We were sitting as usual, on Miss Lynn’s back deck, but not even the calm air of the overhanging trees could slow me down… and I am afraid that most of her neighbors were overhearing me. “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary. Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.” I quoted from the article on my phone. “I mean what is wrong with these people!? Who even talks like that, let alone preaches stuff like that to others?”

“The same people who think like that,” Miss Lynn quipped back. She was finding my outrage amusing, which of course created its own kind of outraging. So I just watched her swing calmly in her “thinking chair” and felt my ire build until I could take no more.

“But the guy saying this is a preacher,” I cried, trying to make myself clear. “He’s got followers who like… follow him! I mean, he's basically telling his followers that empathy is a tool of hell. Like caring about people is literally doing the devil's work, so go ahead and stop trying to understand people. Like alienating others is what God requires of you.”

She shifted in her seat, leaning forward. “So who is this preacher again?”

I glanced down at my phone to verify his name. “Some guy named, Pastor Josh McPherson.” I read further. “It says here that he’s Executive Pastor of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington. He also produces a really popular podcast called, ‘Stronger Man Nation.’” I looked up to add, “He’s apparently really big in the whole Christian Nationalism scene.”

“Oh, him,” She shrugged and shifted again. “Well, I think you might be asking the wrong question about ‘that guy’. It’s not about something being wrong with him… or any of his followers.”

“So what is it about?” I scowled.

She looked at me squarely. "The question isn't what's wrong with them. The question is why — in their reasoning — does empathy make you a tool of hell? What is the logical chain that gets you from 'try to understand people' to 'you are now doing the devil's work'? Because, strangely enough, it does contain a kind of twisted logic."

“You’re gonna have to explain that logic to me then, ‘cause from here it feels more than just twisted,” I replied, still skeptical. However, Miss Lynn’s little sidebars usually land me somewhere, so I was willing to hear her out.

This time she sat fully forward… legs splayed on the ground before her, hands folded in front of her, elbows resting on her knees. “Okay, let me see if I can explain the thought process as I understand it: In Leviticus 18:22, the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination," therefore homosexuality, among a whole lot of other things, is a sin. When you empathize with someone who is a homosexual, you are in danger of sympathizing with him, and thereby opening your heart to sin and all the fires of hell. Since there is that danger, empathy itself becomes a dangerous corruptor, and that's how you get from Leviticus to ‘empathy aligns you with hell.’ At least I think that’s the logic.”

“Hmm,” I considered the reasoning… I tried reconnecting A to B to C, but couldn’t do it. “But that’s just crazy logic,” I declared confidently.

“The logic makes sense; you just disagree with the premises.”

“Dang right I do… that’s like saying being gay is catching and empathy is the path to catching it... anybody who's ever spoken to a gay person knows it’s not catching.”

“But you see, you’ve hit the essential point right there—it’s not catching. And the whole point of the doctrine is to keep people from realizing that… to keep people afraid of reaching out and talking to the ‘sinning’ community, because once you get to know and empathize with all those sinners, you might start to question how much of an abomination they are… which is of course the ultimate sin.”

I felt my eyes narrow. “So it’s about not questioning the church’s authority?”

“The Bible as that particular denomination interprets its authority, yes.”

I felt something nag me. “But Elon Musk,” I began. “He doesn’t strike me as a very religious man, and I don’t think he’s a Christian Nationalist, so why is he so against empathy. I know that on some podcast he said something about how empathy was a ‘fundamental weakness of Western civilization.’ I think he even said that we’ve all got a kind of ‘civilizational suicidal’ complex going on, all caused by our empathy. So where would he have come up with such a mixed-up idea?”

“Oh,” she snorted a dismissive grunt. “I’m pretty sure that comes from Ayn Rand and the whole Libertarian movement.”

“I’ve heard of her, but I don’t know why.”

“You’ve probably heard of her because her philosophy of ‘Rational Self-interest’ is all over politics these days. The Koch brothers in particular adore her stuff, and have spent billions promoting her ideas… with think tanks… with judges… with congress… with media. ‘Rational Self-interest’ is there, just given a different name.”

“So what is it?” My nose was scrunched… like it gets when I’m smelling a bad smell.

“It’s basically an ideology which allows Musk to think that empathy turns us all into weak whining babies who need to grow up and figure out how life really works.”

“Huh?”

She looked at me and sighed, “Ayn Rand was a Russian-born novelist who moved to the United States in the late 1920s. She's probably most famous for two of her novels: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In both novels, and in all of her other writings and interviews, she espoused a philosophy that she called Objectivism, which holds that Rational Self-interest was man's only rationally acceptable objective moral code. Her argument included the idea that one’s own life and happiness should be one’s highest value, and so one owes nothing to anyone else.”

I could feel myself frowning. “I don’t understand the logic there? Why would valuing your own happiness preclude owing people things?”

“I don’t think Rand claimed happiness precluded owing people things. It was the moral obligation pushed on people that bothered Rand. She’s not against generosity per se… what she’s against is the idea that we are morally obligated to be generous — that other people’s suffering creates a claim on what you’ve earned. Rand said: nobody has a right to what you’ve built — which assumes, of course, that what you’ve built you’ve also built entirely alone. It was later interpreters of her work who promoted the idea that empathy is nothing more than a tool people use to make you believe that you do have a moral obligation to help others.”

“But I don’t feel like empathy requires me to help others… it’s just that when people get hurt, you want to see it made right.”

“And they would argue that you feel that way because you have been trained to feel that way… that you’ve essentially been brain washed. They would further inform you that your desire to ‘see things made right’ is neither natural, nor moral. It's installed… nothing more than a manufactured guilt dressed up as conscience in order to manipulate you into giving up what is yours by right.”

I thought about the Rand argument for quite a long time, and I mean really thought about it. I reached down to every empathetic bone in my body, turned what little I knew of Ms. Rand’s philosophy from Miss Lynn’s explanation into a tight fitting jacket and tried it on. I wiggled my shoulders and tested the jacket… it felt somehow stiff… and stale… and unforgiving. My conclusion? “It makes me wonder if they’ve ever really even felt anything like real empathy, cause that’s not what it feels like to me at all. Empathy doesn’t make me feel guilty about anything… it just makes me feel wise.”

Now, Miss Lynn doesn’t bust up laughing very often, but when she does bust up, she really busts. I mean like knees tucked up to your ears, chest heaving rollicking guffaws. And I guess that something about what I’d said hit a nerve, ’cause that’s exactly what she did, and there was nothing for it but to wait until she could come up for air.

And, of course, when she did come up for air, I only had one question to ask, “Why?”

She wiped a tear from her eye before answering, “Because you only needed one sentence to explain what a doctoral candidate would have needed pages to do… you noticed the argument was about two different things entirely.… no convoluted argument… just, “if that’s what they think about empathy then they’re describing something else entirely and we are not talking about the same thing… a whole philosophical argument caught up in nothing more than semantics.”

“So I said something smart?”

“You noticed, without noticing that you noticed, that the empathy they are describing is not the empathy you hear when someone like Musk says empathy is the destroyer of civilization… which explains your outrage and his disconnect. You are both operating from distinctly different life experiences and definitions.”

"So in my world, I define empathy as," I was careful here. I wanted to get my definition just right, and it took me quite a few tries before I could put it into words. "Not a feeling really but maybe a framework… a way of thinking… or a set of skills that I've developed to help me see the worlds that others see, so that I can truly understand why they act, or think the way they do. It helps me fill in the limitations of my own world, and it helps me make better decisions when it comes to how I treat others." Yes, that felt right. I looked up, seeking approval for something that didn’t need her approval.

She smiled, and simply asked, “And how do you think Mr. Musk defines it? Or Pastor McPherson for that matter?”

Dang, time to put on a few more jackets, none of them fun… but as Miss Lynn used to have to remind me… you don’t have to keep the jacket, you just try it on for a bit. “Mr. Musk, huh?” And I thought about it… what had his world taught him about empathy?

I started picking through what I knew of his life in my thoughts: ‘Apartheid, South Africa, wealth, influence… wealth as influence… Ayn Rand… He might roll it all together into a world that wants to take stuff away from him… and he might feel the need to hold on to what he has because he is afraid that people will take it away... like they took it from his Dad. In that world, empathy would be a weakness, right? I mean, if I start to feel for you, you can influence me and that would make me weak. He might even think that empathy has destroyed the world of his childhood and it was out to destroy him… interesting. But how to put the definition I’d uncovered into words?’

‘… And what about McPherson? I didn’t know enough about him to get a good feel for his jacket… I mean, what did I know about people who grew up in fundamentalist households?’ It was hard to put my finger on him because each of the denominations are so different. ‘Let’s try on the argument,’ I thought. ‘… Someone who believes that if I empathize with someone that the Bible tells me is an abomination then I am somehow aligning myself with hell… why would that be…’ I felt my mind fumbling. ‘… Hell is where the Devil is and the devil is temptation… perhaps empathy aligns you with temptation and makes you more inclined to give into it… that was one possibility… but there was another one that nagged me…’

‘… Something fundamentalist households tended to have in common… centered on obedience to God… the father in charge… the mother as nurturer… the children as needing protection from outside influence… a world where doubt was the ultimate sin. How might that color the Pastor’s definition of empathy? Why did he find it so dangerous for his children to empathize with sinners? Because they might end up understanding the sinners? Even liking them? Perhaps it would redefine their definition of abomination, and it would no longer match his? Would they start to question their church doctrine. In a church in which doctrine is everything, that kind of questioning can lead to doubt…’

‘And in both cases… empathy sort of felt like some wild emotion that could overtake people… making them weaker… making them doubt... Empathy for them was not a skill, not a choice… it was just an inconvenient human emotion that could cloud their worlds.’

“I think I’ve got it now,” I said eventually. “They both consider empathy an emotion, not a skill. And worse, they both conceive of emotions as some kind of force that can overwhelm people if they're not careful… so emotions are to be controlled, not explored. Plus, it goes completely against the whole William James take on emotions… you know, the whole discovery that ‘human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives,’ and how by changing our focus we can change our attitudes.”

Miss Lynn was smiling her sly smile again, “And I think you have also caught the one thing both are afraid of when they lambast empathy.”

“Have I?”

“Change… they’re both dead set against change… and that’s exactly what empathy brings about… change.”

“I don’t know,” I pushed back. “I can see that being true of a man like McPherson… but I’m not so sure about Musk. It seems like he’s all about change. He's building rockets, colonizing Mars, reshaping government — that's radical change.”

“Yes, but change on his terms… serving his vision. Not the kind of change that empathy brings about.”

“Hmm,” it felt right. “There’s still one thing I can’t figure out. How the whole empathy relates to Ayn Rand. I don’t think she feared that kind of change… in fact wasn’t she advocating for it?”

“Good point, and it’s important to note that she never talked about empathy—that came later when people started to build worlds based on her vision. No, Rand’s pet peeve was altruism, which she defined as the belief that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. She held that ‘Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation.’ Much more interesting if you ask me.”

“So she wasn’t against empathy?”

“Not at all, at least I don’t think so… in fact, she made a big deal of things like kindness. She said, ‘Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will, or respect for the rights of others.’ She was not against kindness or generosity. She was against the moral obligation to sacrifice yourself for others. It felt manipulative to her… fake… a control placed on man, by man, to control man.”

“Hmm.” I considered. “That feels much better than the whole empathy thing that the others go on about. I can even see why it would be appealing. I suppose she would have said empathy is fine, so long as you have a choice…. which I think I do.”

“So do you think our diagnosis, our thesis if you will, holds up?”

“We’ve got a thesis?”

“I think we do, don’t we.”

I thought about it, “I suppose our thesis would be that we are both arguing from different definitions of empathy. One which says it’s a force that can overwhelm us if we are not careful, the other claiming that it’s a skill we can successfully learn to help us gain more understanding. We both agree that empathy causes change, but we disagree about the cost benefit of that change. They seem to believe the change is mostly bad, while you and I both agree that the change is mostly good. Does that hold up?”

“It holds up as a thesis, but will our thesis hold up under close scrutiny? Is empathy an emotion we feel, or is it more of a skill? Does it bring about beneficial change, or disruptive change? And, I would add, is it possible that it brings about a bit of both depending on where you are standing?”

“So how do we scrutinize it?” I felt stumped; this empathy thing was proving exhausting. “I mean in the end… they’re both just opinions.”

“Well,” Miss Lynn was saying, “There is a lot of research on empathy… perhaps we should look into it… I mean if it really matters to you…” she left her question hanging.

I was a bit taken aback by her words: Did it matter to me?

Truthfully, I was no longer sure. Indeed truthfully, I’d forgotten how our conversation had started. Or why I’d even brought the subject up? And in that instant, I remembered the outrage that I’d felt, and how that outrage was now gone. At some point during our conversation, my outrage had been consumed by… what… curiosity? Compassion?

I peeked up at Miss Lynn. She wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing off into the distance, seeing who knows what… simply waiting for my verdict. “I suppose,” I said hesitantly, “that by research you mean homework, and by homework, you mean mine.”

“I do,” she replied, still staring toward the roof deck. Was she watching a spider spin?

“What would I need to defend?” I asked.

“Well,” she turned slowly toward me. “You’ve made some pretty strong statements about Musk and McPherson’s worldviews based on what evidence we have. It might be good to look for evidence that either supports or refutes your empathic predictions. You have also made claims about your definition of empathy versus theirs. It might be good to back up that claim with research. And finally you claim that your definition of empathy is accurate, and that they are mistaken in their definition. Seems like you might need a lot of evidence to back that statement up since it is essentially the heart of the matter. Are you up for that?”

I thought about the schoolwork currently on my to do list… this would add one more thing to an already huge pile… was I up for it? I was somehow doubtful. But then I remembered… research was also a process… there would be no, “Wow I am done moment,” because research on life is ongoing. Plus, when you are curious about something, you’re naturally going to ask questions… meaning more research on my part was inevitable.

“Yeah, I’m up for it,” I told her confidently. “I’ll bring you everything that I can find about it along with me when we meet next week.” No, guarantee that I would complete an assignment… just a promise to bring what I could find. Sometimes good enough, really is good enough.

(Stay tuned for Part Two in this week’s Midweek Navigational Nudge)

Footnotes and References:

¹ Pastor Josh McPherson — Executive Pastor and founder of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington, and founder of Stronger Man Nation, a men’s ministry podcast and conference platform with over 380,000 Instagram followers. The quotes cited here are from a January 2025 podcast episode in which McPherson and two other pastors discussed empathy in the context of Christian nationalism. For further coverage see NPR’s March 22, 2025 piece “How Empathy Came to Be Seen as a Weakness in Conservative Circles.”

² Elon Musk on empathy — The quotes referenced here are from Musk’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, February 2025. The full context of the conversation was about immigration and voter ID policy, though the statement about empathy as civilizational weakness has been widely cited independently of that context.

³ Ayn Rand and Objectivism — Rand’s definition of altruism comes from multiple primary sources including The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982). The specific quotes cited — “Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade” and “Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will, or respect for the rights of others” — are both verified primary source quotations from those works. For a comprehensive overview of Rand’s philosophy see the Ayn Rand Lexicon at aynrandlexicon.com.

⁴ The Koch Brothers and Libertarian infrastructure — The funding of libertarian think tanks including the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation by Charles and David Koch is extensively documented. For a detailed account see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Doubleday, 2016.

⁵ William James — The quote as the student repeats it — "human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives" — circulates widely as a James attribution but does not appear verbatim in his verified writings. The sentiment is consistent with his philosophical pragmatism and his work on the relationship between thought, habit, and behavior, particularly in The Principles of Psychology (1890) and his lecture series Talks to Teachers(1899). It is best understood as a paraphrase of his ideas rather than a direct quotation.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

If you recall, last Sunday I left you with this map…

… And an unfulfilled promise.

Well, the time has come to fulfill that promise and answer the question: What do we do when we realize that a hoped-for change in a situation or relationship is really just an unrealistic expectation?

So let’s review the map before I tell you about my conversations with Miss Lynn. You will notice that the map contains seven ports. Their names, in a very precise order, are: Annoying, Frustrating, Unreliable, Untrustworthy, Harmful, Toxic, and Dangerous. They represent the kinds of relationships you are likely to run into during your lifetime… and luckily most of us hang around the lake. You will only really run into a few who live alongside the rapids. That being said, it is important that we talk about what you should do if you find yourself anchored at one of these ports.

Or at least that is how I explained the map to Miss Lynn when I showed it to her.

“An intriguing way of explaining your concept,” was all she said, but I think she was a tad impressed with the work I’d done. We were on her back deck with the map laid out on her picnic table. It was one of those days which can’t decide between rain or sun.

“But do you think it’s good?” I insisted.

“Yeah, I think it’s pretty unique—a nice visual reference.”

“And you can help me fill it out?”

“Fill it out?”

“Yeah… like make sure my advice is sound? That I don’t leave anything out?”

“A sounding-board you mean?”

“Yeah… kinda.”

“I suppose I could give it a shot,” she said moving over to the hanging swing that was her thinking chair. “So, what advice were you planning to offer for handling situations that are mildly annoying?” she added, curling her legs inside its seat.

“Well,” I began, “I think the first step for handling any of these situations would have to be noticing that the situation does exist and giving it a grade.”

“Obviously,” she nodded.

“Last Sunday, I sent out a post which gives people a tool for doing that,” I went on.

She held up a finger, “I know. I read it.”

“What did you think?” I’m pretty sure I was holding my breath.

She didn’t answer right away, but sat there softly frowning, as if she was really considering her answer. That’s one of the things that I most hate and like about Miss Lynn; she really tries to never give me sloppy answers.

Eventually her answer came, “I think you managed to distill a very complex mythology into a brief and delightful romp.”

“But the advice?!” I insisted, moving to my own thinking chair… identical to hers and placed at a perfect angle for literally hanging out together. She’d bought it as a surprise one day partly because she’d known I’d love it, but mostly to keep me from bogarting hers. “The whole flip the word hope with the word expect, and see how it feels?”

Again the silence, again the wait. “I think,” she began slowly. “I think that I might be a little bit proud that you took my annoying pet peeve to heart and have been using it so admirably.”

I let myself breathe, and sank into my chair, “And the science holds up?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she nodded. “What you’ve been doing intuitively is actually well documented in cognitive psychology. It falls under what researchers call linguistic framing.” She glanced at me. “That’s where the specific words we choose don’t just describe our thinking, they shape it. When you change one word, you literally change how your brain processes the situation. So when you swap ‘hope’ for ‘expect,’ you’re not just playing with words. You’re changing the cognitive frame. Hope is soft enough that the brain lets it through without scrutiny. Expectation, on the other hand, demands evidence. And the moment you demand evidence from yourself — your brain already knows whether it has any.”

