It's 9AM
Time to unlock the gate
I made a noise the other day.
You know the one.
That low, creaky groan that escapes your lips when you bend down to pick up a dropped pen.
It sounded like an old door hinge that hasn’t seen oil since the Clinton administration.
The warranty on these joints expired a long time ago.
But while I was down there on the floor, contemplating the sheer effort it would take to stand back up, I started thinking about stiffness.
We worry a lot about our hamstrings getting tight and our backs getting rigid. But nobody talks about the mind.
Mental arthritis is a dangerous thing.
It starts with a little stubbornness, moves to complaining about how things are changing, and ends with total calcification of the imagination.
You get stuck in a rut, fighting the exact same battles every day.
And let’s be honest, most of those battles are entirely made up.
Have you ever played “The Floor is Lava” with your kids?
You build obstacle courses out of couch cushions because the carpet is suddenly deadly.
It’s a made-up problem.
As adults, we do the exact same thing.
We don’t live in caves anymore.
We aren’t actively running from lions or rival tribes.
We have food in the fridge and clean water from the tap.
So our monkey minds, hardwired to scan the horizon for danger, turn the floor into lava.
We get outraged at the guy driving ninety in a forty zone.
We panic over the newest algorithm update.
We stress about the massive, scrolling to-do list sitting on our desks.
I looked at my own list this morning while I drank coffee
that beautiful, magic dirt water that weaves a spell over the morning.
The list was packed with things that were almost done.
It reminded me of fighting a rusty brass padlock on my back gate this weekend.
I stood there in the humidity cursing a piece of metal because the key wouldn’t turn.
My Papaw used to tell me, “Don’t force the key. Clean the hole.”
He knew that most things in life don’t need a bigger hammer;
they just need a little maintenance.
Those “almost done” projects are the rust in your lock.
You leave them sitting there, confusing being busy with being productive.
You accept a draw for the day.
But we know a start that equals a draw is just an L in disguise.
When you let the monkey mind panic over the lava, you surrender the only thing you actually own: your control.
You cannot control the traffic or the politicians.
But you can 100 percent control the person in the mirror.
Stop trying to fix your entire year in a single day.
You don’t need it “Mo-Bettah-Fastah!”
Find your one percent improvement.
Rely on that plain old ass-in-seat grit.
Pick one rusty lock today.
Clean it out, turn the key, and finish the job.
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When you see things change, sometimes you need to know the WHY behind it