Patio Pondering: Unbreakable Walls and Redirected Energy

The weather forecasters were right. This morning is dawning just below 20 degrees after pushing past 50 yesterday. I am grateful for hot, strong coffee as I watch the sun rise over the patio and gather my thoughts.

One of those “tell me something about yourself that no one knows” icebreakers we all endure would reveal that I am an advanced amateur genealogist, an interest passed down from both of my grandmothers. Anyone who digs into family history long enough becomes familiar with “brick walls” — ancestors where the records simply stop.

One of my longest-standing brick walls has followed me for more than two decades. My third great-grandmother, Maria Anna Geiger, and her daughter Sophie emigrated from the Kingdom of Württemberg to the United States in 1866. Sophie eventually settled in Allen County, Indiana. I have her baptism records, but for Maria Anna, the trail ends abruptly. No birth record. No marriage record. Nothing.

Over the years I have revisited this wall repeatedly, often finding only information I already had. This past weekend, with the help of modern research tools and a little AI assistance, I decided to give it one more serious push.

The wall did not move.

What did change was my understanding. As I dug deeper into the political and religious realities of early-1800s Württemberg, it became clear that some lives simply did not leave clean paper trails. Marriage was regulated by the state, and without land, money, or status, many couples could not legally marry. The church recorded what it could, but it was not the judge. Some families lived their entire lives largely undocumented, not by accident, but by design.

That realization allowed me to finally move this brick wall into a new category: unbreakable. And strangely enough, that acceptance was freeing. I no longer feel the need to attack it every time I sit down to work on my family tree. The frustration is gone, replaced with calm.

A few days later, I recognized that same feeling from other moments in my career. Times when I finally accepted that a sale, a project, or an advancement was never going to happen. Removing those pursuits from the expectation bank in my head reduced stress and freed up energy for things that actually could move forward.

We all have brick walls in our lives — things we continue to push against long after the odds of success have dropped to near zero.

The hard question is this: when is persistence still wisdom, and when is it time to let go and redirect that energy somewhere it can actually grow?