Living It Daily

About Living It Daily

Living It Daily is a space for meaningful reflection, honest conversation, and practical insight — real-life, thought-provoking ponderings for the moments that make up an ordinary day. Hosted by Rusty Norman, drawing on decades of faith, family, and life experience, this weekly blogcast is a reminder that life isn’t just about the big moments — it’s how we show up every day.

Publisher

Rusty Norman

Category

education · religion & spirituality · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Aug 2025

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Ain’t Nobody Listening, Anyway – Part 2

   From Living It Daily Ok, I tried to let this go and move on, but I just couldn’t. That’s why I’m writing this as Part 2 of my previous article. It isn’t a repeat, but it is an extension. In Part 1, I mentioned a song I wrote, “Ain’t Nobody Listening, Anyway,” but I intentionally left out the words and just talked about it. This time, I’m going to share the whole thing, because the song leaves very little to the imagination. I want to talk about the world close to us: the conversations we have with friends, the news we watch, the entertainment we indulge in, and how all of it shapes what we believe. If I can be a little blunt, I want to talk about the negative effects we’re seeing and what we can or can’t do about them. What am I talking about? I’m sure you can guess. It’s how captivated we’ve become by our technology: the cell phones, the tablets, and the ever-increasing 24/7 connection to the news cycle and social media. That constant stream doesn’t just keep us busy. It feeds us narratives, and it’s easy to stop questioning them. Many people are so busy with their heads buried in their technology that they don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them. Eventually, they only listen to the people who agree with them, even when that advice is counterproductive. They’ve chosen their path and decided they know all they need to know. You can see where that path is heading, and you think you may have some good advice for them because of your age and experience. But when you try to share that hard-earned wisdom, they won’t listen. That’s where this song came from. It took me over a year to write to what I’d call completion. It’s one of those situations where you have an idea and a few words that stick with you, but the thing just won’t come together. For the longest time, the only lines I had were the opening lines of the chorus. Some verses were written and set aside, to be considered later as options. I won’t start with the chorus, but I will give you the full song, because it says a lot more in fewer words than I can in a long explanation. Here is the song: Ain’t Nobody Listening, Anyway By Rusty Norman (Verse 1) Take a look all around, there’s a sight will astound, The people are all looking down. They stare at their tablets, and at their cell phones, Never notice the troubles all ’round. Seems they don’t understand, all the people they’re around Are doing the same things that they are. When the blind lead the blind, too late they will find The Truth they should already know. (Chorus) Oh, if you think that you know where you’re going, And you know that you know where you’ve been, And you think that you have lots of good things to tell them, I’ll tell you now, my friend, When you go and try to tell them, You’ll find nobody’s listening, Anyway. (Verse 2) There’s a fork in the road that they’re trav’ling, With a wrong way and right way to go. But they choose the disguise, a pathway of lies, Never finding the way they should know. Not seeing what they have before them, From the history that they never learned. And they’ve chosen the lies in that clever disguise, Never finding the way they should go. (Chorus) Because they’re so immersed in social media, people can become convinced they know enough and need no further input. This is especially true of input that seems outdated or goes against what they’ve been told, or what they’ve told themselves. They live in their own secure little bubble of insecurity and follow the crowd, even when the crowd is heading the wrong direction. That’s where the frustration starts for me. But if I’m honest, it’s something I experienced myself. In my