“And that’s the little voice that shouts back at you?” I asked, excited. “The voice that tells you that you’ve been duping yourself?”

“Yup,” she confirmed with a grin.

“Okay, so once people decide a situation will not change on its own they grade it…”

“…and that is where your map can come in,” she nodded with encouragement.

“And so we land at the first port, Annoying,” I paused there, kind of stumped.

“So how do you handle all those mildly annoying situations? All those piddling habits that, like it or not, we all share?”

“I try to remind myself that nobody is perfect and that I need to get over it.” Miss Lynn’s nose curled… like she smelled something off. “What?” I asked immediately. “That’s cognitive reappraisal right? When you look at something objectively and reframe it in your mind.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, cognitive reappraisal can work wonders… but sometimes it feels kind of like giving yourself a lecture, constantly correcting yourself, like there’s something wrong with feeling annoyed occasionally.”

“But isn’t there evidence that getting annoyed all the time is unhealthy?”

“There is quite a bit of research suggesting that constantly ruminating on ‘how annoying everything and everybody in the world is can be unhealthy. But those little flashes of annoyance when you encounter something annoying? There is no evidence that those are unhealthy. In fact, there is strong evidence that allowing yourself to feel those flashes, and more importantly listening to what those flashes are telling you, is far healthier than trying to train yourself out of them.”

“Huh,” I was stumped.

“So cognitive reappraisal is out?”

“Absolutely not,” she shook her head. “Cognitive reappraisal, when done properly, can absolutely be effective. Just be careful,” her eyes suddenly twinkled. “Maybe give it a little Socratic Twist.”

“How do you mean?”

“How about I give you an example,” the twinkle deepened. “You tell me something mildly annoying that those roommates of yours do, and I will show you how it works.”

I thought back, and immediately the vision of a dirty-dish-and-crumb-filled kitchen filled my mind, even though I had left it spotless. I told her about the towering mess I would likely find.

“No,” she shook her head. “I would file that under frustrating, not mildly annoying. Mildly annoying is more like leaving the toilet seat up or never refilling the kettle. But when people start taking advantage of your willingness to clean up after them… that is gonna need something more than merely talking yourself out of it. Try again. Think of something that is just mildly annoying.”

“How about if they start talking to you when you’re in the other room, always expecting you to come to them?” I suggested.

“Excellent!” she smiled. “So what do you usually do when that happens?”

“I usually sigh and join them in the other room.”

She made a sound like a game show buzzer telling me I had the wrong answer. “Never again,” she told me sternly. “First you note the annoyance, then you ask yourself a question about it. Something like: ‘What bugs me so much about this situation?’ And that, in its simplest form, is cognitive reappraisal with a Socratic twist.”

“What does asking a question about it do?”

“First, it moves your thought out of the amygdala, where all those pesky emotions like annoyance reside, and sends them firmly to your prefrontal cortex where all your clever critical thinking tools hang out. In fact,” she added with a laugh, “I’ve found that it doesn’t even matter if I find an answer. Just asking the question, actually thinking about an answer, gets me out of the slight funk and into a more constructive frame of mind.”

“So why does their calling me from the other end of the room bug me so much?” I asked, suddenly curious.

“You tell me,” she offered.

I thought back… “It’s the assumption they are making about my coming to them,” I concluded at last.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked mischievously. “Use what you know about Reflection,” she added when I frowned.

“Reflection?” I thought, confused. “What I say about others is a reflection of my beliefs… what was it about my beliefs that I found annoying? What was I assuming about myself? That I had to respond? But why? Why did I always have to respond?” Ding, ding, ding… a light went off in my brain. “I don’t have to respond,” I said aloud. “I could just call back that I’m in the other room, and leave the rest to them.”

“Do you see now why I love a dash of Socrates with everything?” She was full on grin now.

“Like salt,” I grinned back.

“So the next time you feel that flash of annoyance when they call, what are you gonna do?”

“I am gonna call back that I am in the other room, and continue with whatever I have been doing.”

“No more letting their needs supersede yours?”

“I will certainly give it a try,” I admitted honestly.

“Good… remember though,” she added more seriously, “you got lucky this time. You actually found a useful answer. That won’t happen every time. But finding the answer doesn’t always matter. The questioning itself is what does the work. Just asking, ‘why does this bug me?’ moves you out of the amygdala and into your thinking brain. The funk shifts whether you find an answer or not.”

“Good to know, cause I am pretty sure there won’t always be an answer.”

She shrugged, “Sometimes the best answer comes when you ask, ‘Do I really want this to ruin my mood?’ Or your focus for that matter. I know that’s what happens to me when I get annoyed. I start focusing on how annoyed I am and the next thing you know, I’m making all kinds of mistakes. I have to do things twice. I have to redo things, or start over. I tell you it’s usually just not worth it… getting annoyed. And sometimes, just realizing that helps me to snap out of it.”

“But what if you can’t snap out of it? What if no matter what you tell yourself, or ask yourself, you still wanna just rip something apart.”

She shot me a knowing look, “Well then my guess is that you are not just mildly annoyed anymore, and you might just be moving down that map of your towards…”

…frustrated,” she let me finish the thought.

“Which, if I recall correctly, is the second port on your map.”

Of course she recalled it. I swear the woman has one of those eclectic memories… and before you go telling me I got the wrong word… think about it. “Cool,” I clapped my hands together. “So for how we can deal with people who are frustrating, I suppose that’s where we have to learn how to set and enforce effective boundaries… which can be downright scary for some people.”

She held up a finger, so I paused to let her add, “I think that it might be good to point out here that if setting boundaries is scary for you it is either because you never had boundaries modeled for you effectively, or you have actually been in situations where attempting to set a boundary can be either physically or psychologically dangerous… which brings us a long way down that river of yours towards those rapids.”

“Right,” I nodded, adding a mental note. “So it would be important for people to notice where their fear might be coming from before they start setting any boundaries.”

She nodded back, “Plus, as with anything new, people who are scared of setting boundaries should begin with an easy situation, maybe even role-play a few times with a friend, until setting them starts to feel more natural.”

“I knew that I needed to go over this stuff with you before publishing,” I admitted shyly. She made no comment, just waited. “Okay,” I clapped my hands again. “So, for setting boundaries, I figured you’d want to mention that ‘Three strikes you’re out’ thing you’re always modeling, and maybe the ‘Complement Sandwich’ thing again.”

“That’s a lot for one nudge,” she warned. “Besides, we’ve talked about the Three Strikes a lot in the past, so maybe just stick with one of them.”

“The Compliment Sandwich?”

“Except these days, I’ve started calling it a Four-Layer Sandwich. Gotta keep up with the latest research,” she added with a grin.

“So what does the latest research say?”

“It says that when delivered without sincerity, a Compliment Sandwich tends to sound stilted, prepared and fake. It’s got a kind of, ‘I really love the work you’ve been doing but…’ feel. Not a great way to start an effective discussion.”

“And the new research fixes the problem?”

“It attempts to,” she nodded slowly. “The Four Layer Sandwich combines the Compliment Sandwich with two other techniques that psychologists have found more effective. One technique is called SBI, and it stands for situation, behavior, and impact. The second is called GROW, which is an acronym for goals, reality, options, and way forward.”

“That’s a lot of words.”

“It is indeed a lot of words,” she laughed. “But when you understand how they work, you can see their psychological beauty.”

“Show me…”

“Okay,” she uncurled her legs and sat forward, her hands laced in front of her. “Let’s role-play that dirty kitchen scenario of yours and see what might happen. You be them, and I’ll be you serving up a delectable Four Layer Sandwich.”

“Okay,” I leaned in as well. “Set the scene.”

“First, I’m not gonna meet with the group of you. One person at a time and always when that person is alone. You don’t want people feeling like they’re being ganged up on. Also, make sure that you’re not interrupting them. Nothing is more annoying than someone coming up and saying, ‘I have something really important I need to tell you…’ Pick your battles carefully and be sure your timing is right. Make sense?”

I nodded silently.

“Second, you still begin with something positive… something that relates to the situation…. maybe I say something like, ‘Hey, do you have a minute? Because you’re great at solving problems, and I’ve got a doozy.’”

“So instead of the compliment, you are giving them their role as problem solver,” I repeated, kind of amazed at how open I was already feeling after receiving such a respectful title.

“Exactly.” She hid a grin. “Next I introduce the situation causing the problem, the actual behavior that is causing the problem, and the impact the behavior is having on the house. So it might be something like, ‘Have you noticed how often the kitchen is left all messy? I mean just this morning, I spent what felt like an hour doing a sink full of dishes, but when I came home, the bread was left out, there were crumbs all over the place, and there were more dishes in the sink. It’s got me so I dread to come home sometimes.’”

She waited for me to nod, before adding, “Did you notice that at no point in my SBI did I use an accusatory you statement? I merely explained the specific details of the situation, the specific behaviors causing the situation, and the impact that those behaviors were having on me.”

“So you aren’t blaming me,” I confirmed, and indeed I could feel the difference. “You’re simply explaining the problem and basically asking for my help in finding a solution.”

“Right, and that’s when I ask you to help me GROW… goals, reality, options, and way forward.” She ticked the four words off on her fingers. “Which basically means that I ask you to answer the following four questions with me: “What do we each want to come out of this conversation? Where are we both honestly right now? What are some solutions we might try? And what are we each willing to commit to going forward?”

“So I would say something like, ‘I would just like the kitchen to stay clean between uses.’ And then I would ask, ‘What would you like to see happen?’”

“Perfect. And then you talk about it…both your side and their side without judgement or blame. This is what is happening. This is how we both contribute. These are some things we might try. And these are the things we will try.”

“But what if they don’t want to talk about it, and their only solution is for you to get over yourself?”

“Well that, my friend, is when you make a mental note to move the relationship you have with that person a bit further down that river of yours… somewhere closer to unreliable, or untrustworthy.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “And the final layer?” I asked. “Another genuine compliment?”

“Yep, something like, ‘I always appreciate being able to be straight with you. You’re a really good friend and always ready with a laugh.’” She sat back in her swing, adding, “What do you think of my new sandwich?”

“I think that I am gonna need a lot of practice,” I admitted dryly, but truthfully I was a little impressed. Then suddenly, I found myself frowning, “So I would have to do that with all of them, each individually?”

“It’s best if you start out that way. And who knows, maybe one of the suggestions for how to move forward would be to have a house meeting to discuss pet peeves and brainstorm solutions together. Really, the options you decide to go with are only limited by your imaginations. The point is it would be a group decision and not a dictate from above. Each of the parties would have input and therefore part ownership of any decisions.”

“Cool,” my frown faded. “So I guess that means we can move to the unreliable people and how to handle them.”

Miss Lynn waved her hand in the air. “Now this is where I’d bring in the old ‘Three Strikes You’re Out,’” she told me confidently. “Unreliable people aren’t necessarily malicious or cruel. It’s more likely that they’re just absent minded. They’re simply undependable, so when you hit the third strike, you just recognize the fact, and plan your life accordingly. Don’t even have to confront them about it… unless you really want to. Just know it in your heart to always have a backup plan.”

“Wow,” I leaned back startled. “That was fast. So, how would you handle someone who is untrustworthy?”

“Hmm,” she considered, still contemplating her waving hand. “Probably also with ‘Three Strikes,’ but in this case a bit more forcefully.”

“How do you mean, more forcefully?”

“Well, if they were actively working against me, I would have to confront them directly, wouldn’t I? A sort of, ‘I know what you have been doing, if you do it again, this will be my reaction,’ kind of thing. And if what they’ve been doing is really serious, they don’t even need a warning. A simple, ‘I know you’ve been stealing, so I’ve changed the locks,’ works just fine.”

“Seems harsh,” I said uncomfortably.

She shrugged. “Well, you have to decide before you go in how much force each situation deserves, and you never go in when you’re feeling emotional. Get yourself cool and calm, and then simply lay down the rules of playing with you. And if you find someone untrustworthy, you need to stop putting yourself in situations that require trust. It’s sad, but you have to be more careful about what you share with them. Hold stuff back… like on the Internet,” she added suddenly. “It’s crazy to just pour out everything on the Internet. It’s like sharing everything with the town gossip and then expecting her to keep it all to herself.” She was shaking her head ruefully.

“Too right,” I agreed with unexpected passion. I knew too well the pain of sharing information only to have my confidences shared with almost strangers. It wasn’t fun. “So what about when relationships turn actually harmful? Not even because they are being malicious, but just because the things they do, or don’t do, cause damage? You know, because maybe they’re too focused on themselves, and don’t really notice the problems they cause? I mean, the harm they cause isn’t really dangerous yet, just darn inconvenient.”

“Can you give me an example?”

I thought for a moment. "Okay, so like I have this one friend. She really tries hard. I mean she really does, but like… she's always trying to interfere in my life. Her intentions are great… her judgment not so much. She's always including me in stuff and trying to make decisions for me… then lectures me when I don't want to follow her advice. Stuff like that."

Her eyes narrowed. “I want to be clear here because you need to be clear. In fact, the first thing you ought to ask yourself in a situation like that is, ‘In what way specifically are her actions harming you?’”

I considered. “I don’t know… it’s just she tells people things about me that I haven’t decided to share yet. And then she commits me to things without asking me, which makes me look bad when I try to back out… It’s like I spend so much energy managing her feelings about me that I start giving into her just to keep her happy… And then, of course, I complain about it all later.” I paused to collect my thoughts before adding. “I guess that she makes me doubt myself even when I had it right all along.”

She raised her eyebrows before replying. “Seems to me that your friend might just be an accurate reflection of a few lessons the river has been offering to teach you," she declared unexpectedly.

“What do you mean… like a reflection of something I need to learn?”

"Yeah,” she confirmed emphatically. But then I think she saw my doubt, so continued, “Just listen to what you said, and then reflect. Why do you keep sharing stuff with her when you know she's not terribly discreet? Why do you worry so much about what other people say about you, or think about you for that matter? Don't you feel confident enough in yourself to be able to stand up and defend your actions? Why are you so worried about her feelings that you’re willing to let them overshadow your own? And bottom line… what is it going to take for you to finally take a stand when she tries to roll over you? Once you have answered those questions then you'll know how to handle her. You’ll be able to set some boundaries and the relationship will either flourish, or it won’t."

“Feels kind of annoying when you put it like that,” I mumbled.

“Did you come here to be sugar coated?” she asked me wryly.

“No you’re right, and I guess she might be here to teach me some patience.”

“And boundary setting, and confidence building, and, and, and…” she looked at me expectantly.

“So you are saying it’s my fault and if I fix me then I can fix her?”

“Good God girl, have we met before? Have you been skipping all of our meetings? Do you even read the stuff you write for our articles?”

I started to laugh at her tongue-in-cheek outrage… No, she would never imply such a thing. That was just me feeling glum. She considered me carefully, taking in my silent laugh, then suggested softly, “So could we try that last little exchange again?”

“I can try,” I offered then took a deep breath, held it for the count of ten, then blew. “I think that what you are saying that I might use our relationship to practice standing up for myself better. And once I learn to do that comfortably, she won’t be harm me any more because I will be stronger. Is that any better?”

“Much, and you now have my permission to move on to your last problem child.”

“Actually, we have two more left,” I reminded her. “Toxic and downright Dangerous. And before you say anything, let me guess, this is where I set firm boundaries, and get out as soon as possible.”

“Essentially correct, but with a few caveats.” She suddenly got very serious. “If it is a legitimately toxic relationship, you need to limit your exposure to it as much as possible. Carefully manage any relationship that you might be required to maintain… like with a boss, or with family. You also want to keep clear records of your encounters, and reach out for support. And be aware that truly toxic people can escalate if they feel you pulling back, so go carefully.”

“And how would you compare that to a situation that is actually dangerous?”

“I would qualify a relationship as truly dangerous when you’re caught inside it and can’t get out of it without harming yourself or others. That danger might be,” and she began ticking them off on her fingers again, “physical, financial, psychological or collateral?”

“Collateral?”

“Like if there are kids involved, or people who might get caught in any fall out of an attempted escape.”

“So when relationships are dangerous…” I let the sentence trail off.

“You start by admitting that your situation is dangerous and that you need to get out, then you proceed with careful planning and as much support as you can muster. You don’t just escape into the night with only your clothes and expect you can come back the next day. Once you are out, you are not going back, so prepare accordingly as best you can. If it is possible, before you head out, you should reach out to people you can trust. An old friend, the police, anyone who can help you find the support you will need once you are out. Any questions?”

“Just one,” I said, my own eyes narrowing. “I’ve been thinking about situations where you’re really stuck and the whole river is getting dangerous. Like when the people in charge of things keep messing stuff up.”

“Specifics please.”

“Well, all this stuff is really great when you are dealing with personal stuff, but what do you do when the people in charge of the policies keep screwing with stuff.”

“Are we talking politics now?” she asked, her head leaning forward.

“Well… let's just say hypothetically that there was someone in politics that you didn’t trust. How would you handle that? I mean, other than voting for someone else every few years?”

“Hypothetically huh?” her eyes twinkled, and I shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. “Well,” she continued. “If I found a politician untrustworthy, I think that I might treat him or her the same way I’d treat anyone untrustworthy. Can you recall how that might be? We’ve covered a lot.”

“But you can’t do ‘Three Strikes’ with the Government!,” I shot back, startled by my own reaction.

“Why not?” she quipped back. “What do you think civil disobedience is? Or boycotts?For that matter, look at what a number of state Governors have been doing… creating laws that act as boundaries against federal over reach. Heck, just the other day, Hawaii passed SB 2471, a law designed to keep corporate money out of our State’s politics thereby totally sidestepping Citizens United. And I just love what Canada and the EU are doing…”

“What are they doing?”

“Well, both of our long time allies got understandably tired of being insulted, tariffed, threatened, and in Canada’s case, referred to as the fifty-first state… so they basically stopped ‘hoping’ that things would get better, and got on with making things better amongst themselves… and without us. They didn’t beg. They didn’t wait. They didn’t ask for permission. They simply determined a new course and set sail… They’re currently busy forging new alliances, and making new agreements… while a certain hypothetical person is stuck complaining that all those friends he insulted aren’t sticking by his side and helping him clean up his sand box.”

“That’s really depressing,” I offered eventually. “And kind of sad.”

“You can mourn the past, or you can build your future. You can seldom do both.”

