Gents Journey
Helping Men become the Gentleman they deserve to be. This Podcast is part inspiration part motivation. We discuss what it takes to be a Gentleman in the 21st Century. We also talk about how to deal with the internal and external battles that life throws at us. So come be apart of the Gents Journey!
Gents Journey
Grandeur: Tightening the Circle
The chess pieces are moving, and you might not realize you're the one being played.
In this gripping installment of the Grandeur Man series, we journey through shadowy corridors and ancient sanctums to uncover a profound truth about personal growth: as you accumulate power, you inevitably draw attention from forces that seek to test your worthiness.
Through rich, immersive storytelling, we follow a protagonist collecting chess pieces – three pawns, two knights, two bishops, and one rook – each symbolizing different aspects of personal development. But with each new acquisition, the "other side" takes notice. "When you start to rise, every game changes," we learn. "The greater the imbalance you create, the stronger the counterweight sent against you."
This episode pulls back the curtain on why life's challenges often intensify precisely when we're making our greatest strides forward. That promotion, that relationship breakthrough, that habit finally mastered – these victories shift the board in ways that demand response from the world around us. Sometimes we lose pieces not through carelessness but as deliberate tests to see how we'll react.
The power of this metaphor extends beyond chess into every area of life where growth occurs. Your increasing capabilities aren't going unnoticed; they're creating a shape that signals you can no longer be ignored. The question isn't whether opposition will come – it's whether you're building in ways that prepare you for it.
Through five thought-provoking reflections, you'll examine your own invisible game: What pieces have you collected without realizing their combined weight? How has your success shifted the balance in your life? And most critically, if the other side moved against you tomorrow, what would be your first move back?
Join me as we explore what happens when the board remembers every piece you take, and discover how to maintain your course when your growth attracts attention you never anticipated.
"True mastery is found in the details. The way you handle the little things defines the way you handle everything."
Hello and welcome to the Gentleman's Journey podcast. My name is Anthony, your host, and today we are in episode nine of Grandeur man. Episode nine it's coming up fast, so let's go ahead and let's get into the cold opening. It's not the sound that wakes him, it's the absence of it Silence. It's not the sound that wakes him, it's the absence of it silence, it's pure and heavy. It lays across him like a second skin.
Speaker 1:He doesn't remember the exact moment his body betrayed him. The collapse had been sudden, his legs cutting out from under him, as if the ground had pulled away. The memories between that instant and now are fractured the faint rush of air as he fell, the thud of his own weight against the floor, and then darkness. His eyes open, but it's like looking through water. Shadows move in the edges of his vision. Shadows move in the edges of his vision, warping and bending with every shallow breath. The ceiling above him is unfamiliar, not the high stone arches of the Order's common hall, but something lower, more oppressive, ribbed with beams that seem too close. And the longer he looks, there is a taste in his mouth that's metallic and stale, as though copper dust has settled on his tongue. He shifts, but the motion feels wrong. His body answers slowly, like he's controlling it from a distance. Where am I? The question is not just in his mind, he hears it, his own voice, faint, uncertain, and it sounds far away. He blinks and the shadows sharpen. The room is dimly lit, its walls lined with wooden shelves holding small objects. Nothing uniform, nothing orderly. A single candor flickers on the desk across the room, its flame bent toward him as though it's listening.
Speaker 1:He tries to set up. The weight in his head makes it difficult, but its instinct drives him to push through the haze. His boots scoff against the floor wood not stone. The boards creak, old and uneven. There's no sound from beyond the walls, no hum of the order's corridors, no faint footsteps of members going about their training. He's somewhere else. Memories drip back slowly.
Speaker 1:The day has started like any other drill Drills in the East Hall, quiet meals in the shadow of the grand stair, a conversation no more like an exchange of glances with one of the older members whose eyes are warning in them, and then pain in his chest, pressure building behind his eyes, his knees folding and the world tilting out from under him. Now, in this narrow room, the air feels thicker. The candle's flame sputters once, as if it's reacting to his thoughts. You're awake. The voice comes from somewhere to his right, calm but carrying weight. He turns his head slowly.