late teens and through most of my twenties, I thought I knew better than the older people around me. I just figured they were the ones who were old and out of touch. It reminds me of something I heard in my late twenties during a motivational talk. It gave me something I hadn’t expected: insight. No one knows who originally said it. It’s often attributed to Mark Twain, though it’s never been found in his writings. I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it. (Disclaimer: I’m slightly changing the wording to fit my age at the time I heard it.) It goes like this: When I was a young man of 17, I thought my father was so out of touch and ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around or listen to him. When I turned 27, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 10 years. You know as well as I do that the one who learned so much in those ten years wasn’t the father. It was the son. Something about moving through the years makes you realize how much you need the input of those who have gone before you. People who have traveled through the ups and downs of life come out the other side wiser and have much to offer. They often prove the old adage: wisdom comes with age. It’s not uncommon for younger people to think they know more, because they believe their thinking hasn’t been “clouded” by years of experience. They may even believe they have a fresher answer and a better grip on life’s trials than someone who has already traveled those same paths. That’s not to say they can’t have a good or even better answer. But that doesn’t mean they should ignore the input of those who have “been there and done that.” So, why does it bother me so much when I go through the same experience with people younger than me? Why is it so easy to become frustrated when I was just like them at their age? As I look back over my younger years, I see many problems I could have avoided “if only” I had listened to the advice of those who’d gone before me, whether I asked for it or not. Maybe that’s why it’s so frustrating when others don’t listen. Life doesn’t have to be a vicious circle of repeating the same mistakes when someone is willing to show you how to avoid them. But I also learned something coming out the other side of this. Now that I’ve gained almost fifty years of my own life experience, I can see that what finally got through to me wasn’t what they said in the moment. As I traveled my own path and made my own way, their words seemed to come back and haunt me, because I discovered those words had proved true. They had told me the path I was on was wrong. I didn’t listen because I was young and impatient. I thought my way was better. What I didn’t have was enough life experience. They had traveled that path before me and discovered the truth on the other side of the struggles and decisions, so they spoke that truth to me whether I would listen or not. They didn’t lecture. They didn’t preach. They simply spoke the truth to me. In doing that, they planted a seed in me for my future, and that seed would one day bear fruit. They knew that truth doesn’t need an audience to remain a truth. Maybe that’s our part in this: planting the seeds that will bear fruit somewhere in the future, and continuing to show up, even when it seems like nobody’s listening. I say all that to say this: Life has a way of teaching us to listen to those voices of experience and heed their advice. After all, they have been there before and found the ways that work and the ways that fail. I give you Proverbs 12:15 (ESV): “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” Let me ask you a question. Are there people in your life, whether family, friends, or acquaintances, whom you see going through something you could help them avoid, if only they would listen? Are they willing to listen? Or are they one of the many like in the song, where “there ain’t nobody listening, anyway”? Hey, this is Russ, and I’m still Living It Daily… See you next time… All views expressed are strictly the opinion of the writer. © October 06, 2026 – all rights reserved Rusty Norman, Podcastnorm Dot Com, and LivingItDaily.com All audio productions by www.podcastnorm.com and Pod Cast Norm Productions All music from TwoBuckThemes from Mike Stewart unless otherwise stated