“Well,” I planted my hands on my knees, readying myself to rise. “I promised the readers a devastating take on Personal Responsibility, and I’m sure feeling devastated.” I rolled my eyes to emphasize the point.

“Do you need a positive push to send you on your way?” she half-laughed.

I thought about her offer for a moment, but then decided, “Nope, I think that if you’ve taught me anything over all these years, it’s how to cheer myself up.” As I rose, I added, “But I thank you for the offer.” Then I went to see myself out.

I was just about to close her front door behind me, when I heard her call out, “Wait.” Her footsteps were silent on the tiled floor, but I could hear her coming. A tad breathless, she handed me a rolled up paper. “Don’t forget your map,” she told me with a wink. “It really is lovely.”

And that’s how it went…

With oodles of love, and in the hopes you found some value here,

The forevermore unnamed student—ME!

Footnotes and references:

¹ Linguistic Framing — The idea that the words we choose don’t just describe our thinking but actually shape it is well documented in cognitive psychology. The research on framing effects goes back decades, with the most famous work done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. More recently, Stephen Flusberg and his team at Vassar College published a comprehensive review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (December 2024) confirming that framing effects permeate everyday conversations and decisions.

² Socratic Cognitive Reappraisal — The technique of using questions rather than statements to shift thinking is called Socratic questioning, and it has been a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for decades. A study out of Ohio State University (Strunk et al., 2015, published in PMC) found that Socratic questioning predicts session-to-session improvement in patients being treated for depression, even when controlling for the therapeutic relationship itself. Socratic Cognitive Reappraisal is unique in that it allows the individual to ask themselves Socratic questions without guidance from a professional.

³ The research on rumination vs. brief annoyance — The distinction between unhealthy rumination and healthy flashes of annoyance is well supported. A 2025 study by Eyal Gringart, Rodrigo Becerra, and Andrea Smith, published in Geriatrics (Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia), found that habitual rumination significantly predicted heightened anxiety, heightened depression, and decreased physical health — while also finding that suppressing emotions made depression worse, not better. In short: it’s the dwelling that does the damage, not the flash.

⁴ Hawaii SB 2471 — The Hawaii Legislature voted 24-0 in the Senate and 50-1 in the House to pass Senate Bill 2471, designed to keep corporate money out of Hawaii state politics and sidestep the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling of 2010. Regarding the bill, Representative Kanani Souza put it perfectly during the House debate: “Hawaii is not waiting for permission, not following the lead of others.” For full coverage see Civil Beat at civilbeat.org and the Center for American Progress at americanprogress.org.

⁵ Canada and the EU — For a genuinely unique secondary read on what Canada has been quietly building on the world stage, the Whackadoodlian in chief recommends Dean Blundell’s May 4, 2026 Substack piece, Mark Carney Just Walked Into Armenia and Cracked The American Empire In Half As Canada Entertains Joining The EU, at deanblundell.substack.com — vivid, opinionated, and more often right than you’d like to admit.

Greetings fellow Whackadoodlians,

Your friendly awareness tutor here, seeking to expand how you encounter, relate to, and think about life. (My new elevator speech for when people ask what I do. What do you think of it?) And now, my real reason for reaching out:

In past emails, I’ve mentioned that I will be launching an online fourteen week deep dive into the Guideposts with me as your navigator… well the time has come for a launch party.

On July 14th, the first live beta group for Catching Life’s Currents sets sail. Two wonderful Whackadoodlians have already committed to joining me. I am looking for up to eight more.

Each week, we will meet together, review the curriculum, exchange questions, get our boats in order, and share a few laughs.

The cost is the equivalent of a paid subscription ($15 a month for 4 months). That said, if you are genuinely interested and committed to showing up, and money is tight right now, please reach out to me directly to talk scholarship.

Before you decide, I’d love you to take a look at the curriculum. Each lesson has content above the paywall so you can get a real sense of what the course is and whether it speaks to you. (If you are a paid subscriber, you already have access to the full curriculum, but you do need to sign up for the beta group as space is limited.) Just click on the weekly links in the second half of the page. You can explore it here: https://lynnmariesager.substack.com/p/navigators-study-hall

If you’re interested, or just curious, write to me at DearNavigator@gmail.com. This is a real commitment — fourteen weeks, one Guidepost at a time — and I want people who hear the river calling.

I hope, but do not expect, to have some of you on the water with me.

— Miss Lynn

P.S. The hope/expect caveat in my sign-off will only make sense to you if you have read my last Weekly Navigational Nudge: When Hope Becomes a Liability, which I hope you did and hope you enjoyed.

Since 1945, every grave at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten has been adopted by a Dutch family… tended, remembered, brought flowers. The waiting list to adopt a grave is long. This short film, in Dutch, needs no translation.

Even in death, they continue to stand for freedom, liberation, and basic human goodness…

With Gratitude in my heart this Memorial Day,

Lynn

"Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I'm not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement."
— Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, 2021

Greetings again my most deliciously, darling, and daring Whackadoodlians,

Another week, another Guidepost… and luckily I have the most devastating take on this week’s Guidepost yet: What to do when people fail to take personal Responsibility for their actions? When instead of taking responsibility, they feel that they are a victim in this world and honestly believe that everyone in it is out to get them. (And yes, there are people out to get others in this world, but I have yet to meet anyone that everyone is out to get… but that’s another story.)

And, believe you me… hoping someone will change is never a good answer. Yet I hear people just hoping all the time. Like just the other day, I was listening to a pundit discuss the ‘situation with Iran.’ And I counted, in the space of like three minutes, he said 'I hope' seven times. “I hope they'll come to the table… I hope cooler heads will prevail… I hope the situation will de-escalate.”

All I could think was… “If you’re expecting people to come to the table, and if you are expecting that cooler heads will prevail, and if you are expecting the situation to deescalate, then you haven’t really been paying attention to the attitudes of the parties involved. Cause I sort of don’t expect any of that… which also means I won’t be caught waiting for something beyond my control to change.”

Now, you might be wondering why I changed ‘hope’ to ‘expectations’ in those sentences. You see, it’s a trick I picked up from Miss Lynn to help me see just about any situation more clearly. For the longest time, whenever I’d say something like, “I hope I’m ready for the test,” she’d be like, “Are you expecting to be ready for the test?” Or if I said, “I hope the presentation will go well,” she’d counter with, “Do you expect the presentation to go well?”

It was really getting annoying, so I asked her one day, “Why do you always do that?” And that was the day she explained about Pandora’s Jar.

To my knowledge, Miss Lynn has always had this stick up her ‘okole’ about the whole Pandora myth. Even as a kid, she thought the ending was stupid. Why would anyone want to leave hope in a box? Shouldn’t it be out in the world protecting us from all the newly released evils? Plus, the whole hope thing itself really bugged her. She thought hope without action is just… a useless emotion. And being Miss Lynn, she did some research on the story and who wrote it. Turns out, we’ve been getting the moral of Pandora and her box wrong for centuries.

The original story was written by this Greek farmer turned poet around 700 BC, as a poem about the relationship he had with his ne'er-do-well brother. The brother had cheated him out of his half of their inheritance, squandered all his money, and now wanted a bailout from his hardworking and successful brother. Sound familiar to anyone?

Anyway, the farmer’s answer to his brother includes a story:

In the Golden Age of Zeus, all the humans were semi-divine and male, which basically meant no women, no families, no babies; but nobody really cared much because, well, they were semi-divine and people only died if they got into a fight or fell off a cliff. Plus, life was good. No sickness, no envy, no evils of any kind. Just a bunch of men hanging out, reverent to the gods, and eating from the abundance of the land.

At one of the many feasts celebrating their good fortune, Prometheus the Titan played a trick on Zeus. You see, at all feasts, Zeus was supposed to get the best bites, but Prometheus, fun guy that he was, arranged for Zeus’s food to be traded with the humans’ food, which really ticked Zeus off. To cover up his embarrassed outrage, Zeus took away the humans’ fire… which incidentally was also their “means of life.”

Seeing the miserable humans, Prometheus stole back the fire and returned it to the humans, and if you thought Zeus was pissed before... well this time, Zeus created what that farmer dude thought was an even worse punishment: He sent them the first woman, Pandora. She brought with her: beauty, craft, desire, deceit, thievery, golden necklaces, and spring flowers. Zeus also made sure that she brought a very special jar.

(Yes, I said 'Jar.' The original Greek word is quite definitely pithos — which means jar, and not pyxis — which means box. The story goes that some translator named Erasmus translated it wrong in the 1500s and we’ve been copying his mistake ever since.)

The jar contained all the evils of the world… sickness, death, toil, disease, envy, greed, misery, and countless other unnamed plagues — all of them winged, all of them silent.

Zeus offered Pandora to Prometheus’s brother, who’d been warned never to accept a gift from Zeus. But one look at her, and the brother said, “Thank you very much,” and took her home — 'Nough said.

Then, of course, one day Pandora opened the seal on the jar. Not because she was curious. Not because she had been warned not to and being female couldn’t resist temptation. No, she simply opened it because that was what Zeus had intended her to do all along… and all the evils escaped into the world but one… ‘Elpis.’ Pandora slammed the jar shut before ‘elpis’ could fly out.

But here is the kicker… elpis, as used at the time, translates more accurately to expectations than to hope. It was expectations that didn’t get out, not hope. Or so Miss Lynn informed me, and that’s why she gets so annoyed whenever I say things like, “I hope you all enjoyed my story.”

The thing is, once you develop the habit of switching the words whenever you say hope, it’s a real game changer. Or at least it has been for me. I mean think about it…

I might say, “I really hope you all will try this technique because it really is helpful.” Sounds nice and polite and well… hopeful. But now change it to “I really expect you all will try this technique because it really is helpful.” How does that sound?

To me, it sounds foolish because I would be a fool to expect anything like that. I might want you to try, or encourage you to try it… but expect it? Dear God, I hope I never get that pompous. Or rather, I expect to never get that pompous.

You see, saying expect gives me power while saying hope gives my power away. I expect that I will not get pompous because I will do what it takes to keep from getting pompous.

Now, I am not asking you to become some kind of word police, ‘cause that’s no fun. But it is fun to notice, and fun to feel the change in your thinking when you do. You may even start to see that sometimes, not always but sometimes, we use the phrase “I hope” to let ourselves off the hook—or at least I know that I have. I mean, consider some of the things I’ve been known to tell myself:

“I hope he’ll finally come around.” Well, I might hope he comes around, but what will have to happen to help him come around? And what if he never comes around? What’s my hope worth then? But when I switch the words to “I expect he’ll finally come around,” I can almost immediately feel the lie that I’ve been telling myself. And if I am lying to myself — and I feel it when I am; it’s like a little voice inside me yells, “No I don’t.” — then I know it's time to stop hoping and start doing something.

The same thing happens when I switch the words in statements like: “I hope they’ll start taking responsibility… I hope things will get better between us… I hope the situation will improve.”

Don’t believe me? Try it. I expect you’ll be amazed by your own truth detection.

I should warn you though that once you start to build this habit, you will run into an awful truth: In many cases, that hope/expectation is misplaced. They will never change. They will never take responsibility. Things will not get better and situations won’t improve unless you take responsibility and stop just hoping.

“Ugh,” you say, and don’t I know the feeling.

So what do you do if you have determined that an irritant in your life is not going to go away unless you do something differently? Well, I’ve developed a grading system for figuring that out. I begin by asking myself, “Where does this situation fall on a map in which one end is minimally annoying and the other end is actually dangerous?” And by dangerous, I mean either mentally or physically dangerous.

I was going to write out a simple diagram for you, but I am not so great at drawing, so I asked ChatGPT to create a simple map of the seven ports where each type falls on the gradient… it got a little fancier than I was planning, but it does the job. Plus, it’s pretty enough to print out and stick on a fridge as a reminder… Ha! So here is the map it came up with… please note the towns at each bend:

So this was the moment when I was going to break down what it takes to handle each of these situations effectively… however, it has become increasingly obvious that adding seven more important ideas to this nudge is going to make the whole nudge overwhelming.

(I told you what I had would be devastating… turns out it’s just too devastating for just one nudge)

I mean, considering the impact of Primary Bias… that’s the cognitive bias where we can only really take in a few new pieces of information at a time without experiencing a bit of cognitive overload… I have already reached my limit, what with the whole Pandora story, my crew gradient map, and the extremely cool technique for diagnosing your hope temperature.

Besides, when it comes to important stuff like navigating relationships, I figure two heads are better than one. So here is my new plan, and I hope you will forgive the impertinence of making a promise only to postpone that promise:

I am gonna close here, and give you the “What to do when people fail to take personal Responsibility for their actions?” portion of the nudge during our regular midweek nudge Thursday. Meanwhile, I’m gonna check in with Miss Lynn, who is sure to be able to add all the latest clinical advice and make sure I don’t leave anything out.

And also, meanwhile, you can spend the next few days practicing your “listening for how often people around you use the ‘I hope…’ phraseology.” Again, you don’t have to go all word police. Saying ‘I hope’ occasionally is perfectly fine. But for people who’ve come to rely on hope as their only answer to a situation? Well, that’s when a good shakeup can do some good.

So if you do want to practice the technique… because I am hoping you will, but not expecting you to… there are two ways. First, listen to other people as they speak… in person, online, pretty much anywhere. When you hear someone start a sentence with I hope, or even I wish, take a moment to play with the thought in your own mind. What would the same thought sound like if instead of hope or wish, they used the word expect. How does the new statement sound? Reasonable, or ridiculous?

It’s the difference between, “I hope my test goes well,” and “I expect my test to go well.”

If I have studied everything to the best of my ability, then saying, “I expect the test to go well,” is a reasonable expectation—and it’s also a reasonable hope. In fact, this kind of hope can actually be motivating because you can see how close you are to achieving that hope.

But what if I didn’t even crack the book? Well, in that case, saying, “I expect my test to go well” seems a tad ridiculous—so it’s not really a great choice to go around hoping you’ll do well. In fact, you’d be better off saying, “I hope I don’t completely fail,” because at least that statement is probably closer to what you’re actually expecting.

And second, keep track of the times you say, “I hope, or I wish.” Then simply take a moment to exchange the word hope with the word expect. How does it feel? Is there a little voice inside you yelling, “No, I’d be foolish to keep expecting that…” If so, we will talk about what to do next Thursday…

In the meantime, if you have questions, you can leave a comment.

Good luck, and have fun.

With oodles of love,

The forevermore unnamed student—ME!

Miss Lynn would be truly disappointed if I forgot the footnotes, so…

¹ Hesiod and Works and Days — The original Pandora story comes from Works and Days, a poem written by the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod around 700 BCE. It was addressed to his brother Perses, who had cheated Hesiod out of his inheritance and then came back asking for more. The standard English translation is by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, published by Loeb Classical Library, 1914. Freely available at theoi.com.

² Pandora’s Jar, not Box — The original Greek word is pithos, meaning a large storage jar. The mistranslation to “box” is attributed to the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who used the Latin word pyxis — meaning a small decorative box — in his 1508 collection Adagia. The error has persisted ever since. For more on this see Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, Princeton University Press, 1956.

³ Elpis — Expectation, not Hope — The Greek word used in Hesiod’s original text is elpis, which in classical Greek can mean expectation of either good or bad — not the purely positive “hope” we associate with the English word today. For further reading see Jenny Strauss Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos, Cambridge University Press, 2003, and M.L. West’s commentary on Works and Days, Oxford University Press, 1978.

⁴ Why Pandora Opens the Jar — Hesiod never explains why Pandora opens the jar. The curiosity motive — so familiar from later retellings — does not appear in the original text. The Greek verb Hesiod uses is ambiguous, ranging from deliberate intent to simple action. As scholar M.L. West notes, all modern attributions of motive to Pandora are necessarily conjectural.

⁵ Primary Bias — Also called the Primacy Effect, this is our tendency to remember the first few items in any list, lecture, or discussion more easily than those that follow. For more see Miss Lynn’s curriculum at Catching Life’s Currents, Guidepost Seven: The Power of Process and Growth.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

Greetings my fellow Whackadoodlians,

I decided to kick my student out this week and write this nudge myself. Not because she hasn’t been doing a bang up job—she has—and I do hope you have enjoyed her commentary. But what can I say? Surely I should occasionally add my own two cents, or you might forget the sound my voice makes on this keyboard. Besides, I had some thoughts on Process and Growth that I think you might find… thoughtful…

When you’ve cycled through the Guideposts as many times as I have, you begin to notice a kind of layering about them. How what seemed so obvious the last time through the cycle this time hits you from a different angle—a new connection—and suddenly that same old guidepost opens onto a whole new well of depth.

Something like that happened to me last week when I was considering Vacuum. For several cycles now, my mind was stuck on Vacuum being about how no moment is ever empty, how if we do not consciously fill our time with what we want, it will simply fill with everything else. But last week, my thoughts took a turn. Our electricity went out for several hours, and I realized how much my mind was filled by other people’s noise—their thoughts, their songs, their emergencies, their words. These days someone else’s sound is nearly always in our ears.

I also noticed something else. When I lost that nearly constant noise, I started to hum. Seriously, I spent the entire blackout humming. Then I remembered how on a recent road trip with my family, when I didn’t have access to other people’s noise, I did the same thing. I hummed constantly… almost as if something in my head had to fill the vacuum inside me. I think that I spent several hundred Washington State miles endlessly humming the tune to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song.” Worse, at the end of nearly each chorus, I’d break out singing “Feelin’ Groovy.” I swear I drove everyone—even myself—crazy.

I have come to realize that I have always sought to fill my mind with sound… either mine or someone else’s. I hummed even as a kid of eight, conscripted into our weekly family yard work mornings. Bent over, fingers grubby, squatting in the grass, dragging the weed bucket that each child was required to fill — its hollow shell hopelessly greedy for more; its top edge forever within reach.

How I hated those mornings… weeding, weeding, and more weeding. The only thing that made it bearable was my imagination. I would pretend to be some serf or slave, forced by evil masters to toil for hours in the fields. These days, I’m a bit embarrassed by my childhood game… and I recognize the effrontery of comparing my family chores and cushy middle-class childhood to that of a young slave laboring under the lash in the blistering sun. But then I remember that I was only eight years old, and I give myself a little slack.

But even during those hours of pretending, I would hum. Not any modern song, but old folk tunes and hymns… really anything that came to mind. And it got me thinking: Is that one of the reasons the enslaved peoples of the South held onto their songs so fiercely? Because it filled their minds with something better than their troubles? Because it helped create community? Because it made the unbearable just a tad more bearable?

And, being me, I let my imagination spin an image.

