It's a Tuesday at ten in the evening and I'm sitting, thinking about a half-built bar in Sheridan with a Cayman Jack margarita I didn't really need. We pulled part of the countertop today. Underneath, in pencil, was a row of signatures the original builders left behind when they were closing it up. The date next to them was May 11, 2013. Thirteen years and one day ago.
I sat with that for longer than I meant to.
What an overflowing cup actually costs
Most of what I read about gratitude treats it like a vitamin. Take it once a day and your life will improve. That isn't what it is. Gratitude is the only thing strong enough to interrupt pursuit, and pursuit is the gear most of us are stuck in. We didn't choose it. It chose us somewhere around fifteen and it hasn't let up since.
I've spent most of my twenties chasing. Then I caught some of it. The cup, as the cliché goes, is overflowing. The real estate company is moving faster than I can staff it. We are days from opening a venue called The Living Room. My fiancée is about to graduate as a bench jeweler, and a road trip is on the calendar to bring her home. The dogs do not yet know.
I want to tell you that abundance feels different than you think it will. It does not arrive as relief. It arrives as a longer list.
The ten o'clock argument
Society has a clean opinion about being up at ten. Get to bed. Wake at five. Eight hours non-negotiable. The wellness internet has agreed: sleep is virtue.
Then there is the other voice. The Steve Harvey line that has been floating around for years. Rich people don't sleep eight hours a day. The implication being that the hours between ten and one are where the building actually happens, after the calls and the crews and the everyone-else of the day has gone quiet.
Both arguments are correct. Both are also dressed-up cover for what you actually want.
What I want, at ten on a Tuesday, is one hour where nobody needs anything from me. Not my crew, not a guest, not a vendor, not a buyer. One hour to sit with my own thoughts and find out what they are saying. That hour is not a luxury. It is the only material I have for the kind of work I actually want to do. The writing. The thinking-through. The reckoning with what the day actually was.
I will trade sleep for that. The cost of getting it back tomorrow with a coffee and a hard hour in the gym is real, but I have paid it before. I'll pay it again.
Abundance does not arrive as relief. It arrives as a longer list.
Building community, twice
The first time I helped build a community space, it was the Local Nakamal. Kava, in Sheridan. A few cases of empty cans in the trash can while we did the carpentry. I went sober for two years on the back of that build. Whatever romance there was around drinking, I had seen enough of the bottom of the bottle.
This is the second time. The Living Room opens to the public this weekend with an event on Saturday, May 16th. We are not doing this with big funding. We are not doing this with architectural drawings. We are doing it the way community spaces have always actually been built. With what is on hand. With what has been donated. With whatever someone's brother-in-law can hang in an afternoon.
Today the puzzle is the engineering behind the bar and the front door, which is technically the back door, but it is the critical piece of the place. Various energies have shown up to work on the same idea: a place to be together. The owner has dreams I now believe will land, because I have seen the moment when a half-built room turns into a real one, and it is never the day you planned.
There is a particular pride in building something the slow, sideways way. You don't get to brag about a capital stack. You get to look at the room when it is done and recognize every hand in it.
The Cayman Jack margarita
I don't drink much anymore. After the two sober years, alcohol came back into my life only as a marker. A noteworthy drink. An occasion that earned itself. A moment of spirit. Not the daily numbing it had been for half of my early twenties.
So tonight, finalizing a half-built bar, working on what is more or less a sequel to a venue I helped build before, I had one. A Cayman Jack margarita. It tasted like the nostalgia it was supposed to taste like. I am not going to pretend the sip didn't matter to me. I am also not going to pretend I needed it.
That distinction is most of what I learned in the years off. You can keep the things that mean something. You just have to take them on their actual weight, not the weight of the habit.
Thirteen years, one day
We pulled part of the countertop today, and the signatures were waiting underneath. Pencil on plywood. May 11, 2013. The hands that built the thing the first time signed it the way builders have always signed work that no one was supposed to see. For themselves. For the building. For the next person who happened to come along.
That next person, by accident of timing, was me. And the blessing of 2 others who put it there!
I want to be careful here. It would be easy to call the date a sign and run away with it. I do not believe much in signs. Omens, thats another story. Ask me about it sometime. I do believe that when you spend long enough making things, you start to see the seams in time. The way work echoes work. The way one builder hands off to the next without ever meeting. The way the room itself outlives whoever was in charge of it.
The signatures did not tell me anything I did not already know. They reminded me. Make the thing well enough that someone in 2039 finds your handwriting under it and pauses for a second before they keep working. That is the entire job.
Homesick for a home I don't know
There is a feeling I have not been able to name. It sits behind everything right now. The real estate. The venue. The calendar. The road trip we are about to take to bring my fiancée home from her last week.
The closest I can get is this. I am homesick for a home I do not know.
The life we are building is not the one we have been living. Same town, mostly. Same dogs. Same trucks. But the next chapter is unmistakably different. A married home. A working jeweler's bench somewhere in the house. A real estate operation that has outgrown the way I used to run it. A venue with my fingerprints on it that the public will walk through on Saturday.
I want new. I want different. And I keep making, in the same patterns I have always made in, with a small tilt that is, I think, the only kind of growth there actually is.
Younger me would have begged for this. I have to remember that. The version of me that was building Nakamal, a sober bar, with Cayman Jack Margarita cans in the trash, broke and tired and unsure, would not believe the calendar I am running now. Ha, let alone the kid that got me there, if only he could meet me for coffee. The strange part about abundance is that it does not feel like abundance from the inside. It feels like more. More decisions. More weight. More people. More chances to drop something.
The trick is to keep noticing it is the thing you asked for.
Pursuit ends where gratitude begins
Pursuit does not end on its own. It will run as long as you let it. It will eat ten years and not give them back.
The only thing that interrupts it is gratitude. Not the LinkedIn version. The kind where you sit down at ten on a Tuesday with a drink you don't need and a countertop signed by builders thirteen years and one day ago, and you let yourself notice that you are, by every honest measure, living the life the younger version of you would have begged for.
Then you go back to work. Because that is also the deal.
But you went somewhere first. You let the pursuit stop for ten minutes. You let the day count.
Pursuit will be where I left it. The hour I gave back to myself tonight is the one I will remember.
Close
It is closer to eleven now. The cayman jack is warm. The signatures are still under the countertop, with mine going on next to them once the bar is finished. May 12, 2026, and whatever name I write that will not matter to anyone for another thirteen years.
Tomorrow there is a venue to open on Saturday. A real estate calendar that will not slow down. A road trip to plan. Dogs that are going to lose their minds when their person comes home. None of it is going anywhere. Pursuit will be where I left it.
The hour I gave back to myself tonight, the one I am closing now by sending this, is the one I will remember.
If you are up too, somewhere in your own ten o'clock argument, I hope you take the hour. The sleep will come. The work will come. The cup will keep overflowing on its own.
The gratitude is the only part you have to do on purpose.
If a piece of this resonated, the rest of the Field Notes live here on daltongoodyear.com. I am trying to put what I have actually learned in one place. The building. The operating. The slow shift away from chasing for chasing's sake. Wyo Stays handles the short-term rental side of the operation in Sheridan and the Bighorns when that is the conversation. The Living Room soft soft opens Saturday, May 16th, in town, if you happen to be local. Otherwise, keep your hour. That is the whole ask.
Anything here about money or results describes my own companies. It isn't typical and isn't a promise of yours. See the earnings disclaimer.
DG
Dalton Goodyear
Operator, writer and speaker in Sheridan, Wyoming. Hosting short-term rentals since 2017. Licensed Wyoming real estate broker and founder of Wyo Stays.
