Picture this: deciding what really matters

The “big clean-out” continues in my house on the hill in Byng. I know it seems like this has been going on forever, and it kind of has, since I am doing it in fits and starts, as time permits.

The two items for which I am most vigilant are money and spiders. You can imagine why.

The house in which I live was once a parsonage in Ada, which my late wife Abby and her first in-laws, George and Dorothy Milligan, had moved from there to the pasture behind the Milligan’s house.

Everyone has a slightly different idea of what really matters. For most people I expect that their relationship to their family, especially their children, really matters. Most people I know feel their belief in their creator matters.

But of course, the list goes on, and is constantly shuffled by life like a deck of cards.

For me, the idea that I am creating something as an artist, often when I am photographing something or writing something, has a spot near the top of my list.

I think more about these ideas every May, when we cover the end of sports seasons and school careers. We watch as sometimes wonderful lives reach the end of a chapter, like playing your last baseball game, or graduating, or watching your kids graduate, or your grandkids.

My point in the midst of this rambling is pretty straightforward: you get to decide what really matters to you, and there is no time like the present to nurture and protect that. Now is your chance to read or write or paint or worship or travel or make music. Now.