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Morning—Clay here.
Every week, I try to write something thoughtful.
A reflection. A challenge. A hard-won insight.

And almost every week, life throws it right back at me.
Not out of cruelty, but maybe as a reminder:
Don’t just write it. Live it.

That’s exactly what happened with a piece I wrote recently about not expecting life to be easy.
It was queued up and scheduled to go out.
And then life handed me a courtroom, a summons, and a test of patience I didn’t ask for.

🔥 This week, I’m sharing the full story and what it taught me (again) about practicing what you preach.

Let’s get into it.

I Write, God Laughs

Every week, I write a newsletter… usually some reflection or challenge based on something I’m learning or trying to live out myself. And almost without fail, the moment I hit “publish,” life says, Alright then… let’s see if you really mean it.

You could call it life’s little pop quiz.

Case in point: a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about letting go of the expectation that things should be easy. About how much suffering comes not from hard things themselves, but from the surprise that they’re hard in the first place. I felt good about it. Scheduled it. Done and done.

But…

Somewhere in that gap between writing and publishing, I got a court summons. I’d been called to be a witness in a traffic accident. It was minor. Nothing dramatic. But the big scary letter said to show up, so I went.

And—like I should’ve expected anything less—on the exact day that newsletter went out, I found myself sitting in a courtroom for over three hours… just waiting to show a judge a photo on my phone. A photo that took all of 15 seconds to explain. That was it.

Fifteen seconds of usefulness.
Three hours of fluorescent lights, having to pee, and waiting.
The irony practically wrote itself.

Now, was it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? Of course not.
But was it easy? Not even close.

It was boring. Frustrating. Outside my control. And nowhere in my planner.
And to make matters worse, the defendant was sitting five empty chairs down from me… just glaring.

But that’s the thing about writing these reflections, it’s not theory.
It’s practice.
Practice that never seems to make perfect.

And often, it’s immediate and uncomfortable practice.

That courtroom tested my attitude. My patience. My posture. My ability to sit still.
But most importantly, it tested my discomfort in accepting that not everything gets to feel efficient or worthwhile.

And if I’m being honest, that’s the harder part.

It’s easy to wax poetic about struggle when you’re writing from a quiet room.
It’s harder when you’re stuck in real-life limbo with no phone, no vending machine, and no bathroom in sight.

But that is what growth actually looks like.

It’s not simply knowing what matters.
It’s practicing it, day in and day out.

Pontification is easy when things are, well… easy.
Because it turns out life will regularly invite you to not simply write it, or say it—
but to live it.

Even when it’s hard.
Even when it’s inconvenient.
Even when you’re stuck in a courtroom without a phone, for three hours, in chairs so uncomfortable a narcoleptic couldn’t take a nap in them.

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Until next time—
keep the fires burning.
– Clay

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