The Day the Filters Die

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 28, 2026

When someone you love deeply dies, people expect grief.

They expect sadness, quiet moments, and the long empty spaces that follow a life suddenly missing from the room.

What they don’t expect is what often comes next.

The filters die too.

Grief and the Collapse of Politeness

Most of us spend a lifetime managing what we say. We soften things. We avoid uncomfortable truths. We tolerate behavior we know is wrong because confronting it would create conflict.

Those filters are part of how society keeps moving. They keep conversations polite and relationships functioning.

But when someone you love dies—especially someone who was central to your life, someone who shaped your days and your plans—something inside you changes.

The small social calculations stop mattering.

You begin looking at the world with a different set of priorities. Things that once seemed worth tolerating suddenly look ridiculous. Behavior that once felt like “just the way things are” begins to look selfish, cruel, or pointless.

Grief strips away the patience for nonsense.

The Void Changes Perspective

Loss creates a void that nothing else fills. Anyone who has experienced it knows exactly what that means.

A chair is empty that should not be empty.

A voice is missing that should still be speaking.

The daily routines that once anchored your life become reminders that something permanent has disappeared.

That kind of absence changes the way you look at everything around you.

When you have faced the finality of death up close, many of the things people argue about suddenly look trivial. The petty games people play with each other feel childish. The selfishness that drives so much behavior becomes harder to ignore.

You start asking a blunt question more often:

Why are people hurting each other for no good reason?

The Death of Social Tolerance

Grief does something else that surprises many people.

It kills the instinct to pretend things are fine when they clearly are not.

For years, many people tolerate behavior they know is destructive—lying, manipulation, addiction, cruelty, or simple selfishness. They do it to keep the peace or to avoid difficult conversations.

But after a major loss, the emotional energy required to keep those illusions alive disappears.

The truth becomes easier to say.

Sometimes that truth makes other people uncomfortable. It can sound blunt. It can sound harsh.

But it often reflects something very real: patience for harmful behavior has run out.

Seeing the World Without Filters

When the filters disappear, the world does not suddenly become worse.

It simply becomes clearer.

You begin to notice how often people justify behavior that hurts others. You see how greed, ego, and carelessness ripple outward, damaging lives in ways the person causing the harm never bothers to think about.

You also notice something else.

Many people know their behavior is harmful. They simply hope no one will call it out.

Grief has a strange way of removing the fear of doing exactly that.

The Price of Honesty

Speaking more honestly about the world has consequences.

Some people will appreciate the clarity. Others will become defensive or uncomfortable. A few may decide they would rather avoid hearing it altogether.

But honesty after loss is not about winning arguments or changing everyone’s mind.

It is about refusing to pretend that destructive behavior is harmless.

When life reminds you how fragile everything is, wasting time protecting bad behavior starts to feel absurd.

What Remains

Grief never fully disappears. The absence remains, sometimes quietly, sometimes sharply.

But it leaves something else behind as well.

A different sense of perspective.

Many things that once seemed urgent no longer are. Many things people chase no longer look worth the effort. And many behaviors that once went unchallenged become impossible to ignore.

Losing someone you love changes the shape of your world.

And sometimes, along with that loss, it removes the filters that once kept you silent about the things that needed to be said all along.

How I feel wearing flare pants. 😭

#PersonalReflection #FlarePants #BodyImage

How Not To Kill Time And Make It Work With You, Not Against You

I don’t like the idea of killing time. I don’t like the idea of killing anything. But when it comes to killing time, do you do it?

I can’t remember when it was I heard this quote, but it’s stuck with me like a sticky bun sticks to my fingertips.

‘Life and time is like a toilet roll
The nearer you get to the end
The quicker it runs out.’

How to manage time before retirement.

Before I retired from full-time work in 2012, my life was hectic, and time was often my enemy. With deadlines to meet and places to be, I was forever rushing around like somebody who was too busy to tell anybody how busy I was.

I’d look at people’s schedules and wonder how they could easily fit everything in. Some people seem to be naturally gifted at managing their time – or maybe they were better at saying “no” to distractions than I was?

However, I’m proud that I’ve always been a good timekeeper. I’d rather look after time than kill it.

I always arrive at appointments with lots of time to spare. And then it backfires on me as I start questioning myself about the time I am wasting when sitting in a waiting room or killing time when window shopping in the high street while I wait.

Maybe I should start arriving later than earlier? But the thought of being late for anything is something I can not face.

