We change our priorities as we are confronted with the end of something; time with a loved one before they travel or are shipped out to time in the Service; time with our friends before we all graduate; time with our kids before they move away to college and move on with their lives. Each of these impending endings or changes forces us to look at time differently.

We become more aware of it and how we want it to slow down or we want more of it. But we get what we get. A day, week and month for you is the same amount of time for me. Its value, however, is in how we use each moment of time.

6 Steps to No Excuse Living:

1)      Be more aware, more present and more connected to each moment. Each moment matters.

2)      Put fewer things on the to-do list. Do each one better.

3)      Spend more time with the important people in your life. Call your friends and family. Have meals together.

4)      Turn off the electronics and talk to each other.

5)      Know your talents, strengths and passions and build your life around the true you and don’t let others dissuade you from your dreams and adventures.

6)      Listen to others, but always trust your instinct and self-knowledge to choose what is right for you.

List and excerpt via IntentBlog

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived liked the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds. No wonder they did so much thinking back then. When Socrates staggered home late after a day of philosophizing with Plato, his bad-tempered wife Xantippe could not point to a clock on the wall as she started chewing him out.

In my youth, I had a reputation of being extraordinarily lazy. My fame extended beyond our neighborhood. When my name was mentioned, my teachers in school used to roll their eyes and cross themselves. My mother could not agree more. She’d tell about the day I started for school wearing just one shoe, and when I realized my mistake, instead of going back home to get the other, I stayed where I was in the street watching a piano being lifted to several stories up to some apartment, till I was late for school.

“He’s a dreamy child,” one of my aunts used to say in my defense. I didn’t like to hear her say that, but today I’m ready to admit that daydreaming used to be my favorite occupation, especially in summer. As soon as the weather got hot, I looked for a shady place to lie down. When I got bored with daydreaming, I took a nap. One time I dozed off on the Oak Street Beach in Chicago and didn’t wake till it was almost evening, surprised to see the empty beach, the tall buildings along the lake already in shadow, and feel my back hurting from the sun and my head not knowing for a moment how I got there. After getting up and stretching, yawning, and scratching for a while, I sat down once again and thought to myself, How wonderful all this is.

Via Charles Simic

The breeze at dawn
has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask
for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

~Rumi

One of our first garden learning experiences was growing spinach. We planted organic spinach seedlings in early May. Nick Mancini’s patented “seaweed and compost in the bottom of each hole” method was employed and we were excited for the growing experience.

Growth was slow and steady. One week went by and we fed our spinach organic Garden Tone fertilizer and the results were amazing.

A couple weeks later our spinach was thickening and the leaves were dark green. Things were great.

The growth continued for another week and a half until one day we arrived to tend the garden to a surprise. The spinach had flowered, the roots popped out of the ground, and the stems and leaves turned brown.

Instead of having homegrown spinach for shakes, salads, and meals…. twenty beautiful spinach plants were utterly destroyed.

Fortunately, we took this as a learning opportunity instead of a setback. We learned that our spinach had “bolted” meaning that we had let it flower. We should have began harvesting a week earlier.

We learned that we could have harvested the entire plant by cutting them right above the stem or we could have periodically taken spinach leaves from the outside of the plant (no more than 25% of the plant at one time.)

Here are our tips for beginning gardeners: Learn about each plant you grow. Is it best to prune at a certain time? How long will it take your plant to seed, flower, or bolt? What’s the best way to harvest? What are good plant companions for your fruits and veggies? What’s the best type of soil for your crop? Will you have to add specific nutrients?

We had no idea about any of this going into the gardening experience. Like life, gardening is a learning experience. We’re learning, having fun, and growing awesome fresh organic produce.

Happy growing!

Wright Thompson could potentially be the best sports journalist and writer in the US right now. He delivered this epic portrayal of Michael Jordan at age 50. We featured his last major piece about racism and soccer on Lucid Practice. He has done magical work again. His latest article on Montana, Tom and Gerri Morgan, and fly fishing is all-time.

Check it out — here.

It’s a story set in Manhattan, Montana.

“A man named Tom Morgan lives here, making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He’s revered for what he calls “thought rods,” where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.

Tom’s wife? She read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and decided that she needed to make a change or risk living an ordinary life. She looked at a map, found Livingston, Mont., and applied for a job. She felt restless there, too, overhearing the sad conversations in the teacher’s lounge, where her colleagues counted off the years until retirement and the beginning of their lives. Gerri quit and joined the Peace Corps. When she returned, a friend set her up with a newly single rod designer. She noticed that he limped.

“I choose to be happy,” he says.

