carry-On, an edge-of-your-seat action flick about a TSA checker at the LA airport who is blackmailed at his post during the Christmas season to allow a sinister piece of luggage to pass through unchecked.  It was well-made and suspenseful, but I couldn't help but see its premise as a blatant ripoff of the 2002 thriller Phone Booth.  I managed to get through all three movies intact, but felt that each of them was guilty of sensory overload...I couldn't help feeling somehow manipulated, even with the cutesy Red One.  But I guess that's how movies are made today...

Ran Today's Cold (for Me) Depot Parkrun 5K

 I was attentive to the weather forecast for this morning, as they were predicting temperatures here in the Gainesville area to dip into the upper thirties by 7:30 race time for the weekly (free) Depot Parkrun 5K, held at that park just a few clocks south of downtown.  As it was, my phone app had it at 40 degrees with 56% humidity. The last couple of times I recently went out for a race when the temperature had dipped like this I didn't wear gloves...didn't make that mistake again.  No, I wore full-length pants and a jacket, the latter which I shed halfway through...no point in needless suffering, especially standing around shivering before the race.  Speaking of "before the race", during the announcements they asked if there were any out-of-town Parkrunners present, and wouldn't you know it, several from England and Canada raised their hands...all were dressed in short-sleeves and shorts like it was a warm spring morning instead of "freezing-ass cold" as I like to describe it.  I had been watching YouTube and saw a video advising runners to keep their cadence at around 170-180 steps/minute...I was experimenting around with this at the start of the run, only to later realize that when I am actually running at my usual faster clip toward the end I'm naturally maintaining that suggested cadence.  I started slow and finished fast, final time at 27:43...click HERE to view the results.  From here onward my participation in organized races is a bit uncertain as I have a medical video-conference Tuesday morning to discuss my diagnosis and future options after the prostate biopsy last month.  I intend to follow medical advice regarding my running and walking (and other activities), but if I'm still able to continue like I've been doing, then that's what I'll do...until they say otherwise... 

Quote of the Week...from Paul McCartney

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a good song happen.                                ---Paul McCartney

I don't know when Paul McCartney...now 82...made the above quote.  That exemplifies the tremendous stability of the personality and beliefs of this remarkable individual, an outstanding musical artist with whom we've been blessed to live during the same years.  From time to time I've flirted with the notion of learning to play musical instruments...some time in the past in my early fifties I took some private piano lessons.  But unlike Bill Murray's Groundhog Day character Phil Connors, who had a seemingly endless progression of the same day ahead of him as he went through his own piano lessons, I experienced back then the progression of brand new, very different days and their accompanying demands and distractions.  So although I picked up some slight keyboard skills and actually somehow got through a piano recital performing an excerpt from a Beethoven composition, I ended up abandoning the piano project. But in the back of my mind I've always wanted to be able to pick out any tune and transfer either its main melody or accompaniment to the keyboard...or guitar, for that matter.  Will and Rebecca studied piano and applied themselves better to learning it than did I.  I understand that when the Beatles were starting out, none of them could read music, but rather developed and honed their musical skills by endlessly practicing their instruments, and their songwriting was a matter of dreaming stuff up and quickly transferring it to guitar, piano, drum and voice, with each other serving as critics and contributors. Melissa recently gave me a nice electronic keyboard for Christmas, and I have a different strategy for playing it than before, one that I think the Beatles great with his above quote would heartily approve of. But my aims are a bit more modest than those of Sir Paul McCartney:  I just want to play the music that I already know and love...and he wrote his share of it...

