The state of it all

Hello friend—you’re receiving this email as a part of morning reading, a daily reflection on the parts of life worth living for that you signed up for sometime last year. I've got a laundry list of additions, designs updates, and website pieces I want to make, but ultimately, I just wanted to bring this back. Thank you for reading, and a very happy New Year. 

The State of it AllJanuary 16th

Good morning, friend. Anyone who has spent any amount of time working with their hands will be quick to tell you that things rarely come out square and level without concerted effort and attention.To lay something in correct order from the start requires attention and skill. And if skill is not present, then it requires even more attention, plus humility to boot—the knowledge that you might think something is wrong for weeks before having to admit it was correct. It’s even more work to lay in correct order if it was first laid out incorrectly—you have to undo the assumptions of someone else. Figure out what went wrong where. What corners were cut, what errors in reasoning and execution made. Then (and only then) can you begin to do the work, undoing first what was done before, then redoing it to make it right.But in building or crafting, the situation almost never arrises where your tasks was first intentionally made incorrectly by someone else. And made wrong in such a way that it would be the most difficult to fix. Where you now cannot simply figure out what went wrong, what was intended, and what must be done, but you must approach the situation like a bomb tech, figuring out what tripwires are in place to stop your progress.It’s easy to dismiss inequality—things not being laid equal—mostly because inequality is the natural state of things. It’s how the world works. And overcoming that inequality requires intention and planning.But we’d be missing part of the real work of Martin Luther King Jr. if we only looked at him as creating equality—because his work was not that of a craftsman starting with a blank slate, but rather that of someone trying to set a house level while others tried to intentionally keep it out of level. A work that seems truly heroic—and difficult—and then you look at it closer, and see it was a thousand times more heroic and difficult than you first imagined. Happy Birthday (a day late), Martin Luther King Jr. Journal Prompt: What's a problem or situation you feel like was broken before you even stepped into it? What was it like to try to sort it out?