Week #27 of 2025 has arrived... Hot. It is so hot outside. I feel like a lizard scuttling back and forth between winter and summer... trying in vain to find a day of weather that is "just right!" but also not monotonous.

Time to walk over to your 4K Weeks poster and fill in another square.  Done?

In the heat of summer, when we are all just trying to survive, it is a good time to remember this.  Getting your life onto the track that you want it to be on isn't one big heavy lift.  It is a slight tilting of your direction, an single habit a week changed for the better, a shift that takes you imperceptibly towards who you want to be and away from the person you were. 

It is the tiny daily growth of a tree that all of a sudden, 20 years from now, seems to have started to shade the whole back yard.

It's only overwhelming if you try to go from zero to all of it in one leap.

ON WEEK #27 OF 1996...

Nancy Reagan cut a red, white, and blue ribbon to reopen the Statue of Liberty after refurbishment.

She was 3,391.42 weeks or 65.04 years old.

WHAT I CONSUMED THIS WEEK

	Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. After sharing a video of Wallace last week I dipped my toe into his writings... and while waiting for the library ebook copy of Infinite Jest, I decided to read this book by David Lipsky. It's good... and interesting, and a bit self-referential.
	People I Mostly Admire, "How to Help Kids Succeed."   If you have kids, listen to this... and get David Yeager's book... I did.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it." - James Barrie

A healthy man has many problems. A sick man only has one.

I fear that we are all so often focused on not losing the comfortable situation we have created for ourselves that we risk ignoring the warning signs that will end up taking it all away. This is the real risk of collapse. The reality that the large middle of the populate watches things slip away, not wanting to risk their slice of paradise, until one day they look around and there is no paradise.

I'll be honest. I have so much work to do on a regular basis. I am always busy (it's a strength and a weakness). In the years leading up to my dad's death, occasionally I would feel like I couldn't afford to take the hour to have lunch with him.

I am positive I would give up working for a month (2 months? 3 months?) if I could have lunch with him again. There's no judgment in this... just perspective.

WHAT I AM THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

Some lessons I seem to need to learn over and over and over again.

This morning I played basketball (I know! Another basketball story!).

I played terribly, and it kept compounding. At least four times I set a screen, rolled to the basket perfectly open, and bobbled the pass, resulting in a turnover. Three were passes from the same teammate (kudos to Ahmad for continuing to pass to me!).

I also missed 2 3-pointers and a couple of layups. Kind of a bummer day...

I know that there is no controlling the past. I KNOW this. I know that energy spent thinking about the last play just distracts from the next play. I KNOW this. In fact, if any one of my teammates misses a shot, I am the first to say, "next play!", a common refrain from players to remind each other to focus on the "next play". Which is one of the reasons it is so frustrating when I find myself mired in the swamp of mistakes of the recent past.

AND, on top of all that, why do I play? Surely not to win. It's an early morning pickup league. No one is tracking stats.

I play to have fun and get some intense exercise (and it is intense... 28 minutes in Zone 4... 149-160 bmp and 15 minutes in Zone 5... 161 bpm+). I got the exercise, and I did have fun. So, it was a total win!

That's what the 4K Weeks calendar is all about. All the filled in squares are lost to us but for memory, and none of the future squares are promised to us. The only square that matters is the one we are about to fill in.

It is a very difficult skill to master, living in the present moment. But, it is likely the most important. In fact, there is no other moment.

This Friday at basketball I will have one goal... to not think about the last play. Feel free to ask me how it went! 

(It is Friday afternoon, and I am proofreading this... I played... poorly... again today.  BUT!  I did play, and I did have fun, and I did mostly focus on "the next play".  Middling success!)

Until next week!

Spencer,

Owner of 4KWeeks

P.S. Click on this reward if you feel like letting me know you read the whole newsletter: I'm not sure why this fills me with such joy... If you need a more cerebral reward... FINE! Here you go...