Speaker 1:The man stands in half shadow. The hood of his robe draws low. He doesn't move closer, doesn't step into the light. He doesn't move closer, doesn't step into the light. There's no rush to explain who he is. And Sam, the man continues. You've been moved. For your safety. The words are flat, they're deliberate and they land in his mind without comfort. My safety, his voice feels dry in his throat From what the man feels dry in his throat, from what the man doesn't answer right away. Instead he steps forward just enough for the light to catch his mouth. A thin, unreadable line. You've drawn attention, not all of it welcome. The words open something in his chest, not fear exactly, but a tightening.
Speaker 1:There had been whispers in the order before names, mentioning and passing, the kind of conversation that stopped when he entered the room. He had been told it was just how things were, that he was new, that time would bring trust. But now this. His eyes flick to the shelves around him. The objects there are strange A cracked pocket watch, a chess pawn carved from bone, a folded scrap of parchment with an unbroken red seal. Each feels out of place, as if they've been taken from other lives and stored here. The man notices his gaze. We keep what matters, Things others overlook. He doesn't know if it's meant as an answer. He tries to stand and the room sways. The man doesn't move to study him. Instead he watches, a test maybe, or an act of quiet assessment.
Speaker 1:When his legs finally hold, he takes a step toward the candlelit desk. The air near it feels warmer, as though it's the only true source of life in the room. On the desk, besides the candle, sits a small black box. It's no larger than his palm. Its surface smooth but worn at the edges. Something about it pulls at him the way certain dreams feel familiar, even though you know you've never lived them. Before he can speak, the man says nope, not. Yet the words are sharp enough to cut the air between them. He swallows and looks back at the man fully, but the hood hides everything but the mouth. Where am I? A place the order keeps for those who are in between. Before he can ask, the man steps back into shadow. Rest, you'll need it. And then the candle flickers hard, the shadows on the wall stretch and the man is gone. The silence closes in again, heavier than before. His eyes go to the black box once more. Every part of him says not to touch it. Every part of him also says it's already his, somewhere beyond the walls, faint and distant, he thinks. He hears footsteps, slow, deliberate, coming closer. He realizes His hands are shaking.
Speaker 1:Part 1 the world was still sideways when he opened his eyes For a moment. He couldn't tell if the ceiling above him Was real or something the mind invents when it's not sure if it's still attached to a body. It's swarm, blurred. The plaster seems bending and twisting, like they were caught in a slow, silent tide. His chest rose too fast, the air clawing its way into his lungs. He could hear it ragged, shallow, like each breath might be the last one he could bargain for. He didn't remember falling. He remembered her face, not as she'd been when she laughed or when her eyes had burned through him in those private moments where he thought he'd outlived the world. No, this was different. In the dream, if it was what it was, she was standing over him, her hair loose, shadowed by a light he couldn't see. Her lips moved, but he couldn't make out the words, only the sound like water dripping into an empty well, and the way she looked at him, not with pity, not with love, something else.
Speaker 1:Finality when he tried to lift his head, the pain cracked down the back of his neck. His hands were on him, then real ones pulling him upright. Voices blurred around the edges Easy, easy, he's coming back. Get him some water, not too fast. The room was one he knew, but not like this. It was tilted. It was doubled swimming, but not like this. It was tilted, it was doubled swimming in and out of itself.
Speaker 1:The long table, the marked boards, the faint smell of oil from the lanterns that burned low. He could hear the soft clink of wood on wood, the pieces, always the pieces. The rook was still in his pocket. He felt for it before he felt for anything else. It was there, solid, cold, heavy in the way that it didn't belong to its size. Someone crouched in front of him. He blinked and the shape settled into focus. A man he'd spoken to times in passing, one of the older members.
Speaker 1:The way he looked at him now wasn't the way a man looks at someone who just fainted. It was the way a man looks when he's wanting to see if the thing in front of him is going to stand up or stay down. You were gone, he said voice voice low, not just out gone. He didn't know what to tell him because a part of him wondered if he was right. They let him sit there until his hands stopped shaking. The water they gave him was cold, metallic on the tongue. He wanted to ask if she was there, if anyone had seen her, but the words lodged somewhere deep and wouldn't come out when he could stand. They didn't send him away. They led him deeper Past rooms he'd never been allowed into before, past doors that have always been enclosed to him. Each step was a little steadier than the last, though his chest still ached like something in him hadn't come back through with the rest. And then in the half-light he saw it. But they'd been hiding.