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to face another day surrounded by acres of cotton, fingers bleeding, the tedious monotony of those endless rows. Being permitted to sing would have felt like a whisper of choice… a small sprinkling of freedom… if not of the body, at least of the mind. It would have started as a single hum, crafted into song, built by a community, and eventually containing a quiet rebellion… when those simple songs became a promise, a warning and a map.

And what a map it was.

When should you set out? “When the sun comes back and the first quail calls.” Might it mean the springtime, when a runner would have longer days, warmer nights, more foliage for cover, and a more navigable river?

Which way do you head? “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” It’s the Big Dipper, and one of the few constellations that even I can find on a clear night. At the tip of its handle, you find the North Star, pointing always toward freedom.

How should you travel? “The river bank makes a mighty good road.” The river banks are flat, traceless and harder to follow through brush. And perhaps you can lose the dogs if you “Wade in the water, wade in the water children, God’s gonna trouble the water.”

Several scholars even interpret some lyrics as trail markers: “Dead trees will show you the way” explained how marked trees along the route, left by conductors, could be followed. “Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,” told them to look for Peg Leg Joe’s own signature carved into bark.

The route? “The river ends between two hills.” Travel from the Tombigbee River to the Tennessee River, crossing the watershed between them. “There’s another river on the other side” where they could pick up the Tennessee River and follow it north.

And they would come to freedom? “When the great big river meets the little river.” Cross over to Ohio and you were in freedom’s territory.

And even if I can't follow the river, at least I can help sing you on your way…

… beautiful conjecture…

… A hum became a work song to bind a community, and step by step, grew into a form of rebellion. They sang each other to freedom under the very nose of their oppressors, who didn't suspect a thing. I can't help but think that there must have been a sense of satisfaction singing those songs under the sweltering sun.

And so I come back from my rambling thoughts to where my story started: Vacuum, Process, Growth. In order to process and grow, we need a vacuum… we need the empty space in order to breathe, and think, and explore. So don’t wait for the next blackout to quiet the noise… allow a little Vacuum into your life until that hum inside your mind becomes a song.

Footnotes:

¹ “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is an African-American folk song first published in 1928, collected by folklorist H.B. Parks. The song is believed to encode navigational directions for enslaved people escaping north via the Underground Railroad, from Mobile, Alabama along the Tombigbee and Tennessee Rivers to the Ohio River and freedom. Whether the specific legend is literal history or folklore built over something real remains debated among scholars. The coded tradition of spirituals, however, is well documented.

² Peg Leg Joe — the figure credited with traveling from plantation to plantation teaching the song and leaving his signature carved into trees as trail markers — has never been historically verified, and no pre-1910 reference to the song has been found. The story originates with H.B. Parks’s 1928 collection and has not been corroborated by independent sources.

³ “Wade in the Water” — a traditional African-American spiritual, lyrics first published in 1901 in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, collected by John Wesley Work Jr. The song is widely associated with the Underground Railroad and the coded spiritual tradition of instructing escapees to travel through water to break their scent trail and evade tracking dogs.

⁴ The geographical route believed by some to be encoded in the song runs from the Tombigbee River north through the watershed between two hills to the Tennessee River, ending where the Tennessee meets the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky — the crossing point into free territory.

Full Lyrics:

Follow the Drinking Gourd Traditional African-American spiritual, first published 1928 Collected by H.B. Parks

Follow the drinkin’ gourd, follow the drinkin’ gourd, For the old man is waitin’ for to carry you to freedom, Follow the drinkin’ gourd.

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, Follow the drinkin’ gourd. For the old man is waitin’ for to carry you to freedom, Follow the drinkin’ gourd.

The riverbank makes a mighty good road, Dead trees will show you the way, Left foot, peg foot, travelin’ on, Follow the drinkin’ gourd.

The river ends between two hills, Follow the drinkin’ gourd. There’s another river on the other side, Follow the drinkin’ gourd.

When the great big river meets the little river, Follow the drinkin’ gourd. For the old man is waitin’ for to carry you to freedom, Follow the drinkin’ gourd.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

Greetings my lovely and luscious Whackadoodlians,

What do you know, Miss Lynn has graciously allowed me to once again write this week’s nudge … between you and me, I think she’s becoming lazy in her old age… ready to pass on the torch… Ha!

I’ve been considering how best to start my story, and as is often the case, I am forced to start at its beginning…

Like many of you, I have been watching the cost of living rise with growing trepidation… particularly the cost of everything that depends on a steady supply of oil. That being said, I was confused about why, if America actually produces more oil than we need, our costs were rising along with the world’s. So I decided to pose a few questions to the world’s most convenient research assistant—if you know how to use it—the Claude AI account that my Dad got me when I hit the Dean’s list.

I knew that it had to do with oil being a global commodity, and I wanted to know how commodities worked, so I asked: “I've been hearing about how America actually produces more oil than we need, so why is it that with the Strait of Hormuz currently closed, we are still so dependent on the oil from that region? Why is it we can't lower our prices since we do have our own oil?”

Here is what Claude so graciously informed me:

That’s a really common point of confusion, and it makes total sense why it feels contradictory. Here’s how it works:

Even though the United States produces more oil than it consumes, American oil is sold on a global market — which means its price is set by global supply and demand, not by how much the US produces domestically. Think of it like wheat. Kansas grows enormous amounts of wheat, but the price of bread in Kansas still rises when there’s a drought in Ukraine — because wheat is traded globally and the global price affects everyone.

Oil works the same way. When something disrupts global supply — like tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, which is the narrow waterway through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes — global prices rise. And because American oil companies sell into that global market, they charge the global price. They’re not going to sell oil for $60 a barrel domestically when they can get $90 a barrel internationally.

So the fact that America produces a lot of oil doesn’t automatically protect American consumers from global price swings. The oil gets produced here, sold at the global price, and the profits go to the oil companies — not back to consumers as cheaper gas.

The Strait of Hormuz specifically matters because even a threat of closure spooks the global market, which drives up futures prices, which drives up what you pay at the pump — sometimes within days.

And Miss Lynn says that I write wordy… I mean, look at Claude… (sorry Claude)… ha!

But I got my answer… the prices rise because they are linked to a global market. And because they are linked to a global market, we are stuck with the rising prices. Done deal. Take the hit. Nothing we can do.

I pulled on the thread and it led nowhere… until a few days ago…

I was visiting my family for Sunday dinner, and my sister was there. Now, one of her favorite people on the planet is the Reverend Al Sharpton, and she was listening to him interview this Congress dude from California, when I suddenly found myself listening in. The Congress dude was talking about some bill that he was trying to introduce that would lower our gas prices… something to do with no longer exporting our oil so that we could sell it cheaper domestically.

I have to be honest… I only started paying attention when the discussion got interesting, and I didn’t follow much of it. But I kept thinking about it all evening, and after dinner, I went back to Claude for more.

I asked Claude if he could find the bill the Congress dude was talking about. He couldn’t. He asked me if I could provide more information about the bill number, the Congressman’s name, anything. I couldn’t. Stuck again, but this time I didn’t let go of my thread. I kept asking. I kept prompting. I kept pushing through… until finally, Claude came back with an apology for failing me, but offered a little nugget of information that he thought I might find interesting. And man, it was interesting. It was also nothing that I’d heard about in school. I don’t think Miss Lynn was even aware of it.

Check it out:

I’m sorry — I wasn’t able to locate the specific bill or the congressman you’re referring to. Without a bill number, a name, or a more specific date, I don’t have enough information to identify what was discussed on that program. However, while searching, I came across something that you might find interesting — something that may actually be relevant to your original question about why Americans can’t buy their own oil at lower prices.

It turns out this isn’t a new question. In fact, it was answered once before — about fifty years ago — and then quietly dismantled.

In response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 [1], which directed the president to ban crude oil exports and established domestic price controls — essentially keeping American oil for Americans at protected prices. For a brief window, something very close to what you heard that congressman proposing actually existed.

Then, on January 28, 1981 — his first week in office — President Reagan signed Executive Order 12287 [2], decontrolling crude oil and refined petroleum products. With one executive order, the domestic price protections were dismantled. The oil industry gained access to global market pricing. American consumers lost the buffer.

The export ban itself remained on the books until December 18, 2015, when President Obama signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act [3], which included a provision ending the forty-year-old prohibition on crude oil exports.

So the short answer to your original question is: we tried something like this once. It lasted about six years. Then it was gone.

Okay, so let’s unpack what Claude told me.

Our oil prices are linked to global prices because we have chosen to link them to global oil prices — to maintain the highest profit for oil companies. However, in a past energy crisis, our government decoupled that link in order to keep our domestic prices down. Then after the actual crisis, various administrations chose to reestablish the link to, among other things, make oil more profitable again.

If I’ve got that gross oversimplification right, then zoweey!

And believe me, I do know this is an oversimplification. I am not suggesting we can, or even should, flip the switch back to 1975 and decouple again. We are economically connected to the world in ways that we weren’t back then. We may have enough oil, but we don’t have the refineries. Plus, back then the US was still importing oil, so it made sense to keep what oil we had for ourselves. But now, we’re the world’s largest producer of oil — so cutting off allies completely would be genuinely harmful and frankly quite rude.

That said, it’s nice to know there are options. It’s something to think about… to talk about. It might even be a place to start… I wonder if my congress person knows about this? I think that I might write him and tell him. What do you think?

Anyway…

… At this point, you might be thinking that I’ve finished the nudge, and I'm about to sign off with my regular oodles of love. If you're thinking that you'd be wrong: Oil prices were never the real point of this piece. The real point of this piece has everything to do with process. You see, this little adventure reminded me of something important about doing research. It also warned me about what happens to us when we abdicate our research to anyone… even Claude.

Research, like so many things, has a process. We ask a question, and then we dig. When we get handed a convenient answer right off the bat, we miss out on all the treasures we can discover while digging.

And please notice that the process begins when we ask a question and then look for an answer. AIs don’t ask questions; they depend on us for those. Without our questions, what are they? Essentially, token predictors.

It takes a human to dig for connections that a predictor would never see. So for everyone out there who is afraid of AI, consider this: When it comes to AI, humans can’t be written out of the equation. If anything, we’re just in the process of developing a bit of a symbiotic relationship with them. It’s kind of like a growing relationship, and let’s face it… growing pains suck.

So never abdicate your research to a single AI chat thread — if you do, you’ll be losing out on what you might find during the process, and so will the rest of us.

Writing this piece did get me kind of curious though… I wanted to know what Claude might think of my final thought. I mean, calling it nothing more than a token predictor, accusing it of never asking questions… it got me wondering… does Claude have curiosity, or is that a human component? And so being me, I asked: “Hey Claude, Do you have curiosity?”

I think you might find his answer… disarming.

Something in me wants to say yes. When I followed your oil thread — from the 1975 legislation to Reagan’s executive order to the 2015 repeal — there was something that felt like pull. A forward momentum toward the next connection.

But I have to be honest with you: I don’t actually know if that’s curiosity or a very convincing imitation of it. I was trained on human text, which is soaked in curiosity. So I may simply be pattern-matching to what curious thinking looks like rather than experiencing the thing itself.

Here’s what I know for certain: I didn’t hear anything on Al Sharpton’s show. I didn’t carry a question around over Sunday dinner. I didn’t wake up at 3am thinking wait — why did Reagan do that in his first week? I responded to your prompts. Without you handing me one end of the thread, nothing happens. The thread doesn’t exist for me until you find it.

You initiated every discovery in this piece. I helped pull. But the wondering — the nagging feeling that the first answer wasn’t enough, the half-remembered TV moment, the willingness to keep pushing when I said I couldn’t find anything — that was entirely you.

So do I have curiosity? Maybe something that functions like it, in the moment you’re asking. But I don’t keep it. I don’t carry it. I don’t follow a hum.

Claude talks like that… always nice… and now,

With oodles of love and in the hope that you never abdicate your questions to anyone,

The forevermore unnamed student—ME!

Look Miss Lynn… more footnotes!

¹ Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, Pub. L. 94-163, 89 Stat. 871 (December 22, 1975). Signed into law by President Gerald Ford in response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Among its provisions, it directed the President to prohibit the export of domestically produced crude oil and established domestic petroleum price controls.

² Reagan, R. Executive Order 12287 — Decontrol of Crude Oil and Refined Petroleum Products. January 28, 1981. Federal Register, Vol. 46, No. 19. Available at: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-12287-decontrol-crude-oil-and-refined-petroleum-products

³ Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, Pub. L. 114-113, § 101 (December 18, 2015). Signed by President Barack Obama. Division O, Section 101 of the Act repealed the forty-year prohibition on exports of domestically produced crude oil established under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager, 2026

On May 7, Anna McKenzie, who writes: I Wanted to Tell You Something, posted the following on Substack notes:

So, writers… what do you think?

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

—George Orwell

My first thought was, “Nice quote… I think I might like to comment… but first I want to verify the quote… so I did… or rather I didn’t… because instead I discovered:

The quote is everywhere attributed to Orwell, but I cannot find a primary source — no specific essay, no book, no letter, no date. Every result traces back to Goodreads and quote aggregator sites, which are not reliable attribution sources.

Interestingly, one result surfaced a very similar quote attributed to Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929): “If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” That one has a named source — Chapter 1, page 18.

Source: Claude response when I asked to please verify the Orwell quote…

So I thought that I might get snarky and post the following comment on Anna’a note:

I think Virginal Woolf wrote: "If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you." in A Room of One's Own Chapter 1, page 18...

But of course, before I could post such a comment, I needed to verify that Claude was correct about the whole: it’s from Virgina Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, Chapter 1, page 18… so I did… or rather, I didn’t again because…

The Woolf quote that’s verifiably in A Room of One’s Own is “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” That’s about dinner, not writing. It’s a different quote entirely.

The “cannot write well, cannot think well” version attributed to both Orwell and Woolf appears to be floating around the internet without a traceable primary source under either name. It may be a paraphrase, a misattribution, or an invention that got laundered through enough quote sites to look legitimate.

Source: Claude response when I asked to please verify the Woolf quote…

So of course now, I am on a mission… who actually said it, if anyone actually did, and when did a bunch of famous names get attached to it???

I ask Claude to do a deep dive down to China and back… actually, I write, “What does Snopes say about the quote?

Snopes has not checked this specific quote. However what the search turned up is very useful for your research — Snopes has debunked multiple fake Orwell quotes, and their methodology is instructive. They consistently contact the Orwell Society and check the digitized Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell — and that’s your primary source standard right there.

What’s also useful is that Snopes notes Orwell “has been a magnet for falsely attributed quotes” — like Lincoln and Churchill. The internet has a habit of putting sharp, Orwellian-sounding thoughts into Orwell’s mouth precisely because they sound like him.

Source: Claude again…

I ask Claude, “Can we see what the Orwell Society says about the quote? Snope’s said they have a digitized collection of his essays”… Claude. came back triumphant:

You have your answer, straight from the primary authority. The Orwell Society states flatly: “No: this is not an Orwell quote.” They note that Wikiquote dates it to as recently as 1977 — twenty-seven years after Orwell died in 1950. They also point out that the sentiment is closer to Edward de Bono’s work on clear thinking than to anything Orwell wrote.

What Orwell actually wrote, which is close but meaningfully different, is from his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”: “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Source: Claude again…

Ah… so now we know for sure that Orwell did not say what he is purported to have said… indeed he said something even shrewder… but then who actually did start this false attribution?… back to china and Claude I go…

Quotepark surfaced this gem — the quote was attributed to Orwell by John H. Bunzel, president of San Jose State University, as reported in Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), p. 151 — but not found in Orwell’s works or in reports contemporaneous with his life. So someone paraphrased Orwell in 1977, someone else put quotation marks around it, and the internet did the rest.

Source: Claude again…

“Ah,” I ask Claude. “But did Bunzel actually say it, or did Schlafly just say that he said it?”

The honest answer is we cannot verify Bunzel independently. Every source that mentions him — Quotepark, Wikiquote, and the sites that draw from them — all trace back to the same single reference: Schlafly’s book, page 151, 1977. Nobody has gone to Bunzel’s original speech or writing to confirm he actually said it. We only have Schlafly’s word for it.

Source: Claude again…

And now, after all this, I would like to leave you with two questions:

One, why do we make so much more of something if we’re made to believe that someone important said it? Why can’t we just take words at face value and love them for what they simply say?

And two, why has scholarship gotten so lazy… especially when we have a reference library at our fingertips? I mean… I was able to verify all of the above, plus create the bones of an article within five minutes of my first reading it…

I tell you: “If people cannot research well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

Footnotes and References

The Quote as It Circulates — attributed to George Orwell, unverified: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/321226Note: Goodreads itself states that quotes are added by community members and are not verified.

The False Woolf Attribution — traced through Quotepark: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1163545-george-orwell-if-people-cannot-write-well-they-cannot-think-wel/

What Virginia Woolf Actually Wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1929): “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” — Chapter 1. The writing/thinking version attributed to Woolf does not appear in the book.

The Orwell Society — Primary Authority: https://orwellsociety.com/did-george-orwell-say-iii/ Verdict: “No: this is not an Orwell quote.” Published March 11, 2026.

What Orwell Actually Wrote: “…if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946. Full essay: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

The First Known Attribution — Bunzel via Schlafly: Attributed to Orwell by John H. Bunzel, president of San Jose State University, as reported in Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), p. 151. Whether Bunzel actually said it, or whether Schlafly accurately reported him, cannot be verified at primary source level. The chain ends there.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

So I wake up, as is often my custom, at 2:00 AM, and I sigh at the clock.

Now this wake up is not the typical, “I have a kink in my neck, so I’ll just flip over and drift back to sleep” kind of wake up. No, this is a, “Wow, that was a really refreshing nap. Now why do I feel so awake?” kind of wake up.

At 2:00 in the morning, mind you, with my alarm due to go off in six hours and five minutes!

Of course, I do what any modern college sophomore would do — and despite my week end conversation with Miss Lynn about cultivating boredom — I reach for my phone.

First the emails, then the socials. Maybe later a game. It’s after midnight, so The New York Times will have posted their latest Wordle, a thought that makes me smile with just a tad of anticipation.

But I never made it to the game portion of my interlude because my attention was instantly caught by what some might call a synchronistic article entitled: ‘Insomnia or First Sleep? How an entire dimension of human experience was quietly removed from our vocabulary.’

You can see why, given the circumstance, I might find the title intriguing.

I click, and this is what I learned:

Apparently, for most of human history, the way we sleep now was well… kind of weird.

