The Luckiest | The Direction of Intention

The Luckiest [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on September 24, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

And where was I before the day
That I first saw your lovely face?
Now I see it everyday
And I know that I am
I am, I am the luckiest

~ Ben Folds, The Luckiest

Late at night. We talked of going back in time. Way back. Way back to the day before a single event changed the trajectory of our lives. “Who was I on the day before?” she asked. “Who would I be now?” After a moment she added, “I want to remember what that felt like; what she felt like.”

This past decade has been the single hardest period of my life. It has also been the best. I now understand that, previous to this era, I was a dedicated runner-from-life. In grinding me to a fine powder, this magnificent universe has brought me to a standstill. Standing still.

I slow-walked through a grove of trees. I set down my backpack when I had one-of-those-moments: I wanted to be nowhere else, doing nothing else. I have those a lot lately.

I don’t get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns
The stumbles and falls brought me here

Who was I on the day before?

I wish I could reach back through time and tell him not to worry so much. I wish I could tell him what it feels like to be here, that all his running and lostness would eventually take him to stillness. Standing still even in the midst of chaos. A lover of simple things. I wish I could tell him that, even if he cannot yet see it, he is – and always has been – the luckiest.

read Kerri’s blogpost about HEART

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Do It For Yourself [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on January 11, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

I have been writing long enough to know that there are sedimentary layers to my themes. The top layer, the most superficial, is the political layer, current events. I am not above shouting into the storm. When I run to the keyboard and ring the alarm or presume that my point of view is relevant enough to roundly criticize others, I know that, above all, I’m breaking the first rule of happiness: I can never determine what another person thinks or does or feels. On my superficial days, in my ranting, I write for myself.

When I was at my saddest, I set about looking for goodness. I walked the streets of Seattle with the single intention of counting acts of kindness. As you might suspect there were more than I could count. In this world where we story ourselves as aggressive, unthinking and unkind, we are remarkably compassionate. Good will is simply more difficult to see. It is not the focus. The deeper layers of my writing-archaeology emerge when I direct my attention, when I exercise the artist in me and attempt to see beyond what I think. Since these are the layers where I desire to live and work, I suppose it is also true that on those days I also write for myself.

It is a looping life-lesson for me: I have the capacity to choose where I place my focus. I will see in the dark ocean where I decide to shine my light. I will author myself according to what/where I decide to give my focus. It is, among other things, why the film ABOUT TIME is among my favorite movies.

Lately, as one of our get-through-the-pandemic-winter-strategies, we’ve taken to assembling jigsaw puzzles. Entire evenings disappear into our intense pursuit of pieces. Our puzzle sessions require absolute focus – all of the other nonsense and monsters that vie to plague our brains are banished. Our focus is so thorough that we rarely speak. We do, however, listen to the soundtrack of ABOUT TIME. Again and again. When it finishes, one of us walks to the CD player (yes…we play CDs) and play it again. Sometimes we don’t make it past the first track, Ben Fold’s THE LUCKIEST. “Do you mind?” one of us asks. It’s a rhetorical question. It warms us so a repeat is always welcome.

Sitting at the dining room table, hunting for bits of colored cardboard, with the soundtrack playing, all things come into focus. While the surface-layer is on fire with a circus of instability, a pandemic, a climate that is changing, all jobs gone, a broken wrist that is not mending,…the deeper layer beckons: DogDog sits under the table, BabyCat is asleep on the chair, 20 just called and made us laugh, a postcard from Jen made us cry, my phone dinged with a text from a dear friend. I look across the table at my wife, pursing her lips as she plucks a piece of the puzzle from the table and attempts to make it fit, and I know to my bones that I am the luckiest.

To see it or not to see it; it’s my choice.

read Kerri’s blog post about REPEAT