The synthesizer can talk about what's happening. They have the ability to stand back, be silent, and see trends. They weave themes together. Do you have a synthesizer on your team?

Invite others to tell you what matters most to them, invite them to tell you who they are. Because when we invite people to tell stories, we give them the chance to reveal what it is they hope for, what they're afraid of and what they really want. 

If I ever have child (a boy I hope), I’ll tell him that if I did life again, I might have smelled the inside of my post office box.

Sometimes people notice me out on the porch and sometimes they keep walking. And maybe they notice me but they pretend they don’t – because I know I feel some ownership over this street and I know they must feel some right to park on it. So we’re cautious in our knowing and unknowing of the other people who pass along down the road.

I wonder when such an early morning hour became a time to wake up instead of the last moment when things could happen. I wonder why I believe that a good day is measured by things going according to plan and why we’ve started to find comfort in predicting tomorrow and why we applaud ourselves when we choose to not stay up late anymore because that’s an adult thing to do.

At this hour – still – there is something worth coming back to. It’s different everywhere, but the soft feeling is the same. At this hour, here, today, the motorcycle across the street catches light; the air smells like it’s been filtered through leaves.

I’ve always been interested in the difference between regular teachers and extraordinary teachers. Beyond all of the external pressures that teachers face – in addition to a regular life they’re trying to live – they consistently prioritize the things that matter over the things that are measured.

But there comes a time (say, one year with no sofa) when one realizes that the idea of something is never going to equal the arrival of something or the remaining of something. It can’t. We play this trick on ourselves and create these pressures and don’t allow life to flow up against us because we’re too busy trying to channel life into what we want it to be.

When we’re growing and changing we don’t always see the good because it hurts. Sometimes it takes someone else to name it – to call the good out of the ether and let everyone know that there really is a song they’ve been dancing to. There really is this thing that’s drawing us together.

I don’t think we have to slow down and stop searching when we start to feel uncomfortable or when we want security or when we get closer to our thirties. But what I’m trying to say is I think there comes a point where we have to realize that the adventure – the story – the thing we’ve been chasing through college towns, down European streets and across the rolling prairie – isn’t as far away as we think.

But while we sat there, the rest of the world went on outside. The whole neighborhood sat in the shade as their kids ventured to the border of the leaf cover and sprayed passing cars with water hoses. People took slow walks and stood with their arms crossed at the edge of the driveway once the sun dipped behind our house, the embers of their cigarettes like fireflies.

It was that summer while we drug dead animals out from underneath houses, chased cats, built fences and climbed up into attics with electrical wires looped through our belt buckles that we figured out something new – something like the understanding of what it is to work next to someone, to find purpose in silent toil and quiet struggle.

And, somehow that morning there was fog on the flat desert of Odessa. Birds gathered it up in their feathers and I sat there for the last time at my grandparents’ kitchen table with no vision out of the windows. I was wholly there – because I had to be.

If the future can become the present, if we can learn for once to not imagine things that don’t exist, if we can remove ourselves from the worry of a world that hasn’t ever been a reality – the future can be now.

Night might be the collection of unfocused breaths released in sleep – drawn from the echo-chamber of unconscious thought.

The first move, the one when you’re really out of the house, that’s a big one. You find yourself with the things you left behind before, now trudging along forward with them. Before, they were like deposits of yourself, little idols of permanence you used to weight your memory in the spaces of your childhood. 

You have become extraordinary, small house – for in the night, in the morning, in the twilight moment when I’m not sure I should turn on the lights – you are a conduit of living, all good and true hours happen in you.

When you arrive someplace new and it’s at night, you smell those smells of combustion and you’re tired and you’re not sure if it was worth it, this Risk, this Leaving you’ve done. But registered in your olfactory is the memory of what happens next - the new morning.

Along the edge of the large darkness pushes the first red line, come to snuff the street lights and string the cold-weather birds along their dotted-line flight toward morning places.

 I wonder if he still looks at life as hard as he once did. I wonder if it’s possible to slap our hands against the present and shout ¡Mira! on a daily basis or if we must lose the blueness, if we must lose the wonder.