2. 

   8 Sept 2026

   There Ain’t Nobody Listening

   From Living It Daily I had a conversation not long ago that’s been sitting with me ever since. I won’t say who it was with, but I offered something I thought was pretty simple wisdom — the kind that comes from having lived a few decades and paid attention along the way. It didn’t land. Not even a little. And it wasn’t the first time. I’ve been chewing on why that keeps happening, and I think I finally landed on it. It’s not that people are foolish. It’s that so many have never been handed the history that would help them see where their “new” idea actually leads — because somebody already tried it, a generation or two ago, and it didn’t end well then either. Every generation is convinced its moment is exempt from the past. History says otherwise. History always says otherwise. That’s the real frustration underneath all of this — not the phones, not the scrolling, though that’s part of it too. It’s watching people build confidence on ideas that have never been tested against anything older than a headline from this morning. You know the picture I’m talking about. Heads down, thumbs moving, tuned into a 24-hour news cycle that doesn’t always tell us what’s really going on — and sometimes seems more interested in convincing us of a narrative than informing us of the truth. And here’s the part that troubles me most: once people are far enough into that cycle, they stop taking in anything that doesn’t already agree with them. They’ve made up their minds. They’ve decided they know enough. They stand on a path you can see the end of — because maybe you’ve walked it, or watched someone else walk it — and when you try to hand them what you’ve learned, they wave it off like it’s outdated. Irrelevant. Something an old mind wouldn’t understand. This is actually what led me to write a song a while back called “There Ain’t Nobody Listening.” I wrote it out of pure frustration, and it’s stuck with me ever since — maybe you’ll hear it someday. That’s a hard thing to sit with. Watching decay get accepted, even celebrated, without anybody stopping to ask why it feels so wrong. Watching truth get outvoted by volume. I won’t pretend that doesn’t wear on me some days. I’m 75 years old. I’ve lived long enough to have earned a little of what the old folks used to call wisdom — the kind that doesn’t come from a book or a headline, but from actually living through the consequences of things, good and bad, and paying attention along the way. There’s an old adage that says wisdom comes with age, and I believe it, because I’ve watched it prove true in my own life more times than I can count. But so much of what my generation was taught — the history, the hard lessons, the common sense that came from living through mistakes and learning from them — simply isn’t being passed on or picked up by the generations coming behind us. And that’s at the heart of my frustration, and I suspect a lot of folks my age, and some even half my age, feel exactly the same way. There’s another old adage that fits right alongside the first one: those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. My generation has been there and done that, more than once, and we don’t want to do it again — not for ourselves, and not for the people coming after us. But it’s a sad and heavy thing to know you’ve already walked a road, to see someone else heading straight for the same drop-off, and to have them wave you off like you don’t know what you’re talking about. So, the question I keep coming back to is this: do you keep speaking the truth from those many years of experience, trying to help others avoid repeating the failures of the past, whether they’re willing to listen or not? Or do you give up, and let them learn the hard way, the same way some of those failures were already learned once before? And underneath that question sits a harder one. Why won’t they listen? Are they really so distracted by their tablets and their cell phones, so steeped in the heavily biased influence of social media, that truth itself no longer carries any weight? If nobody’s listening anyway, will continuing to beat the drum of truth ever break through the deaf blindness of unwillingness? I don’t have a clean answer to that. I wish I did. But here’s where I’ve landed, and it’s the only place I know how to land: we keep speaking the truth anyway. Not because we expect to be heard today. Not because we think this article, or one more conversation, or one more attempt at wisdom is going to turn the tide by itself. We speak it because truth planted doesn’t need an audience to still be true. Seeds can lie dormant a long time — through seasons that look like nothing is growing at all — before they finally take root. And history tells us something else too: the pressure of propaganda always cracks eventually. It always has. When it does, the people still standing on solid ground will be the ones who kept telling the truth the whole time nobody seemed to be listening. So I’ll keep planting. And so should you… Anyway. Hey, this is Russ, and I’m still Living It Daily… See ya next time… All views expressed are strictly the opinion of the writer © September 08 , 2026 – all rights reserved Rusty Norman, Podcastnorm Dot Com, and LivingItDaily.com All audio productions by www.podcastnorm.com and Pod Cast Norm Productions All music from TwoBuckThemes from Mike Stewart unless otherwise stated

3. 

