You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

Just like the environment’s affect on the land around us, throughout life we cycle through phases.

In 1972 I was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. At the time I only knew the sound of mom’s voice; redFlex aimed my giant head at other sounds. By five in Baton Rouge I stood in the front seat of her little brown Honda Civic. In forth grade I made my plans to be a chemical engineer at an elementary school job fair — not long afterwards, for the only time I recall, my mom whooped me for starting a small fire under our wood-frame house. I knew at ten my favorite color was blue. I made a random-ass decision to make all A’s when I started high school at thirteen; I learned what self-loathing was when I made my only B at sixteen. I still regret it.

At seventeen I thought I knew what love was. At twenty-one, when I bombed out of college, boredom taught me what I thought was failure. Yet I graduated at twenty-eight, moved to Chicago at thirty-one, and redefined defeat with a divorce at forty.

For forty-five years joy was a mystery to me, but I didn’t know it. Church described it when I was young, but never did my experience translate through that recollection. Perhaps abandoning Christianity altogether was the reason for my personal reformation — but meeting Her was probably more crucial. She led me to its discovery.

Those two weeks of silence in 2017 helped. That was when I decided to detach and ignore unnecessary information. While she visited family I was silent, and life has been quiet ever since.