How do I look after time?

In many ways. But one thing that has helped me is to use time wisely by keeping a daily schedule.

I write down the things that I want to accomplish that day, and then I try to stick to that schedule as much as possible. Of course, things come up, and I need to be flexible, but having a structure in my day helps me feel like I am using my time wisely.

Another thing that helps me is to prioritise my tasks. I try to focus on the most important things rather than wasting time on what doesn’t matter. This helps me be more productive and feel less stressed.

How do you kill time if you don’t have enough of it?

How can you kill something that you don’t have?

How often do you hear somebody say, ‘I don’t have enough time’ or ‘I wish I had more time?’ 

When we’re enjoying ourselves, time tricks us. It makes us think it’s going fast or gone quickly. Whereas when we’re doing something we don’t enjoy, it reverses that trick by making us think it’s going slowly. Yet, all along, it has travelled at its usual pace.

When I was at school, time seemed to go slowly. I remember the school summer holidays and how those six weeks of freedom seemed to last forever. They seemed endless until the nightmare of the night before returning began.

Even the two-week Christmas school break seemed to last forever. Back then, time was my best friend. It was always there and gave me as much of what it had as I wanted.

When time runs out on you. 

Then I got my first job and soon found myself fighting for time and trying desperately to keep it from slipping away. It was as if time was upset with me and wanted to leave. If only I had saved up some of the spare time from my childhood. It would have come in very useful.

Work days would always go quickly. Somebody told me it was a sign of being busy. I’d arrive at work dreading the full week ahead, but it would often pass me by like an intercity express train. 

When Friday afternoon arrived, the thought of all that free time over the weekend would put a big smile on my face.

Even better was when the weekend was extended because of a public holiday. I remember being told by a work colleague, ‘ Three days of time to roam free‘. It’s yet another ‘time’ quote I’ve never forgotten.

Time is like money. Those who spend it wisely will never lose it.   

Yet, when the office clock struck five and a long weekend was upon me, why did I resist going home and getting the long weekend started? Was I fooling myself by believing that the long weekend would last even longer if I delayed it? Or was it because I wanted to enjoy that feeling of ‘three days of time to roam free’ even longer?

Time doesn’t stop for anybody, so why was I kidding myself?

Time after retirement. And why do some people find time boring?   

When I retired, the thought of all that spare time on my hands was one of its benefits.

At first, I had no idea what I would do with all my spare time. However, I knew that I would not allow myself to get bored or become addicted to daytime television or social media.

When I hear people say they are bored, I want to arrest them and put them in ‘time jail.’ How can anybody get bored with their time?

When I see people on social media saying they’re bored, not only do I ask them how anybody can get bored on social media, but if they’re bored, do something less boring than spend time on social media.

I’m proud to say that I’ve never been bored or addicted to daytime television or social media.

Looking back, I wonder how I managed to fit everything in. Where did I find the time to work and enjoy a social life that often took me away on holidays or long weekend breaks? It’s something I never found out the answers to.

Fast forward to the present, and I ask, ‘Where does the time go?’ 

Unlike my early years, days, weeks and months seem to zoom past even more quickly. I often compare my life to the toilet roll I mentioned at the beginning of this post. 

I was never good at mathematics. And when it comes to time, the maths still doesn’t add up.

But even with good time-management skills, I sometimes feel like time is slipping away. It’s a strange feeling – like I’m racing against the clock and can never quite catch up.

But at the end of the day, I try to be grateful for my time and make the most of it. Because, as the saying goes, time waits for no one.

How do you manage your time? Do you kill time, or are you somebody who never seems to have enough of it? Is time your friend, or is it an enemy? Do you have any tips on freeing up more time? Share them in the comments section.

Follow Hugh on his social media platforms by clicking the buttons below.

• WordPress
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• Mastodon
• Link
• Bluesky
• YouTube

Copyright @ 2024 hughsviewsandnews.com – All rights reserved.

The Blank Page and an Unexpected Conversation

https://shahblog1.wordpress.com/2026/06/25/the-blank-page-and-an-unexpected-conversation/

Why I Don’t Go Out More

https://theinterfaithintrepidart.com/2026/06/14/why-i-dont-go-out-more/

Visual Art Interpretation – My Hopes and Dreams for the Next Year

I began with an idea of drawing my age and it gradually morphed into a radiant, hand-made number filled not so much with tasks to accomplish as with the people, callings, loves, and practices that give me joy.