   23 Aug 2026

   The Old Dirt Road

   From Living It Daily We all travel the paths we know best. At least, I know I do. It seems we like to take the same route to places we like to frequent, whether it be our path to visit someone or the way we take to our places of employment. There is likely more than one way to get to those destinations, but we are much more interested in getting there in the shortest amount of time. If we take that path frequently, we eventually lose sight of our surroundings and focus only on the destination. It becomes more like a path we travel with tunnel vision. We hardly pay attention to anything but the road ahead. I’ve often told you that my mind tends to wander off on tangents at times. This was one of those times. I could just as easily include this as another time I was looking out my window like I wrote about several articles ago. I say that because it was exactly what I was doing when what I’m going to talk about took place. Let me paint a word picture of what started my thinking about the “Old Dirt Road” that prompted this. I was looking out my window and thinking about many things. I was considering my plans for the day ahead for both work and some personal situations. I can’t really explain why it caught my attention the way that it did. All I know is that it did. I began thinking about what I was seeing. Outside my window is a tree. Not the one I wrote about before, but a different one. I believe the name of this type of tree is “Carrotwood.” It is an evergreen tree. For those not familiar, it doesn’t lose its leaves and stays green year-round. Sometimes the simplest things can trigger a creative moment. On this particular morning, the sky appeared a deeper color of blue than I often remembered seeing. I think since I do a lot of writing, including poetry and songs, my mind was triggered by what I was seeing. It was also bringing up memories from my past, so I began writing down what would later become one of my songs. Mostly, I just had the first couple of lines, but they were enough to keep me thinking about the moment for an extended period of time. I want to share a little of what I wrote called “The Old Dirt Road”: Blue skies, above evergreen trees. An old dirt road, I don’t know where it leads. I don’t know that I ever traveled this way before, But I know that it leads to more. Immediately, in my mind’s eyes, I was no longer looking out my window, but I was seeing an old dirt road from my past as a kid living in Southern Illinois. It was not unusual for us as a family to go for drives on a Sunday afternoon. All the other days, my mom and dad were busy or working, and my sister and I were likely in school. We had several small parks and large lakes within close driving distance, which left a lot for us to explore on those drives. On this day I’m thinking about, my dad pulled off the main road onto a gravel-covered dirt road. I remember looking at my sister in the back seat beside me, and then we both asked in unison, “Where are we going?” I remember my dad answering, “We’re going to see where this old dirt road leads.” My memory of that day came back to me so vividly as I gazed out my window. I knew we hadn’t ever traveled on that old dirt road before. It was a brand-new experience, at least for my sister and me. We saw things we didn’t know existed. We were both young and could only travel close to our home on our bikes. Those Sunday drives expanded our knowledge of the area where we lived. I remember a few things about that drive, and though we didn’t know it at the time, the road my dad had taken circled around one of the several lakes in our area. One of the first things I remember seeing was the spillway of the dam at one end of the lake. I had never seen anything like it before: the water pouring over that edge, the sound of it, the sheer size of the thing to a kid who’d only ever seen the calm, flat water of the lake itself. I remember just standing there, taking it in, not saying much of anything. To this day, I cannot tell you exactly how we got there; I just know we did, and I know it felt like we’d stumbled onto something the rest of the world didn’t know about. Eventually, the ‘old dirt road’ led us to a place we all had seen before. It was the area at the entrance of the lake where there were boat rentals, a swimming area, as well as the camping area we had camped at before. Had we not taken that ‘Old Dirt Road’ on that day, I would probably have never known there was a vast world around the lake that I had never seen and likely never would have. You see, the reason I likely would have never seen that “world” is that we moved from Southern Illinois to Southwest Florida when I was eleven years old, which was about a year later. I’ve lived here for a long time, married my wife, and raised two daughters, and have five grandchildren. Even with all of that, there are many places I have never been around where I live. Some I have discovered because of where my service business has taken me, but there is so much more to see. And it’s not just the roads I mean. Some of my ‘old dirt roads’ these days aren’t made of gravel at all, they’re the conversations I’ve been putting off, the ideas I keep circling back to but haven’t followed through on, the places in my own heart I haven’t fully explored. Those call to me just as much as any road ever did. That leads me to the next part of the poem/song I’d like to share. It goes like this: So many unknowns that are callin’ to me. Because down that road there’s so much more to see. And perhaps those ole skies won’t always be blue But the old dirt road is calling me to follow it through. I learned through that experience that following the same route day after day isn’t always the best thing. Fortunately, though I frequent much of my service area often, there is more than one way to get to those locations. Sometimes I take the long route, sometimes the shorter route, but it seems there is quite often something new to see. I don’t always have to get there in the shortest amount of time, although sometimes the shortest route is necessary. In the last thirty-six years of working my service business, there have been a lot of changes. Some of those changes I would have never seen if I had always followed the same route. Sometimes, I have discovered things simply because a service call has taken me down an ‘old dirt road’ I have never traveled before. How about you? Do you always take the same, shortest route to wherever you travel to or want to go, or even have to go? May I make a suggestion? Take the longer route sometime. Take that ‘old dirt road’ you’ve been avoiding but has captured your attention. Maybe it’s a phone call you’ve been putting off. Maybe it’s a memory you haven’t let yourself sit with in a long while. Maybe it’s simply slowing down enough to notice the world outside your own window. See what might be down that other path. You may be surprised at what you discover and what you may have been missing all these years. Can you hear that ‘Old Dirt Road’ calling you to follow it through? Hey, this is Russ, and I’m still Living It Daily… See ya next time… All views expressed are strictly the opinion of the writer © August 23, 2026 – all rights reserved Rusty Norman, Podcastnorm Dot Com, and LivingItDaily.com All audio productions by www.podcastnorm.com and Pod Cast Norm Productions All music from TwoBuckThemes from Mike Stewart unless otherwise stated

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