Speaker 1:The chessboard wasn't a metaphor anymore, it was real, old. The wood darkened by years, maybe centuries. The pieces weren't all there. The gaps yawned like missing teeth. One of them, a bishop carved in black stone, was slid across the board towards him. This is yours now, the older man said, and so is what comes with it. He stared at it. It stared back For the first time since he's woken, he thought maybe I didn't collapse, maybe I was pulled.
Speaker 1:Part 2 the hallway still smelled faintly of rain, though he knew that couldn't have been possible. Though he knew that couldn't have been possible, not here, not underground. It was a ghost scent, something carried on the mind rather than the air, as if memory itself had leaked through the walls. Every step forward made his shoulders tighten, each footstep giving back a hollow, muted echo. He kept thinking about the sound, the way it was softer than it should be, as if the space itself was swallowing noise. Even the sound of his breath seemed dampened, absorbed into the stone. It wasn't just the air, it was the silence. He could feel it on his skin now, a subtle static, as if, though, the stillness had texture, thin but present, brushing across the hairs on his arms. He slowed without meaning to, glancing down the corridor that stretched on like a single unbroken exhale.
Speaker 1:The light was low here, golden but tired, the candles burning past their final hours. Shadows leaned long against the stone, and in those shadows the pieces waited. His hand brushed against the edge of his coat, where the pocket sagged with weight. The knight, the rook, two bishops, two pawns and the second knight. Its edge was still sharp against his palm where he clutched it after the last trial. He didn't have to look. He could see them in his mind, arranged in a row across a board that didn't exist yet. Each piece, a key, each key a step closer to whatever this all meant. It wasn't just progress that weighed on him. It was the growing sense that the pieces weren't his alone, that somewhere someone else was watching their number rise.
Speaker 1:He turned the next corner and stopped. The air was different. It was cooler, almost damp, carrying that ghost scent of rain again. The space opened into a wide chamber. The ceiling lost in shadow. A table sat in the center, draped in dark cloth, something resting in its center. He stepped forward slowly, every movement deliberate. He didn't know why, but his pulse had picked up again. That quiet drum in his ears.
Speaker 1:When he reached the table, he saw it a single folded scrap of paper, creased and worn. A single folded scrap of paper, creased and worn. The hand ring across its surface was looping, almost elegant, but the ink had bled in places as if it had been wet at some point. He touched it with one finger. The paper roughed beneath his skin and it flipped open. The words were brief, just three of them. Do you hear he blinked. The words were brief, just three of them. Do you hear he blinked. The room was silent, save for the faint throb of his own pulse, but then almost too soft to register. There it was A sound, not words, not music, more like movement, a faint shuffle, quick and gone again. He turned sharply, scanning the room, scanning the shadows, nothing. His brush slowed. He closed the paper and slipped into his pocket with the pieces. The sound could have been anything, his mind filling in the blanks, the settling of stone, but it stayed with him as he moved on, that barely there scrape, the feeling of presence just beyond reach.
Speaker 1:He followed the chamber's fall wall until it narrowed again into another corridor. This one climbed slightly, the incline, barely noticeable at first. The air felt thinner here and the static against his skin began to fade, replaced by a steadier warmth. With each step, the tension that had wound him tight since entering began to loosen, not gone, but eased Like a rope no longer pulled to its limit. The corridor ended in a half-open door. He paused, leaning just enough to peer through. Beyond was a small room lit by a single hanging lamp. Its light pooled across a single hanging lamp. Its light pooled across a low wooden table, casting the corners into shadow. There was nothing else, no movement, no hidden figure waiting to step out, just stillness. He entered slowly, closed the door behind him and, for the first time in what felt like hours, he allowed himself to breathe without hurry. The calm wasn't just in the air, it was in the walls and the way the lamp's light swayed gently, casting slow-moving shadows, like the rhythm of tides. The rhythm of tides. His hand stopped there, restlessly, switching His pulse steadied, and for a brief moment the world narrowed to this the warmth of the room, the weight of the pieces and this quiet certainty that this was an interlude, a pause before something else. But even in the calm, the clue lingered that sound, that question, do you hear? He sat at the table and closed his eyes, letting the silence stretch. And in that silence, somewhere far away or perhaps impossibly close, the sound returned, softer, now almost unrecognizable, like the distant turn of a key in a lock he had yet to find.
