Week #5 of 2025 has arrived. So much of life is about the way we tell the story as opposed to the facts themselves. Are you being a useful personal narrator of your story?

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

ON WEEK #5 OF 2018...

Chadwick Boseman starred in the Marvel film Black Panther, which premiered in Los Angeles. What a moment that was for young black boys and girls... To see a super hero that looked like them... possibility.

He was 2,148.00 weeks or 41.19 years old.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown." - Dennis Waitley

WHAT I AM CONSUMING THIS WEEK

The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson

I am in novel surroundings this week, so I am reading fiction and breathing in the things that are unusual to me.

Instagram Nugget

• Pretty cool

WHAT I AM THINKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

A whole bunch of things that I think relate.

Let me see if I can make them make sense.

First a list:

• The Ouroboros
• Persephone, Hadestown:
  • "Come, My son, we try and we fail.
    Every tale has an end
    But the pale dawn breaks
    And the snakes eats its tail
    And the tale begins again"
• Anais Mitchel at the end of her book: "Keep Trying"
• This passage from A Christmas Carol
  • Scrooge: Speak comfort to me, Jacob!
    Marley: I have none to give. Comfort comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. 

I was in the car with my 15-year-old daughter yesterday. I picked her up from rehearsal, and in those precious minutes, if I ask one, maybe two questions, and then shut up, she talks to me, and it is the greatest thing.

We had moved from the rehearsal post mortem topic to music. She was talking to me about her current #1 song, (Gracie Abrams is surprisingly fun to listen to.) I thought to myself, "Damn, I am the Dad now." And I suddenly got very sad. Tears sad. I kept them under wraps, because I wouldn't have been able to explain it to her. Some things you can only understand by living through them. Saudade, or Ferweh, or Heimweh or something else nearly unnamable.

My daughter will likely one day know the boundless joy of raising a child. The joy of that moment will only be possible through my sadness at witnessing the ending of her childhood. She then will also know what it means to sit next to her teenager, and deeply hope "that this is one of those rare moments" where she can see the child and the adult, and then she will know what it means to think "Damn, I am the Mom now."

I am sad for her in that moment. The moment when you know "the tale will end, and the dawn will break again."

And I am sad for my dad and mom in all of those moments where I didn't realize something was ending for them, because I was focused on what was beginning for me.

But... I am so grateful that we all will have had the chance to have these beginnings.

I love living. I hope you do, too. I don't know what the alternative is like, but for all its pain and suffering and impotent rage and injustice and stupidity and hypocrisy and needless cruelty... living still holds my rapt attention.

You have to keep trying. I have to keep trying. The trying won't keep you from the inevitable end, but it does seem to give meaning to walking the well-worn trail, and it expands the beginnings.

The thing about cycles is this. While inevitable and heroically beautiful, they are simultaneously tragic and sucky.

I have no comfort to give you. I have no comfort to give me. Comfort comes from other people and places. You have to rip off the bandaid and stare these wounds in the face.

You have to root around and find the splinter or it will get infected and you will waste away. Try as you might, you can't have one thing without the other.

The beginnings are inevitable, and endings are essential.

The only thing you get a say in is the trying.

The only thing you GET to have a say is in the TRYING. Keep trying.

Until next week!

Spencer, Owner of 4K Weeks