Every semester, the team at The Little Middle School lovingly prepares a detailed progress report for each of our students.

And every semester, I work so hard to ensure that I do not leave them until the last minute. If I do, I am absolutely sunk.

With twenty-something progress reports to perform the final edits on, they cannot be left until the last minute. You can’t leave twenty hours of work until the last minute — you’ll run clean out of minutes.

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My uncle, whom I quote all the time on this blog, has a saying that he shares with those who are uncertain about the future.

He says, “Do the next right thing. And when you don’t know the next right thing, do the next thing right.”

This solves a lot of problems. There are so many times that I’ve been unsettled and listless only to realize that I was making life way more complicated than it needed to be. All I needed to do was drive safely to my destination, slice this tomato evenly, or fold this towel.

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I have kept a diary for many years.

That enables me to go back at regular intervals to find out what I was doing and thinking in the past.

Often, I have looked up how things were “a year ago today.” The conceit is that I can marvel at the progress that I have made in that time.

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Once, I came back to my business location after several weeks away only to find a giant, dead tree.

I had a great team running things. And yet, when I walked up to the building, the first thing I saw was that the eighty-foot oak tree next to the front steps had brown leaves in the middle of summer.

Everything else was green. The dead tree was hard to miss. But no one else had seen it. Or if they had, they hadn't said anything about it.

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