The Next Step

I think it's time to take the next step.  Of course, it helps if one knows what the next step is, but I suppose the important thing is realizing that one has to be ready to do it.

What's the next step?  Ah, there's the rub.  I've glimmers and thoughts of what it might be, almost hidden flashes of an idea, but it's always veiled in mist, light quickly flashing into darkness.

I think I have to change.

Not the core, of course:  that's pretty well set at this point, and in point of fact is something that I need to do more of, not less:  my greatest successes have come from operating out of that core.

It's the ancillary things, the things that are how I do things from the core that need changing.

What do these look like?  Things like focus like actually keeping to goals and focus and staying on task and forcing myself to really know whatever it is that I'm doing.  In a word, some form of maturity.

Ugh.  There it is.  That most horrid of words, the word that reeks of ties and ill fitting shoes and doing things one really doesn't want to.   Those are my perceptions of maturity - the unhappy adult, looking longily at those doing what they want, then sighing and placing said nose back on the grindstone.

But that's not quite the point - or at least not quite the point as I have come to see it.  It's simply an admission that I've come about as far as I can doing things the way I have done them to this point.  For me to continue to grow, to achieve, to succeed (by whatever measure you want to define success by), I have to learn a new way of doing things - in my case, a slightly more constructed, documented way.

It will be uncomfortable.  It will require me to set goals (what I define them as, to be sure) and hold myself to keeping them.  It will mean there's a touch less "spontaneity" in my life.

But the alternative - perhaps part of my problem now - is this looming sense that I am stuck against a cliff and cannot go any further.  And if one is stuck, sometimes all there is for it is to learn to climb.