The bright red border and repeated golden lights give it the appearance of a theater sign or a carnival ride. They are a remnant of posters I used to make when I was a boy. Inside that celebratory outline, the words curve, turn, reverse, overlap, and require the eye to travel.

The words I placed inside my age—Sing, Play, Memories, God, Laugh, Journey, Pastor, Author, Husband, PeaceGrooves, Friends, Art, Church, Love, Woodcraft—are striking to me because so many of them are relational or creative. Author is near Husband. Pastor winds along the same road as Journey. PeaceGrooves circles alongside Friends, Church, and Love.

The Word I Did Not Write

After finishing the piece, I realized that I did not write health or healing anywhere inside it. Those things matter deeply to me, especially in light of some of the recent physical concerns and uncertainties I have been carrying. And yet, perhaps their absence does not mean they were forgotten. Perhaps I instinctively wrote the life I hope healing will allow me to continue inhabiting.

I did not write healing, but I wrote Sing-Play: the hope that my body and spirit can still release themselves into music.

I wrote Laugh: the hope for lightness, delight, and joy.

I wrote Journey: the hope that I can continue moving forward.

I wrote Husband and Friends: the hope of remaining present in love and relationship rather than retreating into worry or isolation.

I wrote Pastor and Church: the hope that I can continue serving meaningfully among people.

I wrote Art, Author, Woodcraft, and PeaceGrooves: the hope that creativity will continue flowing through me rather than being swallowed up by discouragement, exhaustion, or fear.

Perhaps healing is everywhere in this drawing without being visible. It is hidden beneath almost every word: Let me be wekHzll enough, free enough, encouraged enough, and alive enough to keep inhabiting these loves.

But perhaps the omission also tells me something tender and difficult about myself. When I think about the future, I often think first about what I can give, create, serve, love, and build. I may not always think first about what I need. This picture invites me to remember that somewhere in the glowing year ahead, there must also be room for my own care. I am not only the husband, pastor, artist, author, musician, friend, and creator. I am also a person who needs healing, rest, gentleness, and grace.

The Smear Between Author and Husband

One of the small accidents in the piece occurred in the space between Author and Husband. Water smeared the color there, and I had to cover it as best I could. I was mostly able to hide the mistake, though I know it happened.

That accidental smear now feels strangely meaningful. Author and Husband are two of my most intimate identities: the part of me that creates worlds and gives language to inner experience, and the part of me that shares an actual life in love and covenant with another person. Perhaps those two identities were never meant to be sharply separated. My writing rises from my lived relationships, from tenderness, memory, fear, faith, longing, disappointment, and love. And my creative life inevitably spills into the life I share with my wife.

The water touched the border between those words, and I tried to repair it. That is not a failure of the picture. It may be one of the most honest parts of it. Life does not remain perfectly inside the lines. The roles I care most about do not remain untouched by mess, vulnerability, or accident. Sometimes the colors run together. Sometimes I try to cover what went wrong. Sometimes a trace remains, visible mostly to me.

Yet I did not throw the picture away. I continued working on it. I allowed the imperfection to dry and become part of the finished whole.

Perhaps that is an image of grace. A life of grace is not a life where nothing ever gets smeared. It is a life in which even the smeared places can be incorporated into the beauty.

Church: Almost Illegible

I also noticed that Church almost looks like “Churgh.” It is there, but it is not the clearest or most immediately readable word. That, too, feels symbolic.

Church is deeply present in my hopes for the coming year. It is part of who I am, part of my calling, part of my relationship with God and with community. But church is not always simple or perfectly clear. It can be difficult to read. It can be beautiful and messy, life-giving and exhausting, sacred and profoundly human all at once.

In this picture, church does not appear by itself in a clean, isolated space. It is crowded into a circling path alongside other words: Love, Friends, Art, the movements of creativity and ministry surrounding it. That seems truthful. For me, church is not separate from love, friendship, art, imagination, service, or reconciliation. It is beautifully entangled with them.

The fact that the word may be hard to dicipher signifies that church is something I continue to believe in and belong to, though at times, it may be difficult to see clearly its formation.

The Shape of the Year

The large number itself is not simply filled in. It becomes a winding course. The words curve around turns and corners; some appear upright from one angle and upside down from another. To read the whole image, I almost have to rotate it, follow it, and let my eyes travel through it.

