This is my journal entry from February 25, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Today's the day to get the kids off to school quick in the morning. We get everybody out the door at 7:30 after waking up at 7. And I drop the kids off at school. All goes smooth. I come back home and I'm working right away on getting my letter done that I'll hand out for marketing. I dictate the first half of it, but then it's time to go play tennis with a friend. I'm ready to play tennis with him with gratitude today without all the toxicity and emoting that went on last time. I'm feeling really relaxed and in the zone. I meet up with him and he wins the first set 6-3 and he wins the next set 6-2 and yet it feels joyful. I focused on learning the strategy of the game and noticing that he was often beating me when I would hit these short balls and then he would hit winners off of my short balls. So I adjust my strategy to consistently hit the ball deeper, which is also what I remember reading in the book, The Tennis Partner, the coach suggested to the author to do as well, to punish the short ball and hit it deep consistently so they have to stay back. I enjoyed adjusting my strategy and feeling that my goal was to, if I'm going to hit it, hit it as deep as I can. And if it goes out from being deep, that's okay. Rather it go deep than, you know, keep dropping all these short balls that he finishes and keep hitting the net on these short balls that I hit. I leave feeling like I got a little bit better at the game of tennis and had a great workout and enjoyed the time with him.
I come back home and throw myself into continuing the letter. I finished the letter. I'm starting to get it transcribed and edited by ChatGPT, but it came out a bit too long. I am not sure if I'm going to be able to use all of this because it's just going to take too much time to actually edit this way. Like the book, it came out even narrow margins to be 16 pages and 13,000 words. Plus the beginning went on a little bit too much about me. So I think I'm going to need to re-dictate this one.
My ex-wife drops the kids off after school and their friend is still not available. So we don't get to hang out with her. We play a game that ends up being pretty fun where we throw tennis balls into the recycling bin from about 10 feet away. I managed to get two balls at once in. So I take two tennis balls and throw them both together, and they both go in, which is pretty fun. I couldn't get three in at once, though. But we have fun throwing these tennis balls all over the place and getting them in and out of the recycling bin. And we end up meeting my mother at my house eventually after having enough fun with the tennis balls in the alley. Then my mother and the kids and I go for a walk around Crescent Lake which is great. I bring the soccer ball along and my son and daughter pretend like they're playing basketball and pass it back and forth and they're dunking on power poles and I just love how creative they are. My mother has a nice time walking around the lake with us and we get back and she helps my son. She reads to my son again. My daughter did all of her homework earlier while my son and I took our first little trip to the park. And now my mother helps my son do his homework with his reading. And my son is going around saying he's bored. I'm bored. And I ask him, like, do you mean that you need attention? Is that what you need? When you're saying you're bored, you need me to pay attention to you and play with you and notice you. He says, yes, that's what he means. So that was good that we kind of learned that and figure it out.
Then we wrap up and head to bed and we're in bed just a little bit after nine, which is nice after the little bit earlier start to the day. And I'm really excited to have a solid 10 more hours to sleep at night. I'm wondering what's going to happen with my upcoming date. I'm still excited and I'm wondering like, is it going to be, you know, weeks until I get a match? Like how long until we're going to move things along? But I'm feeling more patient today. Like just trust the process. Let it happen. You know, everything's going to be all right. I can truly relax, focus on my work. And listening in the positive intelligence book, I'm feeling that I'm right in the middle of my positive intelligence all day. I'm going to bed extremely grateful for exactly where I'm at, which what more could a person ask for?
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.