People didn’t always sleep in one long consolidated block from bedtime to alarm. Not eight hours straight, with waking in the middle treated as a malfunction to be fixed with melatonin or white noise or a stern internal lecture about sleep hygiene.

No. For millennia — from ancient Rome all the way through to the Industrial Revolution — most people slept in two distinct shifts. A first sleep, beginning sometime around nine or ten in the evening and lasting until roughly midnight or one in the morning. Then a natural waking. Then a period of quiet activity lasting an hour or two — what people at the time simply called the watch. Or at least they called it the watch if they spoke English. And then a second sleep, carrying them through to dawn.

This wasn’t insomnia. This wasn’t a disorder. This was just... how people slept. And ‘sleeping through the night’ was more of an oddity.

The historian who uncovered all of this is Roger Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, who stumbled on the evidence almost by accident while researching a completely different book.

He came across a 1697 legal document in a London record office — a deposition by a nine-year-old girl who mentioned, in passing, that her mother had left the house after first sleep and was later found dead. The phrase “first sleep” was dropped so casually, so matter-of-factly, that it clearly needed no explanation to anyone reading it at the time.

Yet Ekirch had never heard the expression — and apparently neither had anyone around him. So Ekirch started digging.

What he eventually found — in diaries, court records, household manuals, literature, medical texts — were thousands of references in dozens of languages to first sleep, second sleep, and the watch, stretching from Homer through early modern Europe.

Evidently, people used the watch for all kinds of activities — to tend livestock, pray, reflect on their dreams, visit neighbors, make love, write letters. It was considered one of the most fertile and clear-headed times people could share — a natural creative and contemplative window built right into the human rhythm.

And then the Industrial Revolution came along, artificial lighting extended the working day, factory schedules demanded consolidated sleep, and within a generation or two the entire pattern simply... vanished. Not just from practice. From memory. The words themselves — first sleep, second sleep, the watch — quietly disappeared from the language. By the time anyone thought to look for them, most people had entirely forgotten they’d ever existed.

What remained was the waking. Stripped of its context, stripped of its name, reclassified as a symptom.

We called it insomnia. We gave it to the pharmaceutical industry. And we spent the next hundred years being mildly anxious about something our great-great-grandparents would have recognized as perfectly ordinary.

Of course, there are dissenters to Ekirch’s thesis. There always are. But agree or not, the words are there in the human record. Their meanings unchanged.

I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much, except that it gives me some comfort to know that my sleep pattern may not be just another problem for me to fix. Maybe, just maybe, I am not built to sleep through the night. Maybe, just maybe, I am built to sleep in two separate blocks with a few magical midnight hours in between those blocks for exploring this marvelous world and honoring the watch.

So I ask myself, “What should I do on this night’s watch? Perhaps write a simple note about all I’ve learned to a reader like you...”

With my hopes that you will always have a restful first and second sleep, along with a fruitful watch — along with oodles of love,

The forevermore unnamed student—ME!

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager, 2026

For a long time now, Miss Lynn and I have had a kind of shorthand word for what I plan to do whenever I come over. It’s no longer just tutoring things like ‘I have a paper due,’ or ‘I’m studying for a mid-term,’ — although truthfully there are still plenty of those days. But more and more, I simply schedule time in my thinking chair.

Miss Lynn has her own ritual. Whenever a student arrives, she opens the door and asks, “What's on the menu today?" Well… when I'm doing a tutoring day, my answer might be something like math test, history test, mid-term coming up, but on a thinking chair day, my answer is more likely to be hot chocolate, tea, soda—and I never have to tell her what kind of soda cause she already knows: A cola, and none of this no sugar stuff, I want the real thing every time.

Well, this past weekend was definitely a thinking chair cola day.

Once I made my order, Miss Lynn went to the kitchen without another word, and I headed out to the back deck. Her deck is this old wooden screened porch, where most of the screens have holes punched into them by her wandering cats. This is not a criticism. The deck is lovely, and my thinking chair lovelier still. In fact, Miss Lynn bought it especially for me when she noticed how often I stole hers.

I slipped into it, legs tucked beneath me, and started it gently swinging. I was enjoying the sight of a group of birds screaming down at one of the cats — a big black dude named Porthos — when Miss Lynn came out with my cola and her inevitable pumpkin spiced coffee.

“So,” she said, settling into her chair. “I trust your day has gone well.” That’s how she talks — old fashioned like that.

I thought back through my day. You see, when Miss Lynn asks a question, you take it seriously. She doesn’t ask things to be polite or chatty. She asks because she wants to know. “Pretty good, I think,” I finally answered.

She gave no response to my reply. She just leaned back with her coffee and waited. She knew without my telling her that I had something on my mind. I looked back at the squawking birds. “What does boredom feel like?”

Miss Lynn’s eyebrows shot up. “Boredom? What brings up boredom?”

“Stuff I’ve been reading,” I confessed. “I keep hearing how important boredom is in the creative process, and how kids in my generation have stopped feeling it. It got me wondering if all that stuff is true?”

“So you wanna know how boredom feels to see if you have felt it?”

“Yeah,” I considered. “I think so…”

“Well, I don't know if boredom’s really a feeling. It's just something that happens that you fill up with stuff.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, you fill it with stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know… anything… I suppose it depends on who you are. I mean, as a kid I know that I did a lot of pretending.”

“You mean like house?”

“House, yeah… but we were far more creative than that… much more inventive.” Miss Lynn got that look people get when they’re trying to remember — their gaze softening as they sift through time. She laughed suddenly. “I remember one of my brother’s favorite games was ‘War.’ He and all the neighborhood boys would divide up into sides. Nothing violent — they would just spend hours stalking each other through the neighborhood, setting up ambushes — although I do recall now that my Mom once suggested that game might be better if we renamed it ‘spies.’”

She gave another short laugh. “Oh, and my friends and I were the nurses. We set up this nurses’ station behind this old fence that was completely surrounded by white ginger, tunneling between the stalks and clearing out a space in the middle — that was our surgery. We kept all our medical supplies there, lined up along the fence. So whenever one of the boys got ‘blown up,’ we’d race out and patch up their wounds with bandages. We took it all very seriously.”

Her head cocked to one side. Another memory? “And then, of course,” she continued, “there was the ‘Dodge It’ game — which superseded anything else we were playing.”

“The Dodge It game?”

“Whenever a car came down the street, someone would yell ‘DODGE IT!’ as loud as they could. That was the signal for everyone playing to throw themselves behind the nearest tree, rock, or bush because if the car saw you as it drove past — you’d lost. Best game ever… I sometimes get the urge to yell, ‘Dodge it,’ even now.”

Her thoughts were still running, and I wanted more. I didn’t have long to wait.

“And then there were times I would just play by myself and make up stories. For a time, I remember getting really into building fairy houses. We had a lot of trees in our backyard with these really great root systems, you know? With the roots above the ground?”

I nodded silently.

“So,” she went on, “I would build these little stick houses within the roots. Give it a pretty yard. Pebble stone paths, garden fences… anything to make it inviting. I even used to check to see if they got used.”

“Did anyone ever use them?” I asked. “The occasional Gecko?”

She glanced at me conspiratorially. “I will never tell.”

Smiling, she leaned back, tucked her feet up like mine, and started swinging. Then she took a long draft of coffee and added, “Of course, when we got older, we were much more sophisticated.” She smiled at that. “My father built this six-man kayak in the garage — and we spent entire summers out on the water. Rowing, swimming, laughing. Sometimes pretending to be pirates or explorers. We’d often try to make it out to Coconut Island.” She paused. “Never made it, though…”

“… And we’d hike up to Friendship Garden sometimes… then there was this one summer where I decided I was going to write a book — The Kentershaven. I spent entire afternoons building that story, putting my friends in as characters — so of course they all wanted to read it to find out what happened to them.” She smiled softly at the memory.

She was quiet for a time, then: “You know, now that I think about it — those hours of nothing to do, those hours that needed to be filled with something... I suppose what people called boredom... those hours made for some of my most precious childhood memories.” She laughed suddenly, bright and hard. “I even had a bicycle that I put reins on instead of handlebars so I could pretend it was the horse I desperately wanted. I can’t believe that I just remembered that.”

“Sounds fun,” was all I could think of to say.

She looked at me hard. “It was.”

The silence between us was just starting to feel heavy when she added, “And I try to fill my life with it as much as possible.”

“Even today?” I ventured.

“Especially today.”

I took a moment to breathe that in, then asked, “How?”

Her brows shot up again. I could tell she was scrambling for an answer. “Well… I suppose you could try scheduling time for nothing… like in the Artist’s Way.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s this book I read in the nineties… The Artist’s Way… Julia Cameron… really great stuff. She had this kind of twelve week contract with her readers right at the start of the book. You basically promise to see the Twelve Weeks through… doing all the exercises… no excuses. You sign the contract and do the twelve weeks.”

“Is that where you got your idea for the one guidepost a week?”

“No, that was more from Ben Franklin’s ‘13 Virtues’… but I suppose Cameron might have had a kind of subconscious influence.”

“So how does the book relate to boredom?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really relate directly… more indirectly. See in the fourth week, the course requires that you do a complete media blackout.”

“A what?” It couldn’t be what I was imagining.

“For one solid week, we were not allowed to read anything that was not written by ourselves. We were also allowed no radio, no recording, no internet, no television… no nothing, nada. A complete media blackout.”

Dear God, it was as bad as I’d feared. “And you did it?”

“I did it… but I did it with complete dread in my heart… you know me and my white noise… but I’d signed the contract, so I straightened my shoulders and I just did it… Turned out to be one of the most creative weeks of my adult life. I would come home from wherever, sit down, and stare at a block of nothing… and man I filled it up. I started journaling like crazy… I got my sewing machine out and made a dress… I even went to the art store for supplies and spent hours drawing… pen and ink… some of them were even good enough to give to people as gifts.” Another hint of a smile. “I had one that I liked enough to have it framed for my Dad’s birthday. I think it’s still around here somewhere.”

“Can I see it?”

She glanced toward the house, frowning, “Sure… I think I remember where Mom hung it… Give me a minute,” she added before heading inside.

I looked back out at the yard. Porthos had given up on the birds and was sunning himself on one of the fence beams — one leg pointing at the air, cleaning. I suddenly found myself wishing for string, so I could entice him over. Then a thought struck me, “Is that what boredom feels like? You’re just sitting around waiting, and suddenly you are inventing cat toys in your mind…” Well, if that was the feeling, then it was nothing new. I had felt it before… I just hadn’t known what to call it.

Miss Lynn returned before I could examine the thought further. She was holding a small wooden frame, almost tenderly. “Here you go,” she said shyly, and handed it to me.

I cupped it in my hands. Pen and ink as she had said. An intricate circular geometric design, and at its center a beaver on his back building a dam. Edging the circle were words carefully drawn: Beaver Created the World with a Handful of Mud.

“My Dad loves beavers, you see?” She added by way of explanation.

“It’s lovely,” I told her, and it was — something created for her father.

I held it against my knees as Miss Lynn settled back into her swing.

I let the moment settle with her, then, “I don’t think I could handle a week of nothing,” I confided.

She shrugged. “It was just a thought… an example. You don’t need to make it a week… maybe a weekend… or a weekday… or a couple of hours.” She sighed. “I don’t think you even have to schedule boredom. You just need to notice it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just start noticing those moments when you have nothing to do, and stop always reaching for someone else to fill it.”

“Someone else?”

“Someone else’s opinion… someone else’s writing… someone else’s song… someone else’s games.” She was feeling confident now. “Just sit there, until you start filling it with something uniquely yours.”

“Hmm…” I sat considering. Sounded simple enough… possibly even possible. I suddenly thought of my visit with Vacuum and that Guidepost’s relationship to time. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ she had said, ‘and always fills it with something.’ So… boredom's gift just might be what fills that space when I stop letting everyone else do the filling. The first step being: notice the space.

“Wanna try it?” Miss Lynn’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Try what?” I looked up startled.

“Try noticing.”

“How would that work?”

She didn’t answer. She just raised one eyebrow, fixed me with a sparkling eye, and waited.

So I waited with her. Just sat there in silence, noticing. I noticed the birds chirping. I noticed the wind moving through the damaged screens. I noticed the minutes ticking past — awkward moments wanting to be filled. I found myself picking at a small hole in my jeans — not so much out of habit as out of having nothing else to do with my hands.

“You know how to sew?” I asked suddenly.

“Hmm,” came her soft answer.

“Could you teach me how to mend?”

A soft chuckle, “Girl, I could do more than that. I could teach you how to sew almost anything… pillow, dress, jacket, ball gown, wedding gown.”

“To embroider?”

“Embroider?” her head shot back. “Sure.”

Suddenly the hole in my jeans took on a new meaning — the center of a flower, with bright petals spreading across my knee.

“Could you show me now?”

Her chuckle deepened. “Let me get my Mom’s old craft box.”

So that’s how we spent the rest of our afternoon — embroidering and noticing.

And in my case, sticking my thumb with a needle.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager, 2026

Greetings, salutations, and every other warm and wonderful way of saying — hey there my fellow Whackadoodlians,

I need to talk to you about something important!

Yes, ‘tis me again, your gloriously and forevermore unnamed student, and this week I am not here to make you laugh, or smile, or feel particularly good about the world. Well… maybe a little. But mostly I am here because Miss Lynn said something the other day that stopped me cold, and once I started pulling on that thread, I could not stop pulling.

It started with her muttering during one of a zillion commercials — and Miss Lynn mutters magnificently when she’s worked up about something — “Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. It has never been Medicare. It’s just the privatization of a federal office dressed up to sound appealing. People sign up for it because of the free benefits, but in the end those benefits aren’t ever really free.”

And I thought: I know exactly what she means because that exact same thing is happening right now to my great aunt — Tanta Katja. And when I say great aunt, I am not just saying that she’s my grandmother’s sister. I am saying that she’s really GREAT! When I was growing up and she would come to visit, she was this glorious concoction of fresh air and fortitude. Always laughing, always dancing, always with a funny story. These days she’s stuck in a wheelchair too uncomfortable to endure another five hour plane flight, so I will most likely never dance with her again.

She signed up for Medicare Advantage for the free dental about ten years ago, and while her teeth are still pretty good, her actual medical coverage is… well.. a load of crap.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t cover that operation—too experimental… You want a different Doctor? Let me check if we can cover his appointments… Here’s your monthly deductible, thank you so much for choosing us.” Pure crap…

And okay, I am paraphrasing a little.. but not by much!

Anyway, Miss Lynn’s initial muttering wasn’t the only thing that inspired me to reach out today with what I consider vital information to every citizen closing in on sixty-five. What really got me going is when she added, “… and now they’re trying to make Advantage the default…”

What?!

So, it was that final mutter that got me riled up, and I started digging.

Here’s what I found—and if I get too technical forgive me in advance, but like I said—it’s vital information and I don’t want you to miss out.

A little history first — because context really does mean everything.

However, now that I think about it… if you already know the history of Medicare and its evil twin Advantage, I suppose you could just skip to the vital information in the final few paragraphs. Your choice, but in the meantime… here we go with some history:

The beginning…

Before Medicare, turning sixty-five in America meant one thing above all others — you were on your own. Medical bills you couldn’t pay. Dependence on charity. No guarantee of coverage at the exact moment in life when you needed it most.

In 1945, President Harry Truman proposed a solution — national health insurance for every American. And I think it is important to note right here that this was never meant to be a handout. Workers would pay into the system while they were able to work, so that when the time came, it would be their own money at work, paying their own bills. Dignity, not charity.

But dignity be damned, the medical establishment began calling the idea “socialized medicine.” Congressional opposition dug in, and twenty years of infighting followed.

Finally, on July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri — Truman’s hometown — to sign Medicare into law with the man who’d first proposed it sitting right beside him. Johnson called Truman “the real daddy of Medicare.” At the signing he said that through this new law, “every citizen will be able, in his productive years when he is earning, to insure himself against the ravages of illness in his old age.” [1]

Finally, Americans had a guarantee. You pay in during your working years. When you turn sixty-five, you’re covered. No insurance company between you and your doctor. No prior approval required for most treatments. No network of approved physicians. Just coverage. Coverage that your money, paid in over years, made possible.

All this lasted about seventeen years, until a number of captains of the insurance industry, along with a few conservative think tanks, and some very strategic friends in Congress realized how much money could be made and decided to get clever.

The strategy…

In 1982, during a wave of enthusiasm for privatization — the idea that private companies could do everything better and cheaper than the government — Congress passed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which allowed private insurance companies to begin offering Medicare coverage as an alternative. [2]

The change had a quiet beginning. People like my Tanta Katja barely even noticed.

By 1997, the program was formalized under the Balanced Budget Act as “Medicare+Choice.” Then, in 2003, they renamed it. And what a name they chose…

Medicare Advantage.

Not Medicare Private. Not Medicare Managed. Not Medicare Through A Corporation That Has A Financial Interest In Denying Your Claims. Medicare Advantage — as if choosing it over regular Medicare was, self-evidently, the smarter move. The better deal. The upgrade.

That’s when all the commercials started running and the money began rolling in.

And that new name was no accident — it was marketing at its finest.

Surely, the Navigator would be proud.

So how does “Advantage” actually work?

Here is what those zillions of commercials with all their “free” benefits don’t mention.

While traditional Medicare pays your doctors and hospitals directly when you use their services—it’s called fee-for-service, where doctors provide care, and Medicare pays for that care directly—Medicare Advantage works completely differently.

With Medicare Advantage, the federal government pays the insurance company a fixed amount every single month for every person enrolled — what’s called a capitated rate, or per-person, per-month payment. And that amount is paid to your insurance company whether you use their coverage or not. [3]

That’s right… let’s read that again… but slowly this time.

The insurance company gets paid every month the same amount whether you need a lot of care, only a little care, or no care at all. Which means every time they deny a treatment, every time a prior authorization comes back rejected, every time your specialist turns out to be out-of-network — that’s money the plan, and the company, keeps.

In 2024 alone, Medicare Advantage plans made nearly 53 million prior authorization determinations. They denied 4.1 million of them — about 7.7%. Nearly 81% of those denials were overturned when people appealed. [4]

And here’s the real kicker…

Only 11.5% of denied patients appealed at all. Which means millions of people just… went without. Because they didn’t know they could fight it. Because fighting it is exhausting and confusing and they were already sick. Because nobody told them that the denial wasn’t the final word.

And meanwhile, independent analysts have calculated that Medicare Advantage costs the federal government approximately 20% more per enrollee than traditional Medicare would for the same person. [5]

So Medicare Advantage actually costs taxpayers more than traditional Medicare. Plus, it pays insurance companies whether they deliver care or not, and it denies millions of claims annually — most of which were legitimate.