He’s always been disciplined. In the morning, he plays exactly one game of solitaire, using his voice-activated software. He’s calm at his center, palpably so, making the space around him feel peaceful. Being with Tom is like being with a bodhisattva. That’s what sticks with people who meet him, even more than the inspiration from how he handles his disease with grace. There’s something comforting about him. His discipline and calm allow him to control his world, even his desire to retreat into his memories. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Tom,” his friend Bruce Richards says, “and I’ve seen him down one time, and that I think was the first time I came over and was casting some new rods for him. He was outside on the porch. I was casting. I noticed he had tears in his eyes. He just wanted to cast so bad. He said, ‘I just wish I could do that one more time.'”

I just finished reading Al Gore’s book The Future. The book was based on 6 themes or what he refers to as “drivers” of the future: economic globalization, the digital revolution, climate change, dwindling natural resources, shifts in the global balance of power and advances in the life sciences.

I do not care about Al Gore’s political agenda. I honestly don’t know much about it. It is hard to take anyone who owns this house and this house seriously when they are talking about sustainability issues.  He is leaving a massive carbon footprint on this Earth. In addition, it is always smart to question anyone, but especially smart to question people who are discussing sustainability. “Greenwashing” is happening everywhere these days.

That being said, in my opinion, he hired and works with a fantastic research team. While the book was very dry and slow at times, it referenced many powerful books, people, and events throughout the Earth’s history.

The main theme in his book is that “American democracy has been hacked,” that Congress “is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.”

For those who care about future generations, I would like to highlight some of the points behind his six drivers of the future.

Earth Inc- Globalization:
Gore’s opinion is that the Earth is slowly moving towards being one large organization. Globalization has been going on for decades, and each day this world is getting more connected.  Gore argues that over time more people and countries will have equal access. Why? Gore says that the efficiency of out-sourcing, robo-sourcing, 3-d printing, sustainable capitalism, and technology are just starting to hit their strides.

The Global Mind- The Digital Revolution:
The Internet and the power of computers is taking over the Earth. We are living in what he calls, “the new period of hyper-change.” The Internet is slowly becoming “the Earth’s brain.” Democracy continues to expand around the globe through internet access. People in captive states are seeing feeds, pictures, and video of freedom, and they want it. Censoring countries from information and liberty will prove to be extremely hard in the future.

In addition to political relations facing a drastic change, education is improving by the minute with free online education. Health care is becoming much more efficient with everyone knowing how to use and operate a computer. There are downside risks: the world will be at major cyber risk with almost everything being monitored on a computer. Privacy will be limited and market transactions will continue to get faster.

Power in the Balance- Shifts in the Global Balance of Power:

“Over time the US will be in a constant relative decline.” Other countries are catching up and surpassing the United States in many fields. Africa, China and India’s populations are compounding at an incredible rate. While many of the US’s markets are tapped, these destinations have many raw and untapped natural resources.

Outgrowth: Dwindling Natural Resources

Resources are dwindling. City populations are compounding at a significant rate. Hunger and obesity rates are rising. Companies are being marketed heavily using the global mind. Waste and pollution levels are beyond alarming. Topsoil is disappearing. Farming is becoming harder in many areas. Dust storms and natural disaster rates are rising. Freshwater is slowly becoming harder to access. We need alternatives to combat these issues, fast.

The Reinvention of Life and Death- Advances in the Life Sciences:

Health care will continue to get much more efficient. Age levels will continue to rise due to new technology, cures, and better medicine. Cloning programs will expand to levels where humans will eventually be getting cloned. There will be a lot of “artificial life.” Genetic science mysteries will be solved. Knowledge of how the human brain works will expand. Science will allow for the creation of more artificial body parts including hearts and kidneys. Performance will continue to enhance– Humans will keep becoming “bigger, faster, stronger.” Blood doping will evolve and better performance drugs will continue to unfold. Fertility ethics will become more elaborate. Creation of better genetically engineered food will continue. Mutating plant diseases will expand.

The Edge– Climate Change

This according to Gore is Earth’s biggest issue. Renewable energy and alternative energy programs need to be stimulated, now. Temperatures are rising every year while bacteria and viruses are spreading with higher temperatures. Methane and CO2 levels are spiking in almost all areas of the Earth. Sea levels are rising exponentially. Islands are disappearing and will continue to disappear. Gas and oil drilling will continue to become more efficient and we will have plenty of resources to tap in the Arctic Ocean. He argues that we need to “Get real” and decrease greenhouse gases any way we can (especially decreasing drilling for coal and oil). Solar and wind production needs to pick up, now. Most importantly governments have to offer green companies incentives to do this work so that we can move away from the lobbyists controlling the energy sector.

Hope you enjoyed the breakdown. It’s nice to have some knowledge of where he thinks we stand and where we are potentially going.