progress

Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt — Second Wind

Fandango13 Comments

Esther Chilton’s writing prompt this week is mobile.

At seventy-two, Kevin, a widower for three years, had grown tired of sitting around his empty house and watching the same sun set behind the same fence. The days felt neatly folded, predictable as the bills stacked on his kitchen table. One afternoon, while sifting through old records, he dropped the needle on “Going Mobile” by The Who. The guitar’s restless energy filled the room, and something long dormant in him stirred awake.

By the second chorus, Kevin was standing. By the final note, he had made a decision.

Within three months, the house was sold, its memories packed into labeled boxes and handed off to his daughter. In its place sat a modest RV — off-white, slightly used, and full of possibility. Kevin named it “Second Wind” with a shaky flourish of a marker.

His first night on the road, parked beneath a sky so crowded with stars it felt almost theatrical, he realized how quiet freedom sounded. No ticking clocks. No neighbor’s dog. Just wind brushing past the vehicle like a whisper urging him onward.

He drove without urgency. Through deserts that stretched like unfinished thoughts, through towns where diners still served pie on spinning stools, through mountains that made him feel wonderfully small. At each stop, he collected fragments — a postcard, a story, a stranger’s laugh.

He wasn’t chasing anything. Not youth, not lost time. Just motion.

Months later, somewhere along a coastal highway, Kevin pulled over to watch the ocean crash against stubborn rocks. He played the song again, smiling as the familiar chords echoed through the RV.

For the first time in years, Kevin didn’t feel retired.

He felt in progress.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — August 15th

Fandango16 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term subscribers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about it? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on any day this past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on August 15, 2018. It was written in response to a One-Liner Wednesday prompt from Linda G. Hill. But as you’ll see, I used to write a lot more back in 2018 than just one-liners.

One-Liner Wednesday — Change

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”

Jessie Potter

That was the advice of Jessie Potter, an educator and counselor on family relationships and human sexuality. The context of his quote was about sex and love. He was asserting that change is needed in the American way of growing up, falling in love, raising a family, and growing old.

Similar statements have been attributed to a number of people, from Henry Ford to Tony Robbins and even to Albert Einstein, who also expressed a similar sentiment when he said:

“The world as we have created it is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein is also broadly credited with saying that:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

And Russian author Leo Tolstoy said:

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

All four of these quotes are about change. Changing the way you think, the way you act, and what you do. Because change is progress and failure to change is stagnation.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to get political in this post, but oh well. Conservatives generally don’t like change. They prefer to keep things the way they are — or the way they were, you know, like they used to be (“Make America Great Again”).

They don’t particularly like societal changes. They don’t embrace changing demographics. They deny climate change. They want the U.S. Constitution to be interpreted just as it was written around 230 years ago, as if time has stood still since 1787.

But change is as inevitable as the sunrise and the tides. And remember, if we fail to change, we stagnate.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt.

JYProvocative Question #13

Fandango7 Comments

Our host for the weekly provocative question challenge is Jewish Young Professional, aka JYP.

So what is her provocative question for this week? It’s about climate change. She points out that the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (also known as the 28th Conference of Parties of UNFCCC or “COP 28”) is underway. Specifically, JYP wants to know…

Do you think COP 28 will result in effective progress towards climate change goals?

Okay, my answer is going to sound very cynical, I admit.

So let’s see. Leaders and dignitaries and their staffs from all around the globe boarded their jet planes, both commercial jets and many privately owned jets, I’m sure. They flew to Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in the heart of the biggest oil-producing part of the world, then got in their giant, gas-guzzling limos to get to their hotels, and will, at the end of the conference take their limos back to the airports and board their jets and return to their home countries patting themselves on the back for wining and dining and glad-handing and meeting and discussing climate change for almost two weeks. Maybe there will be a few carefully worded resolutions passed that sound great but can’t be implemented in any meaningful way, much less enforced.