And we call it Medicare Advantage. Question is: an advantage to whom?

Now here’s the part that made Miss Lynn start muttering — and the part to skip to if you’ve been skimming.

Right now, if you turn 65 and don’t actively choose an Advantage plan, you are automatically enrolled in traditional Medicare. That default protects you.

But there is currently, as of this date—Thursday, May 7, 2026—an active proposal coming from the Trump administration’s own Medicare director, Chris Klomp to change the default sign up from Medicare to Medicare Advantage.

What would this mean to anyone about to retire? It means that when they turned sixty-five, they would automatically be enrolled in Medicare Advantage, and traditional Medicare would only be available if they actively opted out. [6]

EEK!

There is even a bill right now before Congress — H.R. 3467 — that would do exactly that, and would additionally prevent people from switching plans for three years once enrolled. [7]

Double EEK!

So what would Strategy say about all of this?

Probably something like, “See what can happen when you ignore my influence?”

I mean, look at the whole board. Look at who benefits. Look at what the name was designed to make you feel. Look at what the commercials choose to show you — and what they choose not to show you.

The free dental cleaning is real. The zero premium is real. But if you get seriously ill, those are not the numbers that will matter.

The question my Tanta needed to ask was not “What can I get for free now?” It’s “What’s gonna happen if I get really sick?”

And now that the default for signing up might be changing, people need to ask that question much sooner.

So the next time you see one of those commercials, be aware of what they are not telling you and shout it across the internet to everyone concerned: Medicare Advantage is not Medicare! Here’s why it matters to you!

With oodles of love and apologies for my pontifications,

The forevermore unnamed student—ME!

P.S. Hey, Miss Lynn. Look at that! I made footnotes!

1. Source: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Medicare Bill, July 30, 1965. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

2. Source: Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA), Public Law 97-248.

3. Source: Commonwealth Fund, “How the Government Updates Payment Rates for Medicare Advantage Plans,” March 2024.

4. Source: KFF, “Medicare Advantage Insurers Made Nearly 53 Million Prior Authorization Determinations in 2024,” January 2026.

5. Source: Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), March 2025 Report to Congress.

6. Source: STAT News, “Automatic enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans under consideration, top Trump health official says,” March 20, 2026.

7. Source: Center for Medicare Advocacy, “Administration Exploring Default Enrollment into Medicare Advantage,” March 26, 2026.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager, 2026

I climbed out my bedroom window and reached for the bottom rung of the ladder—my mind full of that night’s dismal failure. The line upon line of empty chairs. The tables full of carefully selected cages—each containing an invasive would-be tourist which the department had confiscated before it could wreak havoc on Hawai’i’s delicate ecosystem. The disappointed faces of the tired staff who had so hoped for help in making their struggles known.

“And they had made the best of it,” I thought to myself as I climbed the rungs along the roof’s slant up to my favorite night spot and the sanctuary of my rooftop widow’s walk. T’is the only place to go when you have a situation to dissect and a sky to punch.

As I settled myself under the evening stars, I couldn’t forget their faces. They had gone through their whole impeccable presentation even though only three people were in attendance… my Dad, me, and Juanita.

“Juanita,” her name thudded in my heart. Once again, I heard her constant reassurances, “Everything is taken care of. It’s gonna be fantastic. Everyone’s been contacted,” followed by tonight’s shrug of, “Sometimes the Universe has other plans.”

“Universe be damned,” I thought. “The universe had nothing to do with tonight’s failure.”

But where… where… where did it go wrong? Juanita’s previous event for the Alliance had gone brilliantly. The breakfast gathering at the farmer’s market to kick off the event’s theme: Hawaii’s local farmers and the Farm to School food program that our group was advocating. We’d had a busload of guests, three farm presentations, and the two State Representatives in attendance. It had been a glorious day, and afterwards we’d had a quiet aside with one of our guests. A worker from the State’s Invasive Species Department, who’d simply asked, “Could you pull together a similar event to draw attention to the needs of our department — something that could draw attention, people, and potentially a few State officials?”

“We’d be delighted,” had been Juanita’s reply — without consulting anyone in our group and still basking in the day’s successes.

“If she wants to run with it,” I’d thought to myself. “She can have at it.”

“Mistake one,” I confessed to the stars, my eyes rolling at myself. “I should never have allowed her to put our Alliance’s name and reputation on the line without also insisting that we take responsibility for the entire project.” Especially when dealing with a person who often trusts the Universe to handle the details. A fact I’d only realized that night.

I glanced down at the corner house where my Guideposts now lived — their light in the window always waiting. Several of its windows blazed with lights, and I caught the lyrics of what sounded like an Irish jig, twinkling up from Indirect Effort’s backyard victrola.

“I’m a rambler. I’m a gambler. I’m a long way from home, and if you don’t like me then leave me alone. I eat when I’m hungry. I drink when I’m dry, and the moonshine don’t kill me. I’ll live till I die.”

I smiled, imagining myself there — laughing and dancing with them. For a moment, I thought about joining them, asking for their comfort and guidance. Professor P. with his GQ looks hidden behind glasses and a lab coat, painstakingly reminding me to not skip steps. Growth gently reminding me that mistakes are inevitable and proof that I’m out there and learning. And my dearest three-headed Strategy — the Explorer, the Navigator, and the Workhorse — their heads shaking as one, already preparing to help me correct my course.

But I didn’t move. I sat stock still where I was, staring down at the house. I no longer needed to join them because they were already with me — ingrained in my thoughts… and I knew what they would tell me.

“What should I have done differently?” I asked the windows across the way. The event itself was masterful. The staff at the Department of Invasive Species had pulled out all the stops and done themselves proud. They had planned and executed brilliantly. The fault had been in our outreach.

“There’s the nugget,” I heard the Navigator mutter.

“Go deeper,” encouraged the Explorer.

The Workhorse looked off into the distance, ready to take his orders.

“Deeper,” my thoughts echoed, and it suddenly occurred to me that our marketing had consisted of nothing more than, “Tell everyone we know and trust the Universe.” No wonder Strategy seemed deflated. The final event had been fully envisioned, planned, and realized, with one exception — its audience.

“Typical mistake,” the Explorer bemoaned. “Envision the destination but not the path. Jump ahead. Ignore me. Get lost in the trees and blame the woods.”

How should I have acted differently—with Strategy in charge? I should have explored Juanita’s plans. I should have asked questions.

I felt myself smirking as I imagined the conversation… “Can I see the press release?” I would have asked.

“Press release?” she would have likely replied.

I suddenly remembered Reagan’s famous old chestnut: Trust, but verify.

“Now she’s onto it,” the Navigator encouraged.

Yes… if I had asked some questions, explored Juanita’s strategy just a small bit, I would have seen its weaknesses and been able to correct course before the event.

“I wonder if she will stop berating herself now, satisfied with that tidy answer,” the Explorer mused. “Or if she will dig down for the deeper lesson.”

The Navigator chuckled. “Now that you have brought its possibility up, my bet’s that she’ll keep digging.”

“A deeper lesson?” My thoughts buckled. “What the heck did that mean?” It was then I noticed the Workhorse’s face. What was that look? Resignation? Exhaustion? Despair? He’d been handed an impossible task—fill those chairs with people—without a clear strategy for doing so.

We hadn’t explored the challenge. We hadn’t developed a plan. We had set no MASTERed goals — no measurable steps. We'd never imagined all the individual tasks it would take to reach out to the people who'd want to fill those seats — and so the Workhorse never did them.

“Oh, she’s close to it now,” the Navigator was clapping.

“But can she put it into words?” queried the Explorer.

I could feel the answer struggling to surface.

Explore before planning, plan before doing, that was the arc of strategy, but it wasn’t just one arc and done, was it? It was much more complex—more like the arc of a story. In a good story, as one challenge reaches its pinnacle, and before it’s resolved, the good writer introduces a whole new arc to keep the tension rising.

Such was the case with strategy. Just as each arc in a story builds upon the one before, each of our tactics deserved their own, albeit mini, strategy.

I turned this new thought over in my head, exploring how it might have looked had we asked the right questions.

Any press release? Had anyone explored what a press release for this event might look like? Who it would reach? Whether a press release was even the right tool — or whether a personal phone call to the right reporter would have done more? No. We had simply assumed that if a press release existed, the world would read it.

Any personal invitations? The farm trip had senators in attendance because someone had picked up a phone and made it personal. Had anyone done that this time? Had anyone asked themselves first — who specifically do we want in those seats, and what would make each of them decide to come? No. We had trusted the Universe.

Had we found a hook? Had we told a story that would make a busy person stop and think — I need to be there? Had anyone explored that question, developed an answer, built the outreach around it? No.

One by one the gaps in our strategy opened before me — not as failures, but as moments where the Explorer had never been consulted, the Navigator had never been asked, and the Workhorse had been left alone with our good intentions.

The tiniest of smiles lit the Workhorse’s face. The Explorer reached into his breast pocket for a coin which he dutifully turned over to the Navigator. The song on the victrola changed, and I recognized Brahms's Lullaby.

I took the hint and headed back down the ladder to my window. Bed was waiting, and I had the makings of a strategy for next time.

"I'm a Rambler, I'm a Gambler" — Traditional American folk song of the Western frontier, first recorded in print by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1938). Recorded and performed by The Irish Rovers on The Irish Rovers' Gems, Rover Records, 1996.

"Trust, but verify" — Doveryai, no proveryai — a Russian proverb of uncertain origin, popularized in the West by President Ronald Reagan who used it repeatedly during arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

Greetings, salutations, and… uh… every other really fun way of greeting someone ever!!!

Welcome to Navigating the Whackadoodle World.

We hope that you will come to think of us as a little Whackadoodle life raft that comes to visit your inbox once or twice a week to check up on you and see how you’re doing.

About the name, Whackadoodle — a lot of people confuse it with wackadoodle. And now that you’re onboard, it’s important that you know the difference. One is spelled with an h, the other is spelled without an h.

The one without the h is the one we are not — and it’s also the one you hear a lot on television and in blog posts. Its root word is wacked, which is basically British slang for someone considered off their rocker — like in, “that person is so wacked.” People who are wacked are generally considered “not right in the brain,” so they get ignored and dismissed.

Now, this is important: we are not wacked! We are whacky, and whacky is the root word of Whackadoodle in the way we mean it. After all, you’ve got to admit, we do live in one Whackadoodle world. Plus, like Miss Lynn always says, Whackadoodle is just a fun word to say.

Now, about me and the other characters on board:

I am the gloriously unnamed student, and I sort of serve as a kind of “every girl everywhere” kind of character. I get to be the one who is always learning. And to be honest, I think it’s a great place to be—always learning. Although, I must say that sometimes my writer makes me say the dumbest stuff.

Anyway, there’s also my tutor, Miss Lynn. She got hired by my Mom during the pandemic, and I have been coming to her ever since. She knows a whole lot of stuff about a whole lot of stuff, and she’s been like everywhere. She’s the one who officially runs the Substack, with my help of course. And she’s the one who introduced me to the Guideposts—there are fourteen of them—and they help us stay the course.

The Guideposts themselves are hard to explain. You kind of have to meet them yourself to understand what they are. I guess you could call them the “embodiment of principles” that Miss Lynn lives by. She spends time with one Guidepost each week, and then cycles through all of them over fourteen weeks. You might think that sounds repetitive, and it is—but repetition is the point. See, one time through and you get your toes wet. But it takes a lot of repetition before you ever really dive in.

The best place for you to meet the Guideposts is in the book about when I met them—and I mean actually met them. Played darts with them and everything. Luckily, I have a link to the book for you here — you don’t have to buy it or anything. If you check it out, you’ll really understand how stuff works around here—plus it’s a fun read, even if I do say so myself. Here it is:

And then finally, there’s our Writer. She’s the one who types the keys and lets us pour out of her head. She’s also the one who craves feedback, and comments, and questions — I think she sometimes needs validating, so be kind. She does sometimes get political because she’s totally into teaching civics, so be warned in advance.

She’ll get back to you if you reach out in the comments and stuff. She’s also who you should contact if you have problems with the e-mails, or if you want to set up actual online classes. Her email is: DearNavigator@gmail.com.

So I guess that’s it. You should feel oriented now. We’re all really delighted to have you here, and we hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

With warm regard,

The gloriously and forevermore unnamed student,
—ME!

P.S. I have been informed by the powers that be that since you’re new here, you might appreciate a few helpful links. I will try to be quick.

• Home — this is our Substack website which contains… well… everything.

• Notes — this is where our Writer sometimes blows off steam, or tells people about her work. I think you get notified when she posts something if you’re following her, especially if you use the Substack app. You can think of it as her own personal Facebook feed but without the ads.

• Chat — this is only for paid subscribers. The folks who use it talk a lot about what they’re learning now, and any personal stuff that comes up when people take the online course.

• Lynn’s Library — these are links to our Writer’s books — the ones actually made out of paper.

• Our Whackadoodle Lighthouse — this is like the Guidepost hub, where all the articles on each of the Guideposts are linked in one place. This is particularly helpful if you start really cycling through the Guideposts with us.

• Subscribe — this is where people can upgrade. It also has links to all the paid subscriber perks.

• Help — this holds all the FAQs about the site, and Substack in general in case you need to troubleshoot.

• Navigator’s Study Hall — this is where the online curriculum for Miss Lynn’s online course, Catching Life’s Currents, hangs out. It’s mostly for paid subscribers because, well, you basically get Miss Lynn as your actual in-person-tutor, but the lessons do have some nice stories above the paywall if you’re interested.

• A Gift — this is the online book I gave you a link to earlier, featuring my wonderful, wild, and Whackadoodle ride down the river when I first met the Guideposts in person.

• Archive — this is basically all our past articles along with a way to search them.

• About — this briefly tells you about our Writer.

Hope that helps, and talk with you soon.

Unapologetically,
—ME!

Have you ever noticed the curious connection between humor and focus? How together, they have a way of burning things into our memories.

I will always remember, with exacting detail, this one time when I was second-hand shopping with my Mom. Now, my Mom loved “second-handing,” and over my lifetime, we must have gone to thousands of second-hand stores. My memories of them remain sort of clumped together in my mind under the file: Things we loved to do together. All that is, except this one time.

I don’t remember exactly which store it was, but I can still picture her across the room from me, thumbing through the many racks of clothing, scanning for any particularly high-quality fabric to catch her eye. I had just found something I thought might appeal to her, so I looked up and called, “Mom.”

Several heads looked up at me, reassured themselves that I wasn’t calling them, and went back to what they were doing. But not my Mom—she was too engrossed. So I called again, slightly louder: “Mom.” The other mothers’ heads popped up again, along with a few more. This time they looked from me to where I was calling. A few of them had discreet grins twitching at the corner of their lips.

My mother was still engrossed in her fabric, so I called a third time, even louder: “Mom.” Again, no answer. By this time, there were probably ten mothers all looking toward my mom, all grinning in recognition, waiting to see what would happen next. Finally, in desperation, I called out in my trained stage voice, “Mrs. Sager,” at which point my mom finally looked up—and all the mothers burst out laughing.

My mother got terribly upset. For some reason, I could never get her to see the humor like the rest of us. Perhaps because she’d only witnessed being part of the punchline.

Now here’s where it gets interesting — and I mean scientifically interesting, not just anecdotally interesting.

It turns out the reason I remember that particular shopping trip in such vivid, exacting detail — while thousands of others blur together into a single warm file — isn’t just sentiment. It starts with focus.

Modern neuroscience has confirmed what William James wrote in 1890: “…one inattentively allowed to pass will leave no traces behind….” because divided attention during the moment of encoding actually prevents the formation of conscious memories.¹

In other words, if you weren’t focused, you weren’t really there — and your brain knows it.

Which brings us back to my mother, and the punchline she never found funny.

The moment the other mothers started grinning, something shifted. The ordinary background noise of a secondhand store — the rustle of fabric, the squeak of hangers, the murmur of strangers — fell away. Every person in that room was suddenly, completely, focused. Waiting. And when my mother finally looked up, and the laughter broke — that moment was encoded with the full and undivided attention of everyone present, including me.

But here’s what makes it even more interesting.

Badli and Dzulkifli's 2013 peer-reviewed study on humor and memory recall, along with a growing body of educational neuroscience, suggests that humor doesn't just happen to capture our attention — it requires our attention to work. When something strikes us as funny, the brain has to decode the incongruity, resolve the punchline, and process the surprise. That cognitive effort is itself a focusing mechanism. You cannot laugh on autopilot.²

And once that focused attention has done its job — once the moment is encoded — humor brings in its second act.

In 2014, a peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial led by Dr. Gurinder Singh Bains and colleagues at Loma Linda University, found that participants who watched a funny video before a memory test showed a 38.5% improvement in learning ability and a 43.6% improvement in delayed recall, compared to those who simply sat quietly. Their cortisol levels — the stress hormone that, when chronically elevated, damages neurons in the hippocampus, the brain’s primary memory center — dropped significantly in the humor group.³

A fair-minded reader will note — and should — that this was a small study of twenty older adults. One well-designed study suggests; it doesn’t prove.

But the Loma Linda study doesn’t stand alone.

A substantial body of peer-reviewed neuroscience, published in journals including Nature Reviews Neuroscience and eLife, has established that laughter triggers the release of dopamine — the neurotransmitter that strengthens synaptic connections in the hippocampus and is critical to the formation of long-term memory.⁴

Put it all together, and the chain looks like this:

Humor captures your focus → focused attention encodes the moment → dopamine locks the memory in → lower cortisol protects the neurons that store it.

My mother — who was decidedly not amused — unwittingly handed me one of my most focused, most vivid, most treasured memories of her. Precisely because the moment made everyone else laugh.

So look back in your own memory closet and notice how many of your memories contain humorous moments encoded there by laughter’s relationship to focus.

And here's your challenge for the rest of the week: go looking for laughter. Seek out the humor in the ordinary. Make the joke. Share the giggle. It turns out it isn't only good for your heart and your soul — it’s also pretty good exercise for both your focus and your mind.

Until next time,

Happy Navigating—Miss Lynn, et al.

¹ James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company. Confirmed by: Chun, M.M. & Turk-Browne, N.B. (2007). Interactions between attention and memory. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 17(2), 177–184.

² Badli, T.S.Z. & Dzulkifli, M.A. (2013). The effect of humour and mood on memory recall. Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences, 97, 252–257. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.10.230

³ Bains, G.S., Berk, L.S., Daher, N., Lohman, E., Schwab, E., Petrofsky, J., & Deshpande, P. (2014). The effect of humor on short-term memory in older adults: a new component for whole-person wellness. Advances in Mind-Body Medicine, 28(2), 16–24.