Speaker 1:Part 3. The Fire that Doesn't Warm, part 3. The Fire that Doesn't Warm. The room had no corners for his voice to hide in. Stone rang long and unbroken candlelight, slipping in slow waves across the walls, as if the rock itself breathed. The order sanctum didn't hum like churches do, full of memory or choir ghosts. It held a sharper kind of silence, the kind that made a man hear his own footsteps and decide whether he liked the sound of them. They hadn't spoken to him in three days. That was the rule. Gestures only Tasks before teaching. He carried water. He swept. Tasks before teaching. He carried water, he swept. He sat with a watch that didn't tick and counted 700 breaths to see if anything in him would stop asking for permission. No one corrected his posture, no one praised his endurance.
Speaker 1:On the morning of the fourth day, a man with gray hair and steady hands slid a small wooden box toward him across the table and left without a word. Inside paper the color of old teeth, a stick of black wax, a matchbook with no branding and a fountain pen heavy enough to be a weapon or a witness. There was a thin cord, coiled beneath it, all Braided leather rubbed smooth by other hands. He took the things out like it was touching photographs of the dead. He knew that they were asking without a single syllable Write it, say what you've been carrying. Bury the lesser man without a public ceremony, do it to where only the walls can hear, and then give the ashes to the dark. He stared at the paper until the words in his head lined up like men at a firing squad.
Speaker 1:He didn't start with dear. There's nothing dear about the version of himself he was addressing. Not cruel either. Cruelty has been its own trap, a way to feel strong. Without changing, he put the pen down and rubbed the heel of his hand against his sternum. There's a tightness that lived there for months, maybe years, maybe longer than that. He had the sense sometimes that he'd been born with this ache, that some part of him knew how all of this ended and had been trying to warn him since the first time.
Speaker 1:He told the truth and felt smaller for it. He wrote the first line without breathing. I forgive you for wasting our time. The letters were ugly. He didn't try to make them pretty. Pretty had been a part of the problem. Pretty had sold him a version of himself that photographed well and slept like a thief. He kept going.
Speaker 1:I forgive you for the meals you ate when you weren't hungry. For the nights you said yes because saying no had meant you were made invisible. For the years you learned people's preferences so you didn't have to have any. I forgive you for the way you kept us safe by keeping us small. I forgive you for the lies you told to survive. A room full of men who called it networking. A candle popped Hot wax, leaned and calmed. Somewhere behind him, a door swallowed itself, closed with a soft stone kiss. He waited for a throat to clear, a hint that this was enough. Nothing, just the quiet and the pen and the ache. I forgive you for leaving the ring in your pocket too many times, convincing yourself that there would be a better night.
Speaker 1:I forgive you for surviving the crash that never happened and the ones that did. I forgive you for how you listened to every voice, but the one that came when everything else shut up. The words crash, never happened looked wrong on the page as soon as he wrote them. He couldn't say why. He scratched a line through the sentence and then another because the first wasn't enough. He pressed hard enough to bruise the paper and didn't stop until the letters were crossed in a block of black where language had been. The matchbook was too clean. Each match inside had its head. He turned it over. Someone had written seven digits and pencil across the back 707.007. Time that wasn't time. He felt a lift in his chest, like an elevator moving too fast. He'd seen that sequence before A bus, sign a receipt, total his phone when it worked and when it didn't. A memory that felt like looking through smoked glass. He took the matches back into the box and kept writing before the moment could turn into an answer he hadn't asked for.
Speaker 1:I forgive you for the friendships you kept because you owed them an old version of yourself. For the way you developed allergies to silence. For the way you ate your own power in small bites so no one else would notice it was missing. For the way you loved her with half a heart because the other half was rented to strangers. He didn't write her name, the room didn't need it, it was in everything the way he sat, the way his jaw clicked when he swallowed, the way his eyes knew where the door was. Without looking, he could see her clearly as the words, though Hair gathered in a messy tie sleeve pushed up, with her wrist against her cheek, listening. She always listened like that, like a scientist cataloging stars. He saw a different angle of her face then, from above the bridge of her nose, the line of her throat and felt the sudden tilt of the room, like a car that had been going straight and caught a patch of ice. He blinked and the synctum returned to level, breathing in candle smoke and old stone, he kept the pen moving, afraid if he stopped the picture would sharpen and ask a question he wasn't ready to answer.