Planets on Full Display in Winter Night Sky

On New Year's Eve Melissa and I were invited to our friends' rural farm home to celebrate with them and others the changing of the year with food and good conversation.  We had never been there before and gratefully availed ourselves of the Waze app to know where to turn on the zigzagging way, with dirt roads presenting their own challenges as we approached our destination.  Once there, we enjoyed ourselves while soaking in the ambiance of being way out in the countryside of Gilchrist County.  The sky was cloudless and the stars shone brilliantly...as well as the planets: there were three of them (or four if you looked down and counted the Earth): Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.  I could easily make out red Mars, which was the easternmost, just below the zodiac constellation Gemini (technically it's in Cancer, but no one can make out that faint constellation).  I had to look up later which of the other two was Jupiter and which was Saturn.  Jupiter is in Taurus and Saturn, in the west part of the sky, is in Aquarius...just south of Pegasus.  I liked the fact that I could look all the way down to any horizon and see stars without noticeable interference from city lights.  Of course, out here as well as where I live, there are plenty of trees to block the view.  We enjoyed our visit, which I wouldn't have been able to be a part of had I not retired.  One door closes and many more open.  Speaking of more opportunities, I'm looking forward to seeing more of my local planetarium once its January schedule resumes after the holiday break.  It's the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium at Santa Fe College, directed by James Albury...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 10

Here's yet another installment in my Wednesday feature, with me reading and reacting to stories appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, and featuring his picks from the year 1998.  Today it's just one tale, a long novella...

GRIST by Tony Daniel

Sometimes an author has several different provocative ideas that he or she would like to put into a story, and that's one of the things I like about science fiction.  But if those provocative ideas all get thrown into one tale, then a problem arises...at least with me as a reader...pointing to a general lack of a stable point of reference that I can anchor myself to.  It's immediately clear to me what my problem with this novella is: there is no clear-cut notion of what constitutes individual identity, as almost all the characters...including the protagonist...are composite amalgamations of multiple brains and artificial intelligence.  It's so murky that not only do I not care about the hero's assignment to help avert a cataclysmic war, but I'm also not interested in "his" history of relationships with the other characters.  I suspect a lot of readers think that it's kind of cool to go deep down the rabbit hole of speculative fiction, but seriously, stories like this one just make me want to throw my hands up in frustration and walk away.  But the late Gardner evidently loved these disorienting stories, and the longer they are the better.  I'll tell you what: see if you can't find Grist and read it yourself...and tell me what you think about it, along with any suggestions on how I can better approach it...

Next week I'll see if I can't come up with some more reactions (hopefully positive) from Gardner Dozois' anthology...

My New Year's Day Walking and Running Events

This first day of 2025 saw two special holiday events for walkers and runners take place in Gainesville.  Early on, with temperatures in the low 50s at the 7:30 am start, the Depot Parkrun held its traditional New Year's Day 5K.  The organizers promoted the event by encouraging us all to wear pajamas to it, and Melissa and I complied...along with several others.  I'm proud of Melissa taking this positive step of doing her first 5K walk since last May before her breast cancer surgery, and I look forward to her walking in more events as the year progresses.  Later at noon, the Florida Track Club held its own event, the Frank Shorter Mile run, with the course primarily being a repeated loop on the east end of Westside (Albert Massey) Park, going through a quiet residential neighborhood.  I signed up for it because the last time I was timed in a public one-mile race was in the fall of 1974, during my conditioning physical education class at Broward Community College...back then I enjoyed my fastest mile (5:25) of a middling running career.  I knew today I'd be much slower, but then again I'm 50 years older!  The race was very well staged with a lot of positive vibes going around, and I started out running hard.  So hard, in fact, that early on I began to wonder if maybe I was running too hard, but no, I was able to maintain my pace and even increase it at the end, finishing with a time of 8:25.  The noontime temperature had only risen to 58, so all in all, the running (and walking) conditions today were optimal for me and Melissa.  Click HERE to view today's Depot Park run 5K results and HERE to see the Frank Shorter Mile results...  