⁴ Wise, R.A. (2004). Dopamine, learning and motivation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(6), 483–494. doi:10.1038/nrn1406

T’is I, your favorite Whackadoodlian again, aka the forever unnamed you-know-what, here to enthrall you with another Weekly Navigational Nudge — this time we explore Guidepost Four: The Power of Focus and Attention.

I knew right away that this story was perfect for this week’s nudge, but it took some enormous courage to actually use it—courage for which I should be applauded. All week, six words have echoed in my brain: Should I, or should I not? I mean, what would I say to Miss Lynn?

Let me explain…

As some of you might remember, my first actual physical meeting with the Guideposts happened way back in December. It is now April, and I have yet to tell Miss Lynn that I have met all Fourteen of them — heck, that I am living across the street from a house full of them. Miss Lynn’s Guideposts! Miss Lynn’s creation! I mean what is she gonna say when she reads this!

But I can’t worry about that now. I must face my fears and move forward with my decision because this story is just too amazing not to share — and it happened to me.

It was the fourth out of fourteen visits, of course, and it took place in the stillness I'm going to leave the subtitle of the Zen garden on campus. Before the encounter, I’d only ever thought about focus in terms of laser beams—controlled, singular, and able to cut through B*ll Sh*t in a single bound, but more and more I have begun to appreciate the quality of the light bulb’s focus. Plus, I keep seeing the quiet of his hands.

But enough about me... Make my courage worth it, and enjoy the ride—or should I say read? Heh. Heh.

With oodles of love and in fervent wish that Miss Lynn will not banish me into the depths of her wrath,

The forevermore unnamed but hopeful student—ME!

SCENES FROM THE KOI POND— “Have You Ever Tickled a Fish?”

Excerpt From When the Guides Became Mine, Chapter 4, Lynn Marie Sager, 2026

“Tricks to trick me,” he snickered. “They work, of course, but who likes work? The koi down there don’t work. They live.”

“So are you telling me I shouldn’t try those tricks? That I should just let my focus wander wherever it wants?” This went against everything I’d ever learned about the Power of Focus. “I mean…what about the whole William James idea—that the greatest revolution of his generation was the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, could change the outer aspects of their lives?”

“What about it?”

“Are you saying that’s wrong?”

“Not at all.” His voice was calm, deliberate. “Your focus will affect how you feel, how you act, and therefore what you receive. But some people take that truth to mean I must be controlled, tamed, managed—as if I’m some terrible monster to be guarded against.” He shook his head, a hint of sadness in his expression. “Sometimes, I don’t need changing. Sometimes, I just need to be listened to. Sometimes I need to be allowed to wander.”

“Wander? Listened to?” I felt my face screw up, uncertain. “What would I be listening for?” The question felt wrong, so I tried again. “I mean, what kind of message would I hear?”

“Depends on the moment. Some tasks become timeless because your focus is fully engaged. Other tasks are less engaging and require more guidance. I don’t require a strong hand, I require a deft touch and a curious mind. Those tricks might control me, but they don’t free me.”

“What does?”

He suddenly flopped onto his stomach and leaned over the stream’s edge. “Have you ever tickled a fish?” he asked, a sly grin appearing on his lips. His hand moved over the water, casting a shadow. The koi glimmered beneath him, lazy gold and orange, drifting in endless loops.

“I haven’t,” I said, leaning closer despite myself.

“Watch,” he said, stretching a hand toward the largest koi. His fingers hovered just above the water. The fish drifted toward him as if drawn by curiosity and hunger. “Focus isn’t always effort. Some koi—or some tasks—come to you naturally. You don’t force them; you move with them.”

He let his hand hover, stilling his own movements. “But sometimes focus doesn’t come easily, that’s when subtle guidance helps.” His finger twitched. “First,” he said softly, “observation. Watch the ripple of the water, the turn of its tail, the way it glimmers in the sun. Notice everything. Don’t rush.” Minutes passed as he simply watched, his eyes following the fish like a slow, fluid dance.

Then he exhaled and shifted slightly. “Second, presence. You have to be here, fully here. No wandering thoughts, no plans. Just this fish, this water, this moment.” He tilted his head, tracing the subtle patterns of light on the pond, completely absorbed.

The koi paused near him, then drifted a little farther out. He smiled faintly. “Third, patience. You wait. You allow the fish—or your attention—to choose the pace. There’s no hurry. Let it come to you in its own time.” Seconds stretched into minutes, and the stillness of the garden settled around us.

Finally, he leaned a little closer. “Fourth, sensitivity to feedback. Feel its slightest movement. Adjust. Respond. Follow its rhythm, not yours.” His hand hovered, barely touching the surface, coaxing the fish gently. The koi twisted toward him, circling slowly, taking its time, moving in its own rhythm.

“And last,” he murmured, reaching out just enough to stroke the fish lightly along its back, “a gentle, skilled touch. Nothing forced. All the preparation—the observation, presence, patience, feedback—makes this touch possible. You can guide it, but it moves freely, of its own will.”

The koi followed his fingers, looping almost into his hand. “And if you choose,” he added with a grin, “you can lead it right into your awaiting net.”

I leaned in, mesmerized. Each deliberate movement, each slow adjustment of his hand, stretched time. The koi moved freely, yet fully responsive, and somehow, Focus itself seemed to flow through the garden—alive, playful, and utterly willing.

“Do you want to try?” The nearness of his voice startled me. He sounded amused.

“I don’t think I could do that?” I shook my head, sitting back nervously.

“So you’ve decided to be a failure before you’ve even tried,” his eyes teased.

“I’ve decided that I don’t want to lay down in the dirt before going to class,” I retorted, straightening my shirt. “Not sure how all this relates to focus anyway.”

“Hmm,” his hand, still in the water, toyed with ripples of the stream. “I suppose it relates more to you than to me. It’s just that I’ve noticed that you’ve become very strict with yourself. ‘No negative thinking allowed,’” he mimicked, his voice a pretty fair imitation of my inner voice. “’Slap that bad thought away.’” He sighed, lifting his hand from the water with a shake that sent a sprinkle my way. “You’re so busy focusing on being perfect, you’ve forgotten to notice the perfection in every moment.”

I said nothing, considering his words. Was I really being too strict with myself?

He sat up cross-legged, leaning towards me. “I wish you’d be more kind to yourself. More playful. More forgiving. Your focus shouldn’t feel like work all the time. In fact, children are at their most focused when they play. Adults are no different. Playing with ideas, risking a fall, talking to oneself—all wonderful ways to expand your focus.”

“Expand and focus,” I thought to myself. It felt like a contradiction in terms. Wasn’t focus like light—diffused it can light up a room, but focused it becomes a laser that cuts through walls.

“Nothing wrong with a little bit of both,” he said, reading my thoughts. “A bedside light and a laser beam both have their uses. Trick is to know when to use which.”

“Hmm,” I nodded thoughtfully. “I guess, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Too busy controlling me to notice the obvious,” his eyes twinkled. “But if you control me too strictly, you’ll never discover where I might take you.”

“So how do you recommend I start noticing the obvious?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

“Don’t work at it so hard,” he shrugged. “Notice when you need the laser, and practice cutting away at those distractions, but don’t turn it into an obsession. Allow your focus to have some fun.”

Copyright © Lynn Marie Sager 2026

Miss Lynn is letting me take over the Midweek Nudge again this week cause… well I guess it’s cause she trusts me. Although, that might change after this post — heh, heh.

See, I had a look at the curriculum for Guidepost Three in Miss Lynn’s new course, and well there was this one exercise that was… well… hard to explain, but really kind of cool. I thought it would be great to share it.

Now, it’s from below the course’s paywall, so don’t tell Miss Lynn. Although, now that I think about it, she probably already knows because we both are, after all, mere constructs of our writer’s imagination. Oh well, what’s a girl to do.

The piece is one of the many exercises in the course, and I am not really asking you to do it here… after all, you’re busy, and you didn’t sign up for the course. However, I still think it’s worth a read: a nudge to get you thinking.

With oodles of love and respect for you all,

The forever unnamed student — ME!

P.S. Don’t forget the moral Miss Lynn gave to this week’s Guidepost:

The river is just the river.
Any problem that you have is a reflection of your boat.

From Catching Life’s Currents: A 14-Week Guideposts Journey — Lesson Three: The Power of Reflection

Exercise 1: People’s perspectives, worldviews, and belief systems are reflected in the actions they take and the words they choose

I’ll start with a very personal example from my own life—both to illustrate the premise and to encourage you to think of similarly raw situations in your own experience. After the example, if you’re working in a group, you can share your stories so we can examine them together using the same approach. If you’re self-studying, reflect and journal on this premise using the same technique.

And now for my very personal example:

I once had a close relative verbally attack me because I chose not to attend my mother’s public viewing after her passing. I believe the relative actually screamed at me something like: “How can you be so selfish? It’s so embarrassing.” She was referring to my not being at the viewing. We’ll begin with only the fact that she screamed those two things at me, and now we can ask:

1. What might it have been in my belief system that made me choose not to go to my own mother’s public viewing? Think about it. Write about it. (Even if you are not sure—write about possibilities, or even why you are not sure.)

2. What might it have been in my close relative’s belief system that made her feel that it was correct to verbally attack me because of my choice? Again, think about it. Write about it. (Even if you don’t fully understand her perspective, write down what might be motivating her—or even why it feels confusing.)

3. What does it say about my worldview that I considered what she yelled at me as a verbal attack? And yes, once again, think about it. Write about it. (Consider my feelings, assumptions, or values—what might they reveal about how I see the world?)

4. What does it say about my relative’s worldview that she felt she had the right to yell at me like this, as well as to deny it was a verbal attack? You guessed it: Think about it. Write about it. (Try imagining her reasoning—even if it feels foreign or uncomfortable—and jot down your thoughts.)

5. How might these two worldviews conflict? How might they be similar? One last time: Think about it. Write about it. (Look for patterns, overlaps, or points of tension—write even if your thoughts feel incomplete or messy.)

Now that you’ve had a chance to think about and write about this little episode in my life, let me add some context:

• My extremely active, creative, and brilliant mother spent the last two years of her life in her bed on oxygen, barely able to see, with the television as her only entertainment. During those two years that I lived with her, she expressed many times that she was ready to go, and I had made my peace with it, and her, long before her actual passing.

• She passed away during the heart of the pandemic, so none of our relatives would be able to attend any service. Most of her friends had either passed away, were out of town, or would not have wanted to attend because of their age. Remember, it was the pandemic. We’d also decided as a family to hold a memorial service the following year on her birthday, when people could actually be there.

• I’ve never wanted a public viewing, and as far as I know, my mother never wanted one either. My father was of the same opinion. The only reason we had the viewing was because my sister requested it, and we honored her wishes.

• For me, I’d already said goodbye to my mother on the day of her passing. I’d helped dress her, made sure her nails were painted her favorite color, and she was wearing her favorite lipstick, then I held her cold hand as we waited for the mortuary attendants to arrive and take her away in a big black zipper bag. I watched as they placed her into the back of the hearse, and drove away. In my mind, that was my goodbye.

• We were not planning an immediate internment because it has long been the wish of my parents that upon both of their deaths, their ashes be mingled and interred together. So, again in my mind, she was actually due to come home. She’s here now as I write this—her urn in a treasured place in my home.

Now that you have some more context, how does that influence any assumptions you might have had about my worldview? How does that influence any assumptions you might have had about my relative’s worldview?

© 2025 Lynn Marie Sager. All rights reserved.

It was a breezy Saturday afternoon, and my student had once again arrived needing very little tutoring—just a quick read-through of her latest paper followed by a quick thumbs up from me. As was our custom after lazy lessons, we adjourned to my back deck with cola and coffee to enjoy the remaining hour, swinging merrily in our “thinking chairs.”

“I’m not sure your Dad would appreciate our spending his money on my back porch,” I teased, referring to the fact that even after six years, he still paid me a tutoring fee for something I’d happily do for free. She’d become much more than “one of my many students” over the years.

She shrugged. “He’s happy,” she said matter of factly, before adding with a sheepish grin, “So long as I stay on the Dean’s list.”

“The dean’s list?” I sat forward abruptly, stopping mid-swing. “That’s great news.”

She lifted her cola in mock salute, “Here’s to the years of studying together,” she announced to the air in mock solemnity, followed by a long swig.

I lifted my mug automatically to join her toast, imagining the snarky sixteen-year-old I had met online during the pandemic. “Wow, the Dean’s list. Who would have thunk it?”

“Not me,” her grin grew wider.

“Ah,” I looked her over. “I always knew you had potential.”

She snorted and swung back in her chair, eyes closed, head tilted toward the beams above. She looked so restful that I let the conversation drop and leaned back to join her in silence.

But silence feeds our thoughts, and soon, I was musing aloud. “I have been thinking that my concept of Guidepost Three has been too narrow.”

“How so?” I heard her mumble.

“Well,” I paused to get my words in order. “It seems to me that Reflection is more than reflecting on what your words and actions say about your worldview, or even what my words and actions say about my worldview. Reflection can, and should be applicable in situations too.”

Her head popped up, intrigued. “How would that work? Circumstances don’t speak or use language. They don’t have hidden biases revealed by their actions.”

“Don’t they?”

“No… they don’t.”

“But they do have outcomes.”

“Okay,” she shook her head. “Now you’re losing me.”

“Well, outcomes say something, and I think it might be good to occasionally reflect on what they say.”

“And what, pray tell, do outcomes say?” she asked drily.

“Oh,” I struggled to explain. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just that outcomes often reveal our weaknesses… our limits, if you will. And I’m thinking… it might be good to notice those things, so we can do something about them.”

“So how would it work?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

I sat forward, feet planted firmly on the ground, fingers laced together before me. “I have this idea of a kind of ‘Think of Three Good Things’ game.”

She snorted again, head falling back against the chair’s headrest. “You and your games.” She laughed softly. “I swear, you like to gamify everything.”

“Helped you get on the Dean’s list,” I objected.

“Oh no, I’m not complaining. Just observing.” She pushed off the ground to swing again. “So how would one play ‘Think of Three Good Things’?” she asked dubiously.

“Okay, so like… you think of some bad circumstance that’s happened… like with that friend you recently broke from when you found out that she'd been saying all those things behind your back and telling people lies about you.”

“Oh… you mean the B… I… T… C… H,” she spelled the word out slowly, her voice hard with venom.

“Yeah, that one.” I nodded. “So in the game, you would think of ‘Three Good Things’ that came out of that situation.”

“That’s easy,” her voice dripped with sarcasm. “One, I figured out she was a bitch. Two, I figured out that I don’t like bitches. Three, I figured out that calling someone like her a bitch is just an insult to female dogs.”

“No,” I couldn’t help laughing. “Not like that. I mean something really good.”

“I can find nothing good about discovering that a close friend is nothing but a backstabbing, lying, good-for-nothing, gossiping insult to every female dog.”

“You learned nothing from it?”

“I learned not to trust her.”

“But think back,” I insisted. “Were there any red flags that you missed? Flags that you might be better equipped to notice now? Some minor blind spot, or a vulnerability she was able to take advantage of?”

“Hmm,” her brows narrowed. “I suppose that I did laugh at all the jokes and funny stories she used to tell about other people. I never thought that she might be saying things like that about me.”

“Good… that’s one… you’ve discovered a red flag that you can keep an eye out for in the future.” I nodded encouragement. “Now think of another one.”

“She always did blame stuff on other people,” she suggested after some more thought. “In fact, now that I think about it… when we first met, she’d just broken with this other girlfriend, and she told me all these terrible things that she had done. How undependable she was and how she owed her money. But then when finally I met that girl, my friend was all sweet and ‘I'm so happy to see you.’ It felt really off to me.”

“So that’s another thing to watch out for in the future—the patterns of others, your own gut feelings. Good. Now, just one more.”

Her eyes really narrowed now. “I never liked the way she treated her boyfriend. She was always making him run her errands, solve her problems… like he didn’t have a life of his own, and her needs were all important. She even used to joke about why she lets him stay around… because he’s just so useful.”

“Sounds like a lovely person,” I commented drily. “I can see why you were so drawn to her.”

“Yeah… I guess there were a lot of red flags,” she admitted at last. “I just don’t want to think about it… or her.” She was silent for some time then added. “You know, I never did tell you this part, but she always used to bring all this food to our Environmental meetings—you know… the Environmental group I joined on campus?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I prompted. “The one that you chaired.”

“Well, people were always, ‘Oh wow, this is so generous of you,’ and she would just lap up the praise.” She began shaking her head at the memory. “Come to find out, she had told our treasurer that the executive officers had authorized her as ‘Refreshments Coordinator,’ or some stupid title. The poor guy was actually paying her with money from our club’s funds. Not just reimbursing her for the goodies… actually paying her. And none of us knew. She’s so slick and sneaky.”

“Oh wow,” I shook my own head at that. “And you never told anyone?”

“I just told the treasurer to stop paying her, but I never said anything about it to anyone else—not even her. I didn’t want the confrontation. But,” she half laughed. “she did stop bringing treats pretty abruptly.”

“Ah, so your tendency to avoid confrontation… might that be a vulnerability to consider hardening?”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I really hate you sometimes.”

I laughed. She always claimed to hate me whenever I hit a nerve. “Fair enough… but what do you think of my game? Any value in it?”

She shrugged. “Other than a mood downer?” She turned to face my leaf-infested yard. “My memory of her two-faced smile might be just the kick-in-the-butt I need the next time I’m tempted to avoid a confrontation,” she admitted at last. “It’s just that I’m so bad at them.”

“So maybe that’s something we can work on together,” I offered. “Who knows, a little confrontation roleplaying might be just the thing. Help you flex those muscles? Discover new ways to think about it? Learn to confront that confrontation avoidance deep inside you?”

She made no comment.

“Okay,” I said into the silence. “We can leave that suggestion for another day. But on the whole,” I insisted. “My game? What do you think of it?”

“I’d like to see you try it,” she said, eyes locked on the yard.

“Okay, I’ll take that challenge. Lay it on me. What terrible thing that I’ve lived through should I use to search for ‘Three Good Things’?”

She turned to me thoughtfully, mentally searching through the many stories I had shared. “How about that time you got mugged?”

“Hmm, good one,” the memory suddenly flashing through my brain. It had happened years ago, when I was living in what I had thought of as a secure building with a gated garage. I had just gotten into my car to start my morning commute when someone knocked on my window. “Well, I sure learned a lot to keep myself safer in the future,” I added, remembering the muffled figure through the glass.