Speaker 1:I forgive you for the bargains you made with comfort that looked like ambition, for the calendar full of meetings where nothing was decided, for the sentences that started with after I and never ended. I forgive you for all the little ways you made us invisible because being seen would require a name. He paused there. Name, the word carried weight. Lately he understood that a name wasn't a label, but a compact, a rook of a thing, straight lines, no apology. He nodded without meaning to and wrote again I don't forgive you for everything. He let that sentence stand on its own line. I don't forgive how you treated your body like a rental. I don't forgive the nights you turn intimacy into evidence because proof felt safer than presence. I don't forgive the habit of telling jokes when you were afraid. I don't forgive the moment you watched a man be humiliated and said nothing because his humiliation meant you were safe.
Speaker 1:Part 4. The Fire that Doesn't Warm the air in the sanctum still carried the faint tang of melted wax and burnt paper from the night before he woke, before the others, even if he hadn't slept at all. There was no sound but the slow drip of water somewhere beyond the walls, a rhythm so steady it felt older than the room itself. He lay on the thin cot, staring at an arched ceiling, its stone ribs meeting in the center like collapsed hands. The bury of a lesser man was behind him. Now, though, the echo of it remained, like the lingering heat after a fire goes out. It didn't warm, it didn't comfort, but it told him something had burned.
Speaker 1:Rising, he dressed in the plain gray robe they had given him. It smelled faintly of cedar and dust. No one greeted him as he stepped into the hall. That was the way here Silence first, words later, if at all, all the quarters twisted, but never aimlessly. Every turn seemed to lead back to the same central chamber, as though the place itself wanted him to learn its pattern. Candles burned at precise intervals, their flames unbothered by drafts. He thought about blowing one out just to see if it would return. But something he knew it would.
Speaker 1:He found himself in the scriptorium a long table of dark oak covered in scrolls, bound books and small tools for writing. A man sat at the far end, hunched over a page. The scratching of his quill was the only sound. Without looking up, the man slid a blank sheet toward him. No instruction, no demand, just the page. Last night, the page remained white. After a time he sat the pen down and simply watched the ink dry on the other man's work, line by line, word by word. It felt like a lesson one, without a teacher to confirm if he understood. Later he carried water from a cistern. The buckets were heavy, the handles cutting into his palms. He welcomed the sting. It anchored him in his body.
Speaker 1:Each trip felt like the same, yet with each return he noticed something slightly different A crack in the stone he hadn't seen before, a candle leaning in into its holder, the faint outline of a symbol etched into the floor near the well. By the sixth trip the symbol was clear a circle spit by a vertical line, flanked by two smaller marks. He traced it with his finger. The stone was warm there, warmer than the rest. He glanced around, but no one else seemed to notice or care.
Speaker 1:That night he sat in the refectory, bowls of broth and coarse bread were set out. The others ate slowly, methodically. No conversation passed between them. Methodically, no conversation passed between them. Yet he felt part of something, not included exactly, but present in the way he hadn't been before. Eyes met his and held just long enough to acknowledge the shift. When he returned to his cot, the symbol from the well was there, faintly visible on the wall opposite his bed. He blinked and it was gone.
Speaker 1:Sleep came hard and deep. In the dream, he stood in the same room, but the stone was wet, reflecting light from no source he could name. She was there, her head pulled back, eyes fixed on him. She didn't speak, just looked down at him, the way someone does when you've fallen. He wanted to reach for her, but his arms were too heavy. When he looked again, she was gone and the stone under him was cold. He woke with a taste of iron in his mouth and the certainty that the dream had not ended Part 5.
Speaker 1:The Stone that Remembers the morning came without light. He knew it had been morning only because the air was cooler and somewhere deep in the wells, water began to move. It was never quiet here. Somewhere deep in the wells, water began to move. It was never quiet here, never truly still, but the sound shifted with the hours. He was starting to learn them. He rose without waiting for the bell. The robe felt heavier today, the fabric dragging over his shoulders as if it had absorbed something from him while he slept. He crossed the hall without seeing anyone, though he felt eyes on him in places where shadows thickened. The symbol from the well lingered in his thoughts. It had fallen into his sleep again. Only this time the stone had not been cold. In the dream it burned under his hands and the heat had climbed into his chest until it felt like it was eating through his ribs.
