A hallway, an Indiana bar and a farm that wouldn’t load

This morning, FarmVille wouldn’t load.

That doesn’t sound like much of a problem. But it threw off my whole morning routine, and not for the first time. So instead of getting annoyed and moving on, I decided to actually pay attention to why.

Opening my laptop and logging into my farm is my signal. It’s how I tell my brain that work mode has started. Checking my crops, selling what’s ready, knocking out a weekly challenge, these are small wins, and small wins first thing in the morning do something real. Apparently there’s real science behind why checking off small tasks boosts dopamine, focus and creativity. Nobody needed a study to tell me this. They needed to watch what happens to my whole day when a cartoon farm won’t load : )

This morning it didn’t. So I did what any reasonable person does: I googled the problem, cleared my cache, cleaned up some old files and generally spent way more time than the actual game would have taken. Not my best use of time. But I fixed it. Win. Checked my farm. Started my day.

I’ve been leaning on small wins like this more since my dad passed. My world shifted a little when he died, and these tiny daily completions have quietly been part of finding my footing again. I’m not writing about grief today, just noticing that this particular habit is doing more work than it looks like.

Here’s the thing, though: this isn’t really about FarmVille. It’s about a pattern that goes back further than I usually admit.

Back in the Gilbert house, when the kids were still small, I remember one particular Saturday. Everyone had scattered to their corners of the house to decompress from the week. Lexi’s room was full of music and singing. Zach’s room was full of laughter. Mikey’s room had a steady stream of commands barked at a screen. The living room had their father, fully immersed, cursing at whatever game had wronged him that day. And I was doing laundry and figuring out lunch and dinner.

I stopped in the hallway and just listened for a second. Every one of those sounds was a different persona, each person fully somewhere else, unwinding in their own language. There was a rhythm to it, all those separate worlds humming along at once, and I found myself smiling. Then I looked down at the basket of clothes in my arms and had a quiet thought: I could use some of that, too.

So I closed my bedroom door as well. And I logged into FarmVille, which back then lived on Facebook. I spent hours there. Nobody needed anything from me. I didn’t need to be anywhere else.

That instinct never really left. A few weeks ago, visiting Lexi and Quin in Indiana, we were at their favorite bar having a few cocktails, and Quin and Zach fell into one of those deep dives into old PlayStation memories. Lexi jumped right in. She puts in her own hours. I sat there enjoying the laughter, and eventually I couldn’t help myself. “Well, not to brag or anything,” I said, “but I’m almost level 300 in FarmVille 2.”

The table lost it. Laughter turned into tears turned into more memories, all of us circling back to the games that shaped different corners of our family, old and new, PlayStation and Facebook, all of it the same thing underneath. People finding a small, private place to decompress, and somehow still finding each other there, too.

So this morning, when the game wouldn’t load, I wasn’t really frustrated about a farm. I was protecting a small win. A signal. A thread that runs from a hallway on Gilbert Street to a bar in Indiana to a laptop on my desk in Florida.

Turns out the smallest rituals are sometimes the ones holding the most.