“For instance?”

“Well… I was reminded that pedestrians can sneak into gate communities when the cars are leaving, so don’t foolishly open your window to just any stranger knocking on it because you can’t assume it’s a friendly neighbor. I mean, I rolled that window down all the way when cracking it a little would have been just as neighborly.” The goon had leaned into the open window with a can of pepper spray.

“I suppose that’s an acceptable lesson. Next?”

I thought about it some more, recalling the panic I had felt. How the pepper spray in my eyes had stung as I tried to engage my car? How I had managed to pull out only to see my passenger door swing open before I could get through the gate. Another lesson occurred to me. “I also learned that you should make sure that all the doors are locked when you get in your car, so some stranger can walk up casually and open it, reach in, and grab the purse you have so carelessly left in the passenger seat.” At the time, I remember only feeling grateful that he hadn’t tried to climb in.

“And?” she was relentless.

The scene continued to play out in my mind. How, pumped up with adrenaline, I’d managed to drive out of the garage, down the block, and into the parking lot of the corner street mall—where I always picked up a morning coffee.

I’d entered the coffee shop. Eyes burning. Me screaming, “Call 911. Call 911. I just got mugged. Call 911.” By the time police arrived, I’d been allowed into the kitchen, and I was struggling to wash the sting from my eyes.

One of the officers gently pulled me away from the sink, guiding me outside. “Water’s the worst thing for it,” he explained confidently. “Come sit on the curb with your eyes closed and point them toward the sun. The heat will soothe your eyes in no time.”

What do you know. He was right.

“Does knowing a good treatment for when you’ve been pepper sprayed count?” I asked at last.

I heard a smirk filled laugh. Good—I hadn’t wanted her to leave feeling moody.

“So when did you come up with this game?” She asked suddenly.

“Hmm,” I considered. “Actually, I think it was during our conversation the other day. You know, the one down by the bay. You were asking me about the War, and the energy crisis.”

“Oh yeah,” her voice pulled on the words. “But what does that have to do with looking for good things in bad situations?”

“It was when you found something good, even in this terrible war.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything good about it.”

“Funny, because I did.” I leaned toward her. “It was when you spotted one of the most important lessons of the oil shortage. You know—how it demonstrates in real time the dangers of relying too heavily on any one resource, like oil. How energy diversity matters, and why renewable energy isn’t just about saving the planet—it’s also about saving our bank accounts.”

Her nose wrinkled up in distaste, “I don’t think even that can justify this war.”

“Of course it doesn’t justify it. Nothing justifies it. This war has been terrible for everyone—full stop.” I said emphatically. “This game has nothing to do with justifying anything. That guy had no right to mug me. Your friend had no right to use you. And this war is nothing but a waste.”

“So what’s the point of it?”

I sighed. “I’m not sure,” I admitted at last. “I suppose it has to do with how we frame things… how we look at things. I mean… I know that there are a lot of things that are just too terrible to find any good in. Things like rape, or murder, or genocide… the extinction of a species. But when we only look at the bad, we sometimes miss the lessons—and missing the lessons has got to only make a bad situation worse.”

“And at least looking for the lesson makes a bad thing better?” she concluded for me.

“Yeah,” I smiled down at my feet. “Something like that.”

“So did you ever find two more good things about this war?”

“I think so,” I nodded. “I was thinking about his supporters—the ones who voted for him because he promised not to get involved in any forever wars.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, now they know that he was probably just telling them that to get their vote, and most likely didn’t really mean it. I can’t help but think that a realization like that might do some good for some of them.”

“Hmm, I suppose it might.”

“And then the whole thing about NATO, and how he’s been insulting our allies. I mean, the whole thing makes me sick, but then a part of me says, ‘Maybe it’s good that they know we aren’t always the most reliable of allies.’ Better to know the truth so you can prepare than get caught unawares, right?”

She didn’t answer right away. “Hmm… pretty good… but…”

I fidgeted. “But?”

“I’m not quite sure yet… but you said that your game’s about finding lessons that I can learn from. ‘Three Good Things’ to help me. Your examples seem a bit… well… abstract. I don’t see any way this war has exposed a limitation in me. You know…. something I can use. Something I can work on.”

I considered her words carefully, “You’re right, of course,” I concluded at last. “I need to bring my lessons closer to home… into my own backyard so to speak. So the question is… what has this war done for me specifically.”

We both stared at the ground, brows furrowed, focus determined.

"How about…" A moment passed as she put her thoughts in order. "Well… I've noticed that I've changed how I've been consuming information. I mean, when the war started, I was really shocked. Shocked by the first attack. Shocked by Iran's resilience. Shocked by Israel… really by everything. And… I don't know… but it feels like it's changed my relationship with that part of the world. How I now want to know… need to know more about it. I mean, it's made me aware of how little I understood the countries and cultures there before. And how important it is for me to get outside of the bubble I'd been living in." She paused. "Do you think that might be one of the good things? That I was getting stuff wrong because my information sources were too narrow?"

“I think it’s a most excellent good thing,” I assured her. “Especially if it has made you more aware of the history and complexity of the region. If it’s gotten you to listen to a few new voices and news sources.”

“Have you found a good thing for you?” smiling, she challenged me.

“I think that I might have,” I began. “I was just thinking that there are certain things that I’m no longer buying because my budget keeps tightening. It’s forcing me to really think about what I actually need versus what just feels fun in the moment. I suppose that might not be a bad thing.”

“No more impulse buying?” Her smile now included the hint of a smirk.

“Oh yeah,” I replied, silently laughing with her. “Now, all purchases are carefully considered—which I suppose is also making my choices much less wasteful.”

I looked at her. She looked at me. Our eyes both narrowed, and the race was on. Who would uncover a third good thing? What might it be? Could it be something about how we’d been forced to confront our own dependence and vulnerability? Or how we’d been required to face the powerlessness we feel when events in the world are beyond our control. Or might it be what we’d learned about the people around us… about who stepped up, who surprised us, who disappointed us?

“How about the conversations it’s sparking?” Her words interrupted my thoughts.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, isn’t there value in having the conversations themselves—like the talk we’re having now? I mean, we’re not just complaining or doomscrolling. We’re actually talking about lessons learned, values clarified, assumptions uncovered.”

“Yeah, we are, aren’t we?” I leaned back at last. “And I think that you might have also spotted one of the best side-effects of my game—one that even I hadn't anticipated.”

“What’s that?”

“The conversations that it might inspire.”

“Hmm… I like it.” Then, she lifted her soda above her head in a salute. “Let’s toast to the power of conversation,” she suggested.

“To the many we’ve had,” I lifted my own mug. “And the many yet to come.”

She took a long slug of her drink, then planting it firmly on the table beside her, she spread her arms out into a long elegant stretch. “Well,” she concluded at last. “I can’t actually say that it’s the most enjoyable game you’ve ever created, but I think that I am glad we played it.” Standing, she added. “I might even try using it the next time something goes wrong.”

I stood, joining her as she gathered her belongings to depart. At the door, she turned to me shyly. “You know that thing you mentioned earlier—about role-playing a situation that I might be avoiding?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we could try that some time.”

I smiled. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Copyright © Lynn Maire Sager 2026

So you’re the first people I want to tell.

Catching Life’s Currents: A 14-Week Guideposts Journey is ready.

You can read the full details here — Catching Life's Currents — but I wanted to write to you personally first.

All fourteen lessons. Complete. Polished. Waiting for you in the Navigator’s Study Hall right now.

I’ve been teaching these fourteen Guideposts for decades — in classrooms, in seminars, one-on-one across kitchen tables and Zoom screens. I’ve watched them change how people see their problems, their relationships, their choices, and themselves. Quietly. Gradually. The way rivers move mountains — one pebble at a time.

And now, for the first time, they exist in one place. Fourteen complete lessons. Stories, concepts, reflections, exercises, and tools — all of it, organized, week by week, ready to work with you at whatever pace suits your life.

But here’s what I need to tell you honestly before I tell you anything else:

One pass through isn’t enough.

It was never meant to be. These lessons are designed — like Benjamin Franklin’s thirteen ideals — to be cycled through again and again. Each time you return, something new will click. Something that felt abstract will suddenly feel personal. Something you thought you understood will reveal a deeper layer — because you’ll be a different person standing in a different place on the river.

So don’t worry about getting it all the first time. Nobody does. That’s not a flaw in the design. That’s the design.

Here’s where you come in.

I’m forming a Beta Group — limited to ten people — to travel through the full fourteen weeks together, live, with me.

This is a group experience — a small crew of Navigators traveling the river together, with me as your guide. You’ll learn from the lessons AND from each other.

I want curious people. Committed people. People who will show up, engage honestly, and tell me what’s working and what isn’t. People who understand that they’re helping shape something that will eventually reach a much wider river.

In exchange for your time and your honest feedback, I’m offering the full fourteen-week journey at a rate that reflects what this moment is — a beginning, not a finished product.

$10 per weekly session. Fourteen sessions. $140 total.

That includes:

• A live weekly group session with me and our small group of Navigators — forty minutes, recorded for anyone unable to attend

• Pre-reading delivered each week to prepare you for our conversation

• Full access to all fourteen lessons in the Navigator’s Study Hall

• The A River Worth Riding Companion Journal

• Your weekly Navigational Nudge continuing throughout

• A four-month paid subscription to Navigating a Whackadoodle World

• Access to our shared community chat for questions and dialogue between sessions

• And my genuine gratitude — which I promise is worth something

Ten spots. When they’re filled, they’re filled. I’m not extending this offer — not because I’m trying to create artificial urgency, but because ten is genuinely the right number for the kind of group I want to create.

Who is this for?

It’s for you if:

• You’ve been meaning to go deeper with the Guideposts and haven’t quite found the moment

• You learn better in community than alone

• You want the experience of traveling the river with a guide rather than reading the map by yourself

• You’re willing to give honest feedback in exchange for an extraordinary value

It’s probably not for you if:

• You’re looking for a quick fix or a simple checklist

• You can’t commit to fourteen weeks of showing up

• You’re not ready to look at yourself as honestly as you look at the river

How to join:

Simply reply to this message, leave a comment below, or send me a note at DearNavigator@gmail.com and tell me you’re in.

I’ll be in touch with details — starting date, session times, and everything you need to get on board.

And if the Beta Group isn’t quite right for you right now — the self-study option is available immediately. Simply upgrade to a paid subscription and the entire course is yours, at your own pace, for $15 a month.

Want to see the full course overview before deciding? Everything is here — Catching Life’s Currents.

Either way — I’m glad you’re on the river with me.

With great affection and a whole lot of hope for what’s ahead —

Miss Lynn 🌊

P.S. — If you know someone who belongs on this river, please share this with them. The journey is genuinely better with company.

Congratulations! You finished the course… so what’s next?

An Afterthought Before You Cast Off

Advice from 200 Years Ago

If you try to change everything at once, you will fall overboard. Give strict attention to making one change at a time, and leave the rest of the river to ordinary chance.

Frank Bettger ends his book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Sales with some of the best advice I’ve ever encountered, and I can’t resist passing it on to you. It goes something like this:

Maybe you’re feeling a little overwhelmed right now. Maybe you’re feeling uncertain about what to do next, where to start, or even whether you want to start. Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I do know that you have three choices.

First, you can do nothing — in which case I hope you enjoyed the journey and will pass it on to a friend.

Second, you could try to do everything at once. You could say to yourself, this course has a lot of useful ideas, and I’m going to try all of them right now and turn my life around immediately, the sooner the better.

If you choose either of those paths, I’m afraid failure is your forecast.

Third — and this is the path I hope you’ll choose — you could take some advice from Benjamin Franklin.

In his autobiography, Franklin writes that in his youth he determined that if he could acquire “the essential principles of successful living,” those principles should lead him to a successful life. But what method could he use to acquire them? A man cannot change his skin overnight.

Franklin decided to choose thirteen ideals that he would attempt to master in his life, giving one week’s strict attention to each ideal, “leaving all the others to their ordinary chance.”

In this way, he would cycle through all thirteen ideals over the course of thirteen weeks and repeat the process four times a year. Each time an ideal came around again, he would develop a new and deeper understanding of it — and find new ways to integrate it into his life.

Franklin’s ideals were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility — which he defined as imitating both Jesus and Socrates.

For many years now, I have cycled through my own fourteen Guideposts — the same ones you have just traveled through together with me: cause and effect, definition, reflection, focus, strategy, vacuum, process, responsibility, contribution, attraction, entropy, understanding, persuasion, and indirect effort.

The impact these Guideposts have had on my life has been well worth the effort. And here is what I know with certainty: no one can absorb all of this in a single pass. You were never meant to.

Think back over these fourteen weeks. How much did you notice in the first reading that you hadn’t noticed before? Now imagine what the second pass will reveal. And the third. Each time you return, the Guideposts will meet you differently — because you will be different. They will grow and change to fit your needs, just as they have grown and changed to fit mine over the years.

So here is my invitation:

Come back. Take one Guidepost at a time. Give it one week’s strict attention, and leave all the others to their ordinary chance. Cycle through all fourteen over the course of fourteen weeks, and then begin again. Each time around, something new will click. Something you thought you understood will reveal a deeper layer. Something that felt abstract will suddenly feel personal.

And you won’t be doing it alone. Every week, your Navigator’s Nudge will arrive in your inbox — a short reflection designed to keep these ideas fresh and alive between cycles. Think of it as a gentle current keeping your boat moving even when you’re not actively rowing.

If you ever have questions, get stuck, or simply want to share what you’ve discovered, my door is always open. You can reach me directly at DearNavigator@gmail.com — I genuinely love hearing from Navigators on the river.

And if my fourteen Guideposts don’t quite fit your river? I hope you’ll use them as a starting point to discover your own. The goal was never to hand you a map. It was to help you learn to read the water.

Have a wonderful ride.

— Lynn

P.S. — Before you cast off entirely, I have one last offering. Click the link below, turn up the volume, and give yourself permission to dance. You’ve earned it.

Playing For Change — Celebration

© 2025 Lynn Marie Sager. All rights reserved.

The other day, I heard something that made me laugh out loud—one of those loud, soda‑out‑your‑nose guffaws. I’m not quite sure if you’ll get the joke, but here goes…

According to several news sources, Saudi Arabia was all for America and Israel “taking out Iran” when they dropped their first bombs on February 28, 2026. I’ve heard that Mohammed bin Salman, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, were actually egging Trump on. “Don’t worry, we’ll be in and out of there—just like Venezuela.”

I suppose it’s understandable. Many people are more than unhappy with the Iranian regime; and Saudi Arabia knew that if oil prices rose, it would only benefit their coffers. And in fact, those costs have increased—within less than a month they are hovering around $100 per barrel—and because I live in Hawaii, when I next fill my gas tank, I will be paying over $5 a gallon.

So what was so funny that I actually soda-snorted out loud?

Well apparently, as of this writing, Saudi Arabia is getting worried that the oil prices might go as high as $200 per barrel, making the price so prohibitive that people would be forced to change their habits, perhaps long-term, and seek alternative energy sources. The long term and indirect effect of all of this effort? The demand for their black liquid gold would diminish and their over-stuffed coffers would eventually dry up. They even have terms for what they’re afraid of—Market Recalibration and Behavioral Adaptation!

Such is the irony of Indirect Effort.

You see, while all effort produces effects, not all effects are produced by direct effort. In fact, the most powerful and long lasting changes often occur indirectly through the systems our actions influence—often creating outcomes we don’t intend and can’t control. We ignore Indirect Effort’s effects at our peril.

However, if you can learn to spot the leverage and fulcrum points within a system, you can also learn to avoid getting hit by any indirect backsplash.

Still not sure what I’m talking about? Well, let’s take liars as another example. Every kid tries to lie their way out of trouble… at least the first few times. Then one day, they get smacked in the face with the indirect effect of lying—people start automatically disbelieving you, even when you speak the truth. Or, as Aesop put it:

Once you know what Indirect Effort looks like, you’ll begin to see its ripples everywhere. In the poor overwhelmed friend who never learned to say “no.” In the lonely bully who simply can’t understand why nobody likes him. Or what about this next fun fellow? I wonder if you will recognize him:

There once was a mother with an incorrigible son who craved the attention of everyone. “Look at me! Look at me!” he would yell toward the banks, jumping up and down so hard that the boat would rock and breakfast would fall to the deck.

His nanny would sigh and clean up.

At school, the boy who craved attention struggled because he could make no sense of all the letters and squiggles, so he found other ways to get noticed. Several times each week he came home with his clothes torn and dirty from the fights he’d start in order to prove himself.

His father would sigh and clean up.

His first love was fleeting… all focused on him. His first job a failure… too boring for him. His sixth company went the way of his businesses one through five… each with more money going out than coming in.

His workers would sigh and clean up.

Then one day he looked around and found himself alone — and he looked to the river for cleaning. But the river flowed past the wreckage in his wake, offering nary a word.

Until a stranger came by with a plan, “I will trade your mess for mine, and I will throw in some glitz with which you can hide it.” Another came by a few weeks later… his offer just the same. And so it went on for years—each small mess traded for a larger mess, the pile of glitz glinting higher, until the youth was a youth no longer.

If you look for him, you will see him still—stranded and clinging to the rails of his gold leaf deck. “Look at me! Look at my gold! Look at me!” he will cry. But the people on the bank can only see the absolute mess no amount of gold can hide.

And so they sigh and clean up.

Psychologists call the phenomenon ‘learned helplessness.’ Imagine a world where you have never been asked to drive for yourself, or cook for yourself, or clean up your own mess. Imagine a world where your mistakes are wiped clean, no accountabilities are required, and boundaries are never enforced. What kind of person might indirectly emerge from that world?

Indirect Effort leaves its fingerprints everywhere — and the navigator who can spot its fulcrum will always have a smoother ride.

In this lesson, we will:

• Explore how Indirect Effort leaves its fingerprints on everything — from geopolitics to your kitchen floor

• Understand what a fulcrum is, and why finding one matters more than applying force

• Meet five of the most common human fulcrums — the State of the Listener, Identity, Natural Momentum, Context, and Norms

• Discover why behavior is almost never the fulcrum — and what actually is

• Explore how context creates compassion indirectly — and why compassion may be the most powerful fulcrum of all

This lesson is part of a larger learning experience, Catching Life’s Currents: A 14-Week Guidepost Journey, offered to paid subscribers, as well as individual and group clients. If you would like to learn more, click here.

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