Bad Assumptions, Necessary Changes

Have you ever been hit over the head with the fact that something you have been doing for many years, a long cherished assumption about human nature, may be wrong?  Or equally as alarming, that how you do a basic activity is incorrect?

Such was my day yesterday, when I was confronted by the fact that how I have managed in the past may be completely and utterly wrong.  The facts themselves are irrelevant - the outcome is that for the second time in less than six months, basic assumptions about people and how I am as a manager are in question.

One incident (in anything) is a fluke, something that may have just happened.  Two incidents are an indication that there may actually be something there - and it starts with me.

Starts with me?  Yes.  As Splinter (that great dispenser of wisdom in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) says, "There are no excuses when you are the leader".  A failure of something which is in my area of purview is ultimately a failure of myself to do something.

What does all of this means?  I fear it means that the belief I have functioned under for years - indeed very style of dealing with people - is wrong.  That style may very well need to change.  And by changing the style, I will have to change myself.

I've had hints of this lately, of course - hints in other areas of my life, hints around how I react and act in the work environment.  Hints that things which I don't necessarily acknowledge as effective but at least as my "style" are not useful.

In a way it saddens me deeply.  What I think it ends up leaving is a me that I'm not going to like very much, a me that is far less personal and far more business-like in my day to day work life - if you will, a person who is very different than the person I feel myself to be.

The odd part is that for once I know what the changes have to be - not just changes in actions and attitudes, but changes in attention.  Changes in knowingly committing my knowledge to a tight circle of things which in a relatively short time will be meaningless.

In a very real way, a large part of me has to change - drastically change - in the next few weeks to become that which it apparently has to become to be in the work world I am in.

The question is, will I recognize the person on the other side?

Perspective

Blame Otis for his turn of mind.

I was driving home last night, using the time (as I sometimes do) to catch up with friends (it's relatively dead time, I'm in the car, the only other thing to do would be to listen to the radio and either sing poorly or get my blood pressure up).  Through a happy chain of circumstance, it was Otis that I got to spend time with last night.

We went through our usual litany of discussion - children, wives, jobs, how things are going - until we arrived - perhaps inevitably - at my most recent postings.

"Job and life couldn't be going better, huh?"  he asked.

Which of course started the flood - which it is always seems to - of this and that, of things I've written about here, my general dissatisfaction with the state of so much of my life and my real sense that I am now essentially trapped in a rut that leads to my grave.

"So you're home life is going well?"

Sure.  Everyone has blended in here so darn well - which is true, no sarcasm added.  Probably the least happy person in the room is me - which is probably true in a whole lot of areas.

"Well, look at the bright side.  At least your home life is good even if your work life is not what you want.  Imagine if the two were reversed."

The car is still driving.  My mind has pulled to the side of the road in a cloud of dust, thinking.

What if the two were reversed?  What if I had the best job ever, but every other part of my life - which for me is almost totally my home life - was terrible, falling apart, in a constant state of war?  What would things be like then?

It's tempting to ask one of the silly questions, like "How much worse could it be?" or "Who would noticed?" After all, work is somewhere which takes up a great deal of many people's lives, myself include.  By the time commuting is done, almost half of my day is spent in, at, or traveling to or from work. 

But the question is not that simple. What if the two were reversed, if my work was a place where I felt that everything was going very well indeed and my home life, my personal life was an area of constant battles and dissatisfaction, of arguments and troubled children and antagonism?

To be honest, it's tough for me to imagine such a thing - simply because I've never had to deal with it.  Ever.

I can theorize, I suppose.  I don't enjoy yelling and arguments as I am now - I can only imagine that such things would be 10 times worse.  And the experience I've had at homes where there is tension - that simmering sort of anger that seems to permeate everything until all within are in sort of a stew of crisis, ready to boil over as soon as the "guest" leaves the premises - would be enough to poison all that one tried to do offline.

And Na Clann?  I can hardly imagine.  They are well adjusted at this point, doing well in school and other activities, loving of God.  To strip that away, to inflict an atmosphere of strife and the uncertainty of not knowing when the next explosion is going to go off or even if a parent will continue to be there....

Does all of this (at which I recoil in horror) somehow make the rest better?  I'd be lying if I said beyond a very real sense of alarm at that sort of scenario, not necessarily.  What ifs don't change the reality of what is.  The rest of my life doesn't magically get better merely by comparison.  There is still work to to be done, maybe still things I can do to choose that course...

But it is good -and I am grateful to Otis - for making me go through the exercise of perspective and realize that the two things are not equally bad. In one case, it is something to be borne.  In the other, it is something that will scar lives forever.

Belief in Self?

What is the role of self belief and success?

Oh, not that usual relationship that is commonly acknowledged: that without self belief there is no success.  This has been demonstrated time and time again, both by the success of those who would otherwise not seem to be inclined to be from their circumstances as well as by those who, given all the hands up they can be given, never really seem to take of.

The thing I am wondering about is something more elusive than that, the role of one's own self belief in succeeding - and how one gets it.

Part of the lose of hope in lives -in mine, anyway - is the sense that I simply cannot succeed at something which I try.  Of course one has to have an accurate measure of success to start with - we are neither master authors nor master cheese makers from the start.  At the same time, I am often dogged by the sense that I am not - and cannot - succeed.