My December 2024 Running, Walking and Swimming Report

It's sometimes difficult, when outside events are imposed on me, to maintain my own set of standards and routines of running, walking...and especially swimming: December 2024 was a case in point. On the 18th I underwent a prostate biopsy, recovery from which involved a temporary withdrawal from at least the running and swimming...at this final date of the month (and year) I have yet to resume the latter.  But for December as a whole, I'm pretty satisfied with my state of progress in the three areas.  I participated in four  races, running in the Season of Hope 15K, and doing the Depot Parkrun 5K three times, speed-walking it once.  This was my first full month of retirement, yet although you might think this would enhance my training, I actually had more control over my activity with my work structure, counter-intuitive as it may seem. Now I need to set up and assert my own routines: it's a process, both for me and for my loved ones.  This self-discipline regarding running, walking and swimming is something that I need to develop and take personal responsibility for...with expected medical procedures in the near future, though, I'll still need to be reasonable about it all.  In January, apart from the weekly Parkrun 5Ks, there will be a marathon/half-marathon event on Sunday the 19th and a 15K on Saturday the 27th.  The degree to which I participate...and train, for that matter, will come down to those factors of self-discipline and my ongoing medical situation.  I'm realistically optimistic about the long-term picture, although circumstances may be limiting in the short-term.  I'm continuing to see walking and swimming take more significant roles in my life, and my recent switch to the nearby YMCA with its much more accessible swimming pool bodes well for the future...

My Favorite Songs of 2024

Back in July this year I noticed that I hadn't been keeping up with this year's new music, much less listen to the "hits" as they had their "rotations" of radio play.  So I listened to some albums, the best of them being The Smile's Wall of Eyes and Green Day's Savior. They're both very good, but as far as standout tracks are concerned, only three made a deep impression on me...that was in July: click HERE to read the article I wrote about it on July 9th.  I never did go deeper into current album releases, what with tragedy and medical crisis permeating my life for the remainder of 2024.  But those three songs remained strong and meaningful for me, and now that I can instantly call them up to play with my Amazon Music account, I have listened to them many, many times over the past few months.  So there won't be any long list of my top favorite songs of 2024: just three.  At #3, it's Read the Room by The Smile.  As I wrote back in July, this is a British alternative rock band composed of Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner.  Wall of Eyes is their second album...and they must all dig their little group because they just released a third studio album.  Read the Room has cryptic lyrics...that's all right since many of my favorites over the years were pretty difficult to understand as well.  It's the musical counterpoint going on here that drew me to it, especially during the complex instrumental ending.  At #2, it's impossible not to understand the words to Green Day's lyricist and vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong's powerful The American Dream is Killing Me, which pretty much sums up my own thoughts as to the course of our society as it has largely degenerated over recent years.  Finally, my favorite song from 2024 is also from The Smile: I Quit.  I quickly found myself attached to it not only for its incredibly blunt and pertinent lyrics about making a permanent transition and taking a new path, but also for its haunting and very complex music.  Below are some of the  words...  

Wild ghosts

Wild feelings

Leaning windmills

A dead drop

This is the end of the trip

A new path

Out of the madness

To wherever it goes

To wherever it goes

And wherever it goes

And wherever it goes

And wherever it lies

And wherever it lies 

I liked this song before learning of my son's passing and not long thereafter deciding to retire.  It reminded me of the ending to Lord of the Rings, when aging Bilbo Baggins utters the following line as he is about to board the boat to take him on to the Grey Havens: "I think I am quite ready for a another adventure!"  May your own new adventures bless you...sometimes, though, they come whether you're ready for them or not...

Looking Back on 2024 in My Life

As 2024 draws to a close, I look back in my life on both the good and the bad, the miraculous and the tragic.  In May, Melissa had her breast cancer diagnosis and quick surgery to remove the malignant lump...this followed by chemotherapy (her body suffered a bad reaction to it) and then radiation therapy, ending this fall.  By all measures, the cancer has been removed from her body, thank God.  But after pulling up into our driveway on July 18th following the second round of that chemo, the police were there to notify us that our beloved 34 year old son Will had died.  This would overshadow all of the good that 2024 had produced for us, and we're left with a big hole in our lives.  He was (is) such a compassionate and responsible young man...what a terrible loss for us and the world he graced with his presence for too short a time span.  Rebecca, my 29-year old daughter, lives in town and makes me proud with her commitment to her job as well as her close relationships with us and her partner. My own health seems to be going in opposite directions: in one direction I am gradually becoming fitter and more athletic while in the other I have just been diagnosed with localized prostate cancer, the treatment for which looms ahead of me in early 2025.  I do feel blessed to be in such an environment where it can be effectively treated and I am confident of the successful outcome.  And when I clocked out at 10 pm on Friday, November 29th, my retirement began after working for 37 years at the Gainesville Post Office.  I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to work there and have many good memories of my colleagues as well as the work itself...I am no disgruntled postal worker!  And I have enjoyed not having to deal with the traffic while driving to and from work since then.  For 2024, Will's passing dwarfs everything else, but in life sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can be difficult...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

