Being able to limit hope without becoming hopeless is a tricky but essential balancing act.

Imagine you’re locked in a cage. You have to escape. You start brainstorming, but all your ideas involve objects or people you can only find outside the cage. “If only I could get my power tools, I’d be out of here in no time!” Pal, if you could get your power tools, you’d be outside the cage.

So you have to write that stuff off. But that doesn’t mean that you have to give up hope. It just means you have to confine it. You have to create positive thought, but not let it go where you can’t. It’s a nice dream, having those power tools. But it’s an unhelpful dream.

Sometimes your situation is bad. And dreaming about all the ways you could make your situation better if only your situation wasn’t bad to begin with is… well, it’s not very productive.

If you never escape that cage for the rest of your life, there will still be a side of the cage that’s less drafty. A more comfortable corner. An angle from which you can see the sunrise. Whatever it is, find it. Hope for it, even. Dream of a better here and now – and not a pleasant there and then that doesn’t help you get there.

Happy New Month!

My resolution this month is as simple as it is important. I will spend as much time as I possibly can with people. Life is too short, and people are too important. I will be as good to them as I can be.

May you do the same, my friends.

Not being asked to help isn’t an insult. You can offer to help, and someone can decline without it meaning that they don’t think you’re helpful in general. Sometimes people just need their own way, for a while.

It’s amazing what people leave behind. Even accidentally, nothing ever really disappears. It all just moves around, collecting in little corners and hidden places, waiting to be discovered. Junk becomes riches on a long enough timeline. Dig around a little. Find wonder.

I had a humbling moment the other day. I did something, expecting to get thanked. I wasn’t. I was cross for about ten seconds before I realized that I had been on the receiving end of that same thing multiple times myself, and had never even thought to thank the person that did it.

The small lesson, of course, is “Don’t do things because you want to be thanked. Do things because they’re the right things to do.” But the larger lesson is to look beyond the obvious. People are doing you favors all the time, every day. If ever there was a day to remember to say thank you for the non-obvious, this is it.

Many people feel daunted by the idea of stating a goal. Two things drive this anxiety: fear of failure, and uncertainty about methods.

Fear of failure is commonplace, though all the best advice applies: If you don’t try you’ve failed already; don’t look at the odds, look at the cost, etc. But the uncertainty about methods is a poor reason to avoid setting a goal, simply because a goal requires no methods.

If my goal is “build a house,” then knowing how to build a house is absolutely not a prerequisite to setting that goal. It’s a requirement to achieve that goal, and it will be part of the project plan that gets made. But the goal is absolutely the first step, and requires nothing else. Nothing but desire and ambition.

So if you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t want to set a goal of becoming a famous musician because I don’t even know how to play an instrument,” then you’re already cutting yourself short. You’ll never even learn if you don’t have some motivation behind the act. Whether your goal is to be a famous musician, a cool dude at parties, or someone with a more relaxing private hobby, desire cannot follow action. You won’t ever learn to play guitar at all.

So set the goal! Tactics come later, success or failure comes later, planning and action and iteration all come later. The goal, my friend. The goal must be set to be accomplished.

There is a moment after the fire. You look at the ruins, the rubble. All that was once built, gone. The moment of greatest despair is here. When the fire raged and all was burning, even amid the fear and anger there was some shred of hope and purpose. Some idea that you might act swiftly enough to save something, anything. To stem the destruction somehow.

And then you don’t. You look out at the ruins and you see failure. You see not only loss, but loss connected to you and your actions, or perhaps your inactions.

And more, even more than that. A house may be built upon an empty field and the work is hard and heavy, but from the very first breaking of ground you’re building. Moving up and forward. But the rubble, the ruin. It’s weight. An enormous burden of weight that creates an impossible distance between you and simple neutrality. Even an empty field is a distant dream.

It is easy to leave ruin in your wake, to walk away with nothing but your despair. So much of you is buried under that rubble. The weight smothers it. The work is impossibly hard, but if you leave it behind you will never recover. You have lost so much. It feels like you’ve lost everything. The horror is this: you haven’t. There is still more of you to lose.

It’s under there. Under the ruins. Despite the impossibility of the task, you must begin to dig.

Think of someone you admire. Someone close to you. Now imagine asking them, “What should I do today to be a better person?”

Do one of those things each day, big or small. Try not to do anything they’d be mad at you for. Work your way down the list.

There’s not enough goodbye in the world. I wish I could say it until you didn’t have to leave.

Whatever keeps you above water for a few extra minutes increases the odds that you’ll find a permanent solution. Grab whatever you can.