One thing parents often neglect to tell children about adult life is that it’s largely sensible.
When you wake up in the morning you pretty much know what needs to be done that day, and roughly when. It’s mostly a matter of doing it.
I like these categories:
1) Responsibilities,
2) things you can do to make your tomorrow or next week better,
3) things that define or improve you as a person, and
4) junk that you don’t really have to do.
The responsibilities are mostly tending for our families, paying bills, doing a good day’s work, and the like.
The things that make tomorrow better are saving more money, planning for retirement, exercising, maintaining our homes and belongings, keeping relationships strong, and such things.
Those things that make us better as people are improving our minds and skills, , tending the disciplines of our faith, giving to those in need, tending to broken people, loving more, playing with children (including our own), doing acts of kindness, and reflecting on the persons we are becoming day by day.
A lot of junk has to do with self-indulgence or indulging other people. If you are lucky (and most of us are very lucky most of the time) we get down to that well before bedtime, but nobody promised us that we’d be able to goof off and watch TV or unwind with a hobby. “Comfort foods” like television, facebook, escapist fiction, video games, and pointless chatter will expand to fill whatever space you allow them, so it’s best to not let them consume the time we owe to more noble interests. It’s okay to have leisure activities like favorite TV shows, but they have to be kept in perspective.
As long as we do those things, we are pretty well off pretty much all the time. If we do the things that make tomorrow better, even a bad tomorrow is not as bad as it could have been.
Most of us have at least 85% predictability in our lives. One thing that is largely unpredictablefrom day to day is how we’ll feel about the things that must be done. As long as that doesn’t stop us from doing them, we’re pretty much okay. I find that those who only do the things they feel like doing are unenviable in their circumstances.
And of course the real trick is in doing these things in the right order and the right proportion. In this regard, the workaholic and the irresponsible are brothers — they have two symptoms of the same problem. I know, having been both at different times in my life. I suppose searching for order among our various categories is another common thread of humanity.
I guess I’m really thinking about these things as my oldest prepares to graduate from high school this year. I wonder if it would have helped if someone told me how sensible things really are, that self-indulgent shirking leads only to misery, that understanding life’s sensibility leads to a less fearful and more intentional life, and that a more intentional life is a good thing.
The Douglas WR-340 jumped out at me as I was looking over the online catalog at RondoMusic. I love the look of it, from the sharks-fin inlay fret markers and floyd rose locking tremolo to the beautiful red-stained ash body. 
This is a very strange-looking guitar. 
