“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
–Steve Jobs

Connecting the dots and stacking the dominoes is where much of the frustration and disappointment in my life occurs. For whatever reason, I have this belief that somehow my life can be “planned” from day to day. When I take an honest look at it, I guess it would be considered a God complex. At the very least, it is highly arrogant to believe that I have control of so many things in my daily life that I can actually predict how my future will unfold.

I became “aware” enough to start stacking the dominoes when I was about 12 years old. I had made the middle school football team, I was seeing a girl at school, I was going to go to high school, be a jock, get a car and rule the world…..instead my granddaddy died and knocked over my stack of dominoes. He died of a heart attack. I wasn’t even mature enough to know what a heart attack was. I remember laying in bed and envisioning an animated heart with arms and a mean face beating up my granddad. I was even afraid that the same heart would come and attack me. I had not taken into account that I might lose a family member, ever.

I soon got over the death of my granddad and began to stack my dominoes once again. I was in high-school, I had a girlfriend, I would be an all-state lineman, go to college, get married, have kids, make a bunch of money,etc….instead, my friend Justin Hasty was killed in a car accident. I had not even spoke to Hasty for over a year but it still managed to shake up my stack of dominoes. After Justin’s death, none of the dominoes even looked the same.

Since high-school there have been arrests and DUI’s, awards given, cars wrecked, exams passed, deaths in the family, money won, addictions formed, rehabs entered, businesses built, businesses reduced, relationships ended, and families formed. There has never been a significant period in which to stack a string of dominoes large enough to even watch fall without the table being flipped…and for this I am grateful.

I don’t feel like I need a plan.

I don’t feel the pressure of forming an air-tight, long-term strategy.

I don’t have the concern of trying to figure out my future because there are just too many things that can go wrong and right, with and without my involvement.

It just seems easier when I am not trying to stack the ivory. It’s less frustrating when I can enjoy the flipping of the tables and appreciating that the chips will get re-organized soon enough if I just display some patience. The dominoes always fall. Some land neatly and exactly where you want them, sometimes it’s messy and they are hard to pick up, but they are always changing and that’s what makes it so much fun.

Peace, Love, and all things Beef related,

Beefcake