I do not know exactly how it will unfold. My hopes do not form a straight road or a neatly numbered plan. They form a brightly lit labyrinth. Something that appears upside down from one position may look different once I travel farther along the curve. Something that seems peripheral now may become central. Something disappointing may redirect me toward an unexpected opening.

This drawing does not say, Here is my plan to master the next year.

It says, Here is the glowing path I hope to traverse.

Music feeds ministry. Woodcraft feeds contemplation. Writing feeds faith. PeaceGrooves gathers together my imagination, my longing for peace, my love of play, and my desire to offer something meaningful to others. Marriage and friendship keep my creative life from becoming merely solitary. Church places my personal dreams within a larger body. God is not outside all these things, looking down upon them from a distance, but present among them.

My life is not a ladder climbing toward a single success. It is a winding, illuminated journey through many loves.

The Lights Around the Border

The repeated yellow bulbs around the border give the piece a vintage, celebratory feeling. They make the year look like something grounded in the past yet being announced: a show beginning, a stage opening, a bright invitation to enter.

There is something almost exuberant about it. I did not draw a quiet little calendar page or a restrained list of intentions. I drew my age as a symbol of hope. Music, laughter, love, friendship, art, faith, craft, writing, church, PeaceGrooves—these are not hobbies or decorative extras around the edge of life. They are among the things that make life worth living.

And yet the lights are not machine-perfect. They are hand-drawn. Each one is slightly different. Some are rounder, some rougher, some more irregular. The brightness of this coming year is not a slick commercial promise that everything will be perfect. It is the brightness I have carefully drawn around my hopes with my own imperfect hand.

The lights continue around the bends. They do not shine only along the smooth or impressive stretches. They follow the narrow turns, the dips, the places where the shape curls inward. The light does not abandon the complicated places.

What This Picture Says to Me

This is a picture of my hope not merely to survive another year but to remain fully myself within it.

I want to sing and play.

I want to laugh.

I want to remember.

I want to journey.

I want to love and be loved.

I want to remain a husband, a pastor, an author, an artist, a craftsman, a musician, a friend, and a dreamer.

I want PeaceGrooves not merely to exist as a project, but to become an expression of something deep within me: my longing to imagine, create, and make peace.

I want God not as an abstract religious idea floating somewhere outside my life but as a living presence woven among music, love, creativity, friendship, church, memory, laughter, and journey.

And perhaps beneath the entire picture is the word I did not write: wholeness.

Wholeness includes health. It includes healing. But it is larger than both. It is the hope that all these different names for myself will not compete with one another, break apart, or fade away, but somehow curve together into a single radiant life.

The smear between Author and Husband, the almost-illegible Church, the reversed words, the crowded pathways, the uneven bulbs, and the wandering design do not lessen the picture. They make it more honest.

My hopes for the next year are not cleanly arranged or perfectly protected from mistakes. They are handmade. They are entangled. They are vulnerable. They are colorful. They are imperfect.

And, Oh Yes!, they are still shining.

When Nations Turn Toward Their Own Minds

https://thereflectivemind9.wordpress.com/2026/06/04/when-nations-turn-toward-their-own-minds/

Do our beliefs shape our opinions—or do our opinions shape our beliefs? A thought-provoking reflection on the ideas that influence how we see the world.

#Beliefs #PersonalReflection #LifeLessons

Read more: https://www.wyalusing-wes.com/opinions-about-beliefs/

The Cenotaph

There are places in me
where I go to mourn
what is not there.

An empty stone,
a name without a body,
a date without a doorway.

The precious thing is buried elsewhere—
in a house that no longer stands,
in a field grown over strange weeds,
in a voice I cannot quite recover,
in the face of someone
before disappointment taught them
how to look away.

I bring flowers
to the wrong place.

Still, I come.

Because memory does not always know
where the dead are buried.
Sometimes, it only knows
where to kneel.

And perhaps that is what I am:
a cenotaph of my former selves,
a monument raised far from the grave,
a body still walking
with epitaphs hidden under the skin.

Here lies the boy who believed.
Here lies the song unsung.

Here lies the photo with the blurred face.
Here lies the joy that went ahead of me
and never came back.

But the mausoleum is empty.

That is the terror.
That is the mercy.

For what is not here
may not be wholly lost.
What is buried far away
may still be sending roots beneath the earth,
their ghostly fingers stretching toward me.

The Cenotaph Triad

The Cenotaph

The Roots Beneath the Stone

The First Green Thorn

The River Isn’t Finished Flowing Yet

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/06/04/the-river-isnt-finished-flowing-yet/