Sometimes the greatest gift isn’t some new thing, but room to move around.

Bless me with empty space! Grace me with cleared clutter! Purge and prosper!

My children, in honor of a special occasion, threw away a bunch of junk. There are few better gifts I could receive. I love them so!

I miss my father, and I miss my best friend. Too much loss for the memory, in one day. But I am connected to people here on this world, and even in our grief we’re linked. The hole in our individual hearts is extra glue for the collective, like the wood you carve out of two pieces so they’ll fit better together. I will take it.

When someone is overly curious about the exact rules of a situation, asking many questions before engaging, they tend to fall into one of two camps:

1. People who are very interested in following the rules because they don’t have a lot of confidence in their ability to infer the correct behavior in ambiguous situations, and
2. People who intend to do very weird things and want to know what they can get away with.

In other words, when someone asks a lot of questions about all the laws of a town before setting foot there, they’re typically either a socially-inept but obedient person, or they’re a lawyer.

Cleverness often requires structure. Left to pure imagination, some people can go absolutely wild. But the joy of a clever solution is in making a clever solution that works within the confines of the restrictions set by the opponent. Making a highly-unexpected but legal move in chess is a satisfying way to outsmart your opponent. Playing an Uno Reverse Card when they take your queen isn’t.

The responsibility of people who like to play smart is that they have to know the rules better than anyone else. You can’t just be a clever and persuasive person to be a good lawyer, you also have to know the law better than anyone else in the room. Remember that, clever kids, and study up.

Today I taught a class on being resilient in the face of adversity and unexpected challenges. And a bunch of stuff went wrong in the morning leading up to it! It was perfect!

You couldn’t ask for a better time for a bunch of random mini-disasters to happen. Tech issues, miscommunications, last-minute changes; we had the whole set. A half-dozen things went wrong in the two hours or so before the event.

And the event went perfectly fine.

Rule number one, straight out of the hitchhiker’s guide, is just “Don’t Panic.” Nothing is unfixable, nothing will kill me. Always remember that most people can’t even see those challenges, and won’t even notice their effects on the final product.

“Change” is neither good nor bad. It’s just different. You now exist in a new world; if you view that as a “challenge to overcome,” then you’re fighting the normal progress of life. Don’t. Just think of it as a new town, and now you’re looking for a new place to eat. Neither better nor worse, just different.

There are problems everywhere. No job, house, school, community, relationship, or anything else will be perfect. Perfection shouldn’t be the goal nor the standard.

But not all problems are equal! Here’s an extremely basic example: let’s say your preferred temperature is 70 degrees. You have two apartments you can pick from to live in: one is 65 degrees naturally, and the other is 75 degrees naturally.

Neither is 70, so neither is “perfect” for you on that metric. But even though they’re both off by the same amount, one of those is probably better for you! Being too hot makes me more uncomfortable than being too cold, so I’d choose the 65-degree place (plus, I own more clothing that lets me deal with cold than the reverse, not to mention that it’s generally cheaper to warm a place up than cool it down). But some people find being too cold much more uncomfortable and would choose the other apartment.

So it’s not always about finding something “perfect,” but you can make a lot of improvements by finding a better-fitting imperfection. Everything has trade-offs, and every person is unique. That means you can find the job, community, relationships, or whatever else that gets the things you care about most right. The rest, you just laugh away.

Today is my father’s birthday.

I spent the morning visiting him, in many ways. I went to his grave, adorned it with new trinkets with my mother and sister. He would have laughed, and so we laughed – it was as he wanted. The rest of the morning I spent on old pictures, videos, messages. The hundreds if not thousands of little signs and wonders he left behind for us. I listened to his music.

I laughed as often as I cried. I can only miss him because of how wonderful his presence was. You can’t miss something you didn’t love. I remember that when I’m sad; sadness is a small price to pay for joy.

There is always light coming. For all I miss him, he added so much more, and still does,

Happy birthday, old man. I love you.

I picked up the large stick while the lot of us wandered through the wooded park on our hike. She asked me why, and I said, “pokin’ stuff.”

You can’t ever be bored without being utterly wilful about it. There’s just so much to do. There’s all of outside! There’s stuff to poke! Go see if it’s real. What kind of bird is that? Is there anything in that hole? Look, turtles!

How can you be bored without being boring? You must be so uninteresting to be uninterested. There are mysteries in every corner, and they’ll make you healthier as you look at them.

My kin and I wandered around for hours today, pokin’ stuff. We made new friends, we found cool stuff, we got sunlight and good air into us. We looked at the moon.

Such joy in our backyards.

Life is far too short to do everything. The most important things will always be being with the people you love, and having fun. In that order.

Sometimes being with the people you love will mean doing something not fun. You will carry burdens sometimes. You will hold a hand during pain. Or maybe you’ll even do something they think is fun, just for them. Because you love them.

May you be so lucky.

Try to take all the hostility out of the word “why.”

When you imagine being asked the question, “Why are you doing that like that?” are you imagining a curious, open-minded person? Or is your first instinct to view that question as an obvious criticism?

Most people mean it as an obvious criticism. Most people aren’t asking, “Why are you going that way?” because they want to know more about your thought process. They’re “asking” because they disagree, using curious language to cover very critical tone – and intent.

Step 1: Don’t ever do this yourself. Don’t ask “why” if you aren’t genuinely curious and open to the answer. That question has incredible potential, but if we waste it on sneaking in the start of a disagreement, we’re wasting it.

Step 2: When someone asks you like that? Pretend they didn’t! Respond with a smile and a genuine explanation, as if you’d been asked by a curious child instead of a critical adult. Disarm the hostility by letting it dissipate harmlessly instead of encountering any resistance.

We should treat “why” with more respect!

It’s not my favorite method, but sometimes to get through a particularly rough stretch of days, it helps to think about when the next good day will be. Something you’re looking forward to, even if it’s just the end of a period of misery. When does that movie come out? When is the next taco day in the cafeteria?

The next good day is never far away.