So will this conference result in effective progress toward climate change goals? Sure!

And if you buy that, I’ve got this bridge I want to sell you.

MLMM Photo Challenge — A Beautiful Day

Fandango18 Comments

“Grandpa,” Alyse said. “It looks like it’s turning out to be another beautiful day, today. Can we pick up some lunch and go have a picnic by the lake under the dome?”

“Blue,” Alyse heard her grandfather say. She looked up at him and saw that his eyes were moist.

“What did you say, Grandpa?” she asked.

“Blue,” he repeated. “They skies used to be blue,” he said. “Now the sky is always yellowish brown.”

“I know, Grandpa,” Alyse said. “You told me about how the skies were blue and about the stars you could see in the dark. But that was when you were a kid. With all of the development and progress, that’s no longer the case.”

“You mean with all of the pollution we’ve spewed into the air that is no longer breathable, the blue skies are gone forever and the stars are no longer visible.”

“I know you miss the old days, but this is the price we pay for progress,” Alyse said.

“I don’t want to pay that price anymore,” the old man said, tearing off his survival mask.

“No!” Alyse screamed as she reached for his mask and tried to fit it back over his head. But it was too late. He was gone.

Alyse sighed. What’s the big deal about blue skies and starry nights? she wondered. She read about them in the old books, but she’d never actually seen a blue sky or stars at night. And she was fine as long as she kept her survival mask on when she was outdoors.

Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Photo Challenge. Photo credit: unattributed.

FOWC with Fandango —Progress

Fandango24 Comments

FOWCWelcome to February 21, 2020 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “progress.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.

One-Liner Wednesday — Change

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63CC0F74-8C36-49B5-B3EE-43D27C6BA815“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”

Jessie Potter

That was the advice of Jessie Potter, an educator and counselor on family relationships and human sexuality. The context of his quote was about sex and love. He was asserting that change is needed in the American way of growing up, falling in love, raising a family, and growing old.

Similar statements have been attributed to a number of people, from Henry Ford to Tony Robbins and even to Albert Einstein, who also expressed a similar sentiment when he said:

“The world as we have created it is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein is also broadly credited with saying that:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

And Russian author Leo Tolstoy said:

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

All four of these quotes are about change. Changing the way you think, the way you act, and what you do. Because change is progress and failure to change is stagnation.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to go political in this post, but oh well. Conservatives generally don’t like change. They prefer to keep things the way they are — or the way they were, you know, like they used to be (“Make America Great Again”).

They don’t particularly like societal changes. They don’t embrace changing demographics. They deny climate change. They want the U.S. Constitution to be interpreted just as it was written around 230 years ago, as if time has stood still since 1787.

But change is as inevitable as the sunrise and the tides. And remember, if we fail to change, we stagnate.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt.

One-Liner Wednesday — A Round Tuit

Fandango12 Comments

IMG_2621“Someday is not a day of the week.”

Novelist Janet Dailey

My wife maintains a fairly robust “honey do” list. I tend to be a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to checking off the items on her list. When she periodically asks (bugs) me about what progress I’ve made on her list, I’ll often say something like, “I’ll get to it when I get around to it.”

One day she handed me a gift-wrapped box, which I excitedly opened. Inside the box, wrapped in tissue paper, was a wooden coin with the words “A Round Tuit” carved onto it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“You said you’d clean out the garage when you got around to it,” she answered. “So I got you a round tuit. Now you have no excuse.”

The last time she asked me if I’d done any of the tasks on her list, I told her that “I’ll get it done someday.”

She looked at the large calendar hanging in our kitchen and said, “I see Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, along with a number of other days, but I don’t see Someday. Can you show me where Someday is on this calendar?”

I can imagine novelist Janet Dailey confronting her husband when he tells her that he’ll get around to doing something on her honey do list someday, and throwing “Someday is not a day of the week” in his face.

Written for this week’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt from Linda G. Hill.