Speaker 1:He hadn't told anyone. He wasn't sure he could. In the refractory the bread was harder, the broth thinner. He ate without tasting it, more out of habit than hunger. Across the table, one of the older men sat down his spoon, watching him for a moment before speaking. You saw it. The man said it wasn't a question. He didn't answer, but his jaw tightened. The man nodded slowly, as though the silence was enough. You'll see it again, and when you do it'll ask something from you. Before he could respond, the man stood and laughed his bowl untouched.
Speaker 1:The day's labor took him outside for the first time since his arrival. A walled courtyard lay beyond the south doors, narrow overgrown with winter vines. The earth packed hard as stone. Along the wall, small alcoves had been carved, each containing a figure, some worn down to faceless shapes. Others were so finely preserved they looked as though they might step forward. He stopped at one particular. A man, kneeling head, bowed hands, collapsed over something hidden. The plaque beneath it bore the same circle and line mark from the well. When he reached the brush away the dust, his finger slipped into the groove, cut deep into the stone. The contact sent a shiver up his arm, not from cold but from the faintest vibration, as if the statue was breathing. He stepped back unsettled.
Speaker 1:The rest of the afternoon was spent moving crates from one storeroom to another. The work was simple, but the crates were heavy. Each trip wore on him by the tenth. He felt the air thickening, the way it does before a storm. When the final crate was set down, he noticed the mark again, this time scratched into the wood in jagged lines. Not carved, not placed with care. It looked almost desperate as though someone made it quickly, trying to leave a warning. That night the dream returned, only it wasn't the refractory, almost desperate, as though someone made it quickly trying to leave a warning.
Speaker 1:That night the dream returned, only it wasn't the refractory or the well, it was the courtyard. Moonless and black, he stood before the kneeling statue, but the face was his own. The eyes were open, the mouth was trying to speak, but no sound came, just the faint hiss of water moving somewhere below. He reached toward the statue and this time the object in its collapsed hands was visible A small black pond, worn smooth by touch. When his fingers closed around it, he felt the weight of something much larger than the piece itself and, from behind him, a voice You've taken another. He turned to look, but the courtyard was empty. He woke with a pawn in his hand, his third, two knights, two bishops and one rook, and now three pawns. The imbalance was growing. He didn't know why, but he could feel it in his chest. The board was taking shape.
Speaker 1:Part Six, the Weight of the Set. Morning broke with a thin light that slipped through a narrow window and fractured beams scattering across the stone floor like pieces of glass. He sat on the edge of the bed staring at the palm of his hand, turning it over and over. It was empty now the pond had vanished sometime during the night, same as all the others, but the memory of it still pressed against his skin, a ghost weight he couldn't shake. He knew better than to look for them. The pieces never stayed where he left them. They came when they wanted, disappeared when they chose. Yet he was certain they were all somewhere, kept guarded or maybe even watched over.
Speaker 1:By mid-morning, the courtyard called him back, not by order, not by duty, just an unshakable pull like something beneath the stones knew his name. The statue from yesterday stood unchanged, head bowed hands, collapsed in eternal offering. But now the alcove beside it was empty. He could have sworn held a faceless figure before brother calvin found him there. The man's shadow stretched long over the dirt before his voice followed it. You're carrying more than you should, calvin said. He turned, unsure whether to answer. You think it's just the weight in your hands? He continued. But the board remembers every piece you take. Everyone shifts the balance. Too many pawns and the game will not end the way you want it to. The words landed heavier than they should have. How do you stop it? He asked. You don't? He simply replied you play it out, but you should know the other side is moving too.
Speaker 1:The rest of the day passed under a strange pressure. Tasha should have been easy. Scrubbing stone basins, hauling water, folding thin robes and laundry Felt slow and off kilter, as though the air itself was thickening around him. Faces seemed to linger in doorways, shapes shifted in his periphery. Late in the afternoon he found another mark, not carved into wood or stone this time, but drawn in ash. Along the wall of the south corridor. The circle of mind symbol again smeared as though someone had been interrupted. Mid-stroke mind symbol again smeared as though someone had been interrupted mid-stroke. Beside it, a single black line angled just so like the start of another mark that was never finished.