This last Saturday morning in December was unusually warm and muggy (64 degrees, 100% humidity) at the 7:30 beginning of the weekly, free (sign up online) Depot Parkrun 5K, just one of hundreds of similar events taking place across the USA and several other countries.  On such a day as this, when I'm going to run it (instead of speed-walking like I did last week), I know up front that I will be simply working to sustain a strong regular pace without attempting to set any personal best records.  So that's exactly what unfolded, with me settling into a slightly uncomfortable pace and enjoying the presence of some runners ahead of me who kept me honest with that pace.  At the end I had a time of 27:32...click HERE to view the results.  There weren't as many participants in today's race as usual, and that may be due to the fact that (1) the University of Florida is closed for the holiday season (2) many may be out of town who normally would be there or (3) folks are waiting for the special New Year's Day edition of the Depot Parkrun, to take place this coming Wednesday morning.  The organizers say to wear the pajamas you slept in the night before: dare I?...

Quote of the Week...from Mahandas Gandhi

Be the change you wish to see in the world.                          ---Mahandas Gandhi

Mahandas (or "Mahatma") Gandhi was the great twentieth-century lawyer who, with his pacifist creed of passive resistance, was instrumental in India's independence and had a lot of things to say about how best to live one's own life.  That in itself doesn't qualify him for my "quote of the week" feature, but the above quote...Rob Dial recently referred to it on a podcast...resonates with me.  In the first place, I can't exactly dictate to the world how I want it to be...well, maybe I can but I would be delusional if I thought it cared one bit.  But seeing how much of human behavior is imitative, I do have the power and authority to demonstrate by my own actions what I would like to see from others.  I believe that many of us are seekers, looking for examples in others to emulate and guide them through their daily existence.  Why not be one of the examples?  No, I'm no Gandhi, nor would I want to be, and I have a lot of stuff to work out in my own life and am far, far from any semblance of a perfect model.  But I'm alive, here and now, and that gives me enough to change with...

Wishing All the Best, Taking Blog Break

I hope that you and yours have been enjoying your holiday season this year.  Melissa and I have spent quite some time with our daughter Rebecca as well as with Melissa's family side residing here in Gainesville.  I found it probably the best thing to take a little break...for a few days...with this blog.  Maybe toward the end of 2024 or, starting next year, I'll get it going again...

Blessings and Hopes for this Christmas Holiday Season

On this Christmas Eve "Eve", I wish you all a happy holiday season and that you experience peace in the present and hope for the future.  Melissa and I both are still deeply in grief over the loss of our wonderful son Will, who tragically passed away this past July.  The holiday season simply isn't the same without his loving presence in our lives...we are grateful for our dearly beloved daughter Rebecca to be living near us to celebrate Christmas.  God Bless you all...

First Round Major College Football Playoffs: Boring Mismatches

The brand-new major college football playoff format, with a whopping twelve schools now vying for the national championship, began this weekend with four largely boring, lopsided contests...not exactly what the organizers were hoping for, I'm sure.  Notre Dame, Texas, Ohio State and Penn State stuffed Indiana, Clemson, Tennessee and SMU, respectively.  I was only surprised at the Vols-Buckeyes score, thinking that Tennessee had more in them than that.  On the other hand, unlike the NCAA major college basketball championship tournament that tries to stage its games at more neutral sites, this round took place at the higher-seeded schools' home stadiums, a huge advantage for them, to say the least.  The second round will all be traditionally-named bowl games: Boise State plays Penn State New Year's Eve in the Fiesta Bowl, then on January 1st its Arizona State/Texas in the Peach Bowl, Oregon/Ohio State in the Rose Bowl and Georgia/Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.  I'm not all that interested in who wins, but I usually pick out a team before each game I watch to root for anyway. I guess Georgia...until they lose...will be "my" team since I was born there.  I just hope the next games will be more competitive...