Is the desire to wake up earlier and earlier part of getting older?  I had a meeting Sunday morning in Seattle.  Instead of sleeping in until the last possible moment and then driving in to the meeting, I woke up 1.5 hours earlier than I needed to so I could spend some photography time at the Washington Park Arboretum (which was only a 5 min drive from where my meeting was located).

I didn’t get any portfolio-quality bird photos, but I did get a blog-quality photo of this Yellow Warbler.



Did you ever think such beautiful birds were all around us here in Seattle?  I won’t bore you with the long story of how hard it was to get this photo, but it’s sufficient to say that it took a lot of patience and reasoning.  I also found some hummingbirds but didn’t have enough time to figure out how to get a good picture of one of them.

After attending my meeting I watched today’s episode of Meet the Press where they remembered Tim Russert.  It was yet another reminder that the principles for living a good life are not that numerous, complex, nor difficult to find.  What’s hard is staying true to those principles in the face of countless things pulling you in different directions throughout life.  That should be the focus when kids are taught these things: the problem is not knowing/memorizing/regurgitating the principles.  The problem is staying true to them: you need to prepare yourself for all the things that will try to pull you in other directions.