Week 28 of 2024 has arrived. Just over halfway through 2024.  Smack dab in the middle of the summer and the 4th turning. The world turns and moves on. I wonder if my 18-year-old self would recognize me at 47. I'm not sure he would. Time to walk over to your 4K Weeks poster and fill in another square. Done? In our house, Ryann (my wife) and I are in the middle of the struggle with the speed of the childhood clock. It's easy to see the loss.  They aren't the chubby little minions who say things like "my toe-thumb hurts" or reach out spontaneously to hold my hand. We weren't quite prepared to be relegated to spectator so "early" in the timeline....

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It is easier to tolerate conflict when you are wound up and expecting it.  It requires a much more skillful touch and a stronger constitution to be easy, free and geared up for peace, but competent and ready for battle. 

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Your life has meaning. You know that to be true, even if occasionally you deny it out of depression or a macabre sense of humor.

And so, why struggle, why strive, when "none of it really matters anyway" ?

I think it is because you have to try, for it to matter.

Maybe it is the historical "fish struggling up onto the land" inside of us, that makes us need struggle or maybe it goes back further than that... Entropy is increasing, everything is falling apart, but life wants to try to pull order from the chaos. Life needs to feel like it is capable of pulling order from the chaos.

Striving, struggling, trying, scraping, any synonym for grappling... MAKES IT MATTER.

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