Speaker 1:When night came, he laid in bed listening to breathing of men and rose beside him In the dark. The sound of it fell in and out of rhythm, replaced at times by something quieter, measured, calculating. He knew it without opening his eyes. The game was no longer just waiting for him to make moves, it was studying him. Now the monologue. The monologue, you might think the danger comes from. When the board is empty right, when there are no more pieces to play, no more moves to make when the battle is over and the silence has settled. But that's not the truth. The real danger begins when the board is uneven, when one side begins to gather more than it understands, when the weight shifts quietly, almost politely, and no one notices until it's too late. Think about it. He has three pawns now, three Small things, each one harmless if you hold them alone, but together they tilt the game, they draw attention, they make the other side wake up. See, brother, calvin's words weren't just a warning, they were a sentence passed without ceremony. The other side is moving too. That's the truth.
Speaker 1:Most men never see until they've already been caught. Right, you think you're the only one making moves. Right that your steps are invisible, your growth private, your power gathering unnoticed. But nothing in life is really unobserved. Every action casts a shadow. Every action casts a shadow and somewhere, in a place you cannot see, something is watching that shadow move. See, that is the part that no one teaches you.
Speaker 1:When you start to rise, every game changes the landscape. Every piece you add to your set changes the game itself. It calls forth a matching force. The greater the imbalance you create, the stronger the counterweight sent against you, and it rarely arrives as an equal. No, it comes in strange ways. And the old friend who suddenly turns cold, and the door that was open yesterday but now it's not open today, and the voice in your own head that begins to whisper that you're not ready, not worthy, not capable of keeping what you've built. And yet he doesn't understand this. He doesn't understand this. But the three pawns are not just three pawns, they're proof, proof he's moving faster than he realizes, proof that his set is forming in a way that cannot be ignored.
Speaker 1:And the moment your set becomes impossible to ignore, you're no longer the only one hunting, you are being hunted back. Think about your own life, think about the things you've collected, the victories, the possessions, the habits, the skills, the relationships. Individually, each feels small, forgettable, right, but together they form a shape and that shape says something to the world. Says something to the world. It says he is becoming dangerous. When you carry that kind of shape, the world stops treating you like someone who can be ignored, it begins to test you. It sends storms into rooms you thought were safe. It slips challenges in your sleep. It weighs you piece by piece to see if you're worthy of keeping what you've gathered.
Speaker 1:And here's the hardest part. Sometimes you lose pieces not because you were careless, but because the other side will take them simply to see how you respond, to watch. Rather, you fold when the set you thought was yours begins to shift. So understand this the more you gather, the more you'll be gathered against. The question is not if the other side will move, it's when. And when it does. The board will not care whether you feel ready, it'll amend your next move anyways.
Speaker 1:So let's go ahead and let's get into our five reflections. Reflection one what pieces habits, wins, possessions have you been collecting without realizing their combined weight? Reflection two their combined weight. Reflection two how has your growth or success quietly shifted the balance in your life? Reflection three who or what might be on the other side in your own game right now? Number four are you building in a way that prepares you for the challenges your progress will attract? And number five if the other side moved against you tomorrow, what would be your first move back? That's a huge question.
Speaker 1:So, guys, we are in episode nine, right? We're going in episode 10 here shortly and we're a third. We're almost a third of the way there and I cannot tell you again how much I just appreciate your support. It just means the world to me, and if you want to support this program, this series, this show, it's super easy. Just do two things Share this with a family member or a friend and leave a like or a comment on this episode. It helps out immensely right, and I'm getting a lot of feedback from you guys.
Speaker 1:I'm having a lot of great conversations with you, and if you want to have a conversation with me, there's three ways to do it. First way, on the description of this podcast, there's something that says let's chat. You click on that and you and I can have a conversation about this series, this episode, the 14 other series that are out there and 270 plus now episodes on Gents Journey. There's a ton of stuff out there. Second way is going to be through my email. My email is anthonyatgentsjourneycom, so please, please, please, feel free to reach out to me there. And then, last but not least, you can always find me on my Instagram. My Instagram is my gents journey. So again, guys, thank you so much for listening today and remember this you create your reality, take care.