Look at us, we’re almost halfway through this thing.
Today’s prompt might be tough for you to read, but it’s not tough for me to write, so don’t worry.
Here’s the thing. Sloat men have a bad habit of dying by their 40th birthday. Here’s a list:
Uncle dead at nine.
Uncle dead at twenty.
Grandpa dead at forty.
Father dead at forty.
In seven years I’ll be 39.
Maybe I’ll live that long, maybe I won’t. Family history says no, but God does big things.
In seven years, Alicia and I will have been married for almost twenty years. Akeeli will be seventeen, Aven will be fifteen, and Drake will be ten. Maybe there’s a fourth Sloat child by that point, who knows?
I’ll have been a teacher at Okay Public Schools for eight years. I hope to have at least written one novel, maybe a trilogy, those seem to be pretty successful.
I want to have gotten the Teacher of the Year award from my school, the state, and be working on National Teacher of the Year.
My seventh grade class will be graduating in seven years. I want them to come up to me on their graduation day and tell me that I made some sort of impact. Anything.
Hopefully I’ll have a few years of being a head coach under my belt, and I want to be leading a team to a state tournament. Then I want to win it. I want the ring I never got in high school.
I really want to lose some weight. I do. I’d like to lose 150 pounds in the next seven years, and I know that’s completely reasonable, and I’m in charge of my own journey, and all I have to do is put my mind to it, and blah, blah, blah. I just have to buckle down and do it. That’s it. That’s like, twenty-one pounds a year. Totally doable.
I don’t necessarily want a “better” life in 2022, I just want to be a better person. I happen to like my life right now, and don’t want a whole lot to change, except internally. I want to be Travis 2.0. I want to be closer to my children, closer to my wife, and closer to my God.
That’s me in seven years. Love you guys.