🎩 TREE 485: How do you do?

No one greets you with “How do you do?” anymore. But if someone did say that to me, I would love to answer that on my best days I wake up with gratitude for the life I live in my new home in Dursley, England which I share with Christine and our annoying/adorable cats. I think about my kids spread across America, Wales and England. I stretch and take pleasure in my body and how it moves in the world. I eat my peanut butter on toast and drink my tea consciously, enjoying the tastes and textures in my mouth. I open my computer to do my job as a designer marketing the services of one of the world’s best employer branding agencies and say, “What’s the game today?” Then I laugh because how gloriously ridiculous is my job? I design social posts and PDFs and ads for an agency that helps multinational companies to market themselves to potential employees. (How did a job like this come to exist?!) I spend the next eight hours creating stuff as if it was the most important activity a human could be doing at that moment. (Yesterday, I drew a sad clock.) I take deep satisfaction in doing my work well. I get frustrated when things don’t work the way I think they should. I cheer our team’s successes. At 5:30 PM, I close my computer and forget about it until tomorrow, unless my CEO who lives in San Diego has emailed me in the afternoon with some urgent task. In that case, I keep working. In one way, the work I do is directly connected to the livelihoods of 120 other people and indirectly to thousands. In another way, it’s utterly pointless. I hold both those thoughts in my head and give myself fully to doing the best, most creative work that I can. Because How I do is as important as what I do. But probably I would just say, “I’m good. How are you?”

What happens in the barrel, stays in the barrel.

Sometimes what you need on a Thursday morning is an absolute banger. (Spotify)

One of the things I love about the bible is that someone slipped in the book of Ecclesiastes.

“Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun – all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” —‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭9‬:‭7‬-‭10‬ ‭NIV

Grow slowly
Jeff