On the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson used to do a bit using classified ads from newspapers, and one that I’ve never forgotten went something like this:

Lost Dog, 3 legs, has mange, missing one eye, answers to Lucky.

Time, circumstance, the cumulative impact of one thing that becomes many things, is all very real in all our lives, it’s just we may not realize it, or care to realize it. For absolute certain, in the biological, neurological, and practical domains, many things are happening to us, it’s our awareness of, or interest in them that varies.

As I have learned about consequential aspects of my health and injuries and conditions, and as I trial-and-error my way to learning to live with and strategize around them, there are infinitely more things happening inside me that are unknown to me, and that are, in fact, unknowable. This is always true, for all of us; no matter how much we know or think we know, we know so very little.

It is in this very existential reality that we find one another, none of us knowing much about where we’re headed, and most not caring to figure out where we’ve been and why. In this way, time is the only unifier among us.

How difficult is it to face this stark truth? To escape it, Bezos wants to colonize Mars, and many other Multi-Billionaires actively work very hard to extend the life span – theirs, not necessarily ours – and it’s mostly because they cannot bear the thought of not living their unprecedented-in-human-history privileged lives. How do we know that? Some come right out and say it, but we can also realize it in contrast when we think of all the other high-wealth people like Steve Jobs and Paul Allen who’ve come and gone before now, who faced the reality of their own mortality with practical acceptance, and used their awareness of it to finish as much work as they could, and set up perpetual access to the value of their work beyond their own lifespan.

Time laughs, and eventually takes us all.

And as time unifies us by alternately pushing, dragging, and lifting us forward – all of us together in one enormous mass of energy hurtling toward our eventual death – there are simple things we can all do that reliably slow things down and allow us to claim significance for ourselves, including and especially in the tedium of building self-care daily habits, without discipline to, we yield what micro-authority we have over our own positive outcomes, and the joyous journey of being present for our own experience in being alive.

For me, I do this by carrying with me into my many daily therapies the awareness of my own ignorance, the responsibility we each inherently have to capitalize on our own truths and knowns, and as I seek the common place where you and I might meet, in my mind and my heart and my soul, I run to that intersection where we can stand, together, certain only of the moment at hand, and letting, for now, all else go. I carry this awareness with me as I do my vision drills, my hip therapy, my balance work, my osteo bone loading, my cardio to build new neural circuits to replace those lost to 2nd-order-to-hip-injury illness.

I use adult coloring books for my vision convergence therapy, and as I work at my easel with 10000 lux light streaming into my eyes, every pencil stroke is a directive to my brain to  properly organize my eyes so I can color within the lines, and every pencil stroke is a prayer for you, for us, that we’re all together in helping ourselves be whole and happy with what we’ve got, with where we are, with who we are right now. As I finish one drawing, I start another, confrontational in its blankness, and for me this replicates the choice of how I approach each day; each day is blank until I fill it in, my mind is blank until I fill it in, and if I don’t have responsibility for filling it in the loudest, most aggressive information will flow right on into it, unimpeded, and that information will change my circuitry in real ways that are harmful to me and difficult to reverse.

In this way, me being disciplined to my various therapies inoculates more in me than the narrow purpose of each separate practice. Taken as a whole, my discipline to my daily therapies becomes a transcendent ritual of glorious awareness and connection, where in my mind I commune and rejoice and honor God and all my loves, helpers, teachers and guides, who have helped deliver me to this very moment in my life, and this happens in my mind as if it were real, this happens in my mind even though I’m super isolated, even though you have no way of knowing I’m doing it, even though it doesn’t directly manifest in a benefit beyond my own psychology, and ability to persevere.

But it builds into something more than its day-in-day-out parts.

I’m counting on me sticking to my trial-and-error process to figure out which therapies will help me, I’m counting on me figuring out how I can get myself stable enough to become self sufficient again, I’m counting on me coming back to meaningful service to others, I’m counting on my daily therapies to aggregate up into making my whole life matter, no matter how much of it remains. In this way, I experience micro-victories, all day long, almost every single day. Even though I’ve lost almost everything, when I am disciplined to my own self-care, I’m winning.

For now, I continue to Answer to Lucky.

I love you.