Do I base too much on the reactions of others?  Possibly.  Success - at least in our society - is measured in terms of "simple" things like recognition and money.  They are not truly indicative of success, I guess - but then again, getting paid for something you like and are good at far and away beats getting paid for something you don't really care for and manage to get through.

And too often this is the sticking point for me:  trying to find a sense of self-belief in the midst of a world where I am "supposed" to do something and like it, rather than like it and do something.

To suggest this to others - especially those close to you - is sometimes incredibly difficult.  If you has never had the experience of achieving a long cherished goal only to have it treated as uneventful  - or worse, unnoticeable - you cannot imagine the deflation of the soul.

Which is where self belief is supposed to come in, I guess - that backstop of life, that hedge against the world that when all others strike down our thoughts and goals, it will maintain us from going over the cliff.

But what if it turns out that every time you go to the backstop it is mysteriously not there, that the wave it is supposed to protect against simply washes over you and down the cliff?  Where, you wonder as you go over for the 1000th time, is my self belief? 

In your worst times, you begin to even question if you had it in the first place.

Without self belief, activities lose their luster.  Careers becomes endurance marathons. The thought of doing anything else - anything that requires internal generation of energy and confidence - becomes an exercise in trying to push a boulder up a very steep hill indeed.

If self belief will not come from within, where will it come from?

Trapped

Feeling remarkably trapped in my life this weekend.

It's as if I've suddenly looked up and it feels as if the rest of my life is set for me - and I'm not very excited by future I see.  Yes, I know it's possible to change your choices and thereby change your life, but life seems to be a series of narrowing choices, not expanding ones.

Without very much effort at all, the next 15 years of my life are easily laid out for me:  what I would do, where I will do it, what the expectations are of me. 

So why doesn't this excite me more?

Because in following this course - not precisely chosen for me, but not precisely of my own choosing either - I feel I am simply being reduced to less and less until, at the end, I will simply be nothing more than a compilation of duties and responsibilities.  Me - or any sense of me - will have been long ago washed away, leaving only the persona of duties left in my place.

It's foolish to pretend that at that point something suddenly changes and life reverts back to that which I would like it to be.  15 years from now - or even 5 years from now - I will be that much farther away from that which my heart keenly desires, with that much less time to make it up.

It's wrong to admit, I suppose, that even I am occasionally overcome by the simple desire to just run away - to just shuck everything I have to do and go do what I what to do.  It's foolish, of course, and does not solve anything, but thing that make it attractive - the thing that pushes so many off of that cliff - is the simple fact that one gets to choose something for oneself, that after a long time (years?) of making choices based on responsibilities and duties and things I have to do, one can choose as one wants.

(Again to emphasize it's mostly a pipe dream.  Responsibilities never magically disappear on their own, and the consequences often never really go away.  It's not like we're dealing with at true tabula rosa here.)

But is there a third alternative?  I wish I could see it.  Something between the grinding duty of "I must" and the ephemeral freedom of "I choose" must lie a path where one fulfills responsibilities while have hope and input into the path of one's future. 

Something where "trapped" is not the ultimate definition.

Holding Ourselves to the Standard

Self-vision is a thing which is always difficult to measure and hard to assess.  We are ourselves, of course; the ability to move outside of that basic fact makes it difficult to perform the sort of assessment that we love to perform on virtually everyone around us.  There are even those among us who proclaim themselves to be masters of the self critique, of the (arguably) rare ability to drill down on themselves and know their faults.

My question is this:  in the pursuit of self critique, can these same people hold themselves to the standard that they hold others to?

Standards - goals, expectations, objectives, call them what you will - are dangerous to the individual who is using them.  They are in usually in some way objective, not open to interpretation.  A thing is either done or it is not done, the book written or not written, the conversation had or not had, the gossip made or not made. 

They are outside of the individual, and so the application of self critique does not specifically apply to them.  We may be held to them but they are not fully of ourselves, and so not fully self interpretable.

The difficulty?  Of holding one's self to that standard of performance.

Why is it difficult?  Because too often lack of achievement or even downright failure is the result and too many people are simply unable (or unwilling) to admit this.  It is one thing to say that I have an issue with anger or performance or overeating.  It is another thing to say I have failed to meet a standard on anger management or performance or overeating.  One is, eventually, defined by myself; the other is something which I cannot fully control the definition of success over.

And holding others to a standard which we ourselves cannot (or will not) achieve?  This becomes the height of folly evident to all, the sort of hypocritical  performance that can be the most damaging of all because it is evident to everyone but ourselves that there is a severe disconnect between the two.  Now not only are we not holding to a standard (although by self definition we think we are), we are attempting to hold others to the same standard that we ourselves could not make.

Standards - goals, objectives, achievements - are important things to have.  We just need to accept that it is not our definition alone of what meeting that standard is that defines the reality.

Giving In?

I wonder if at some point, there simply an acceptance of things about one's life, a sort of resignation that this is the way things are going to be for much longer than one had anticipated.

I say I wonder. I think I actually know the answer at this point - and it's not one I'm fully happy with.

I say happy rather than uncomfortable or upset.  Those don't seem to really be options at this point.  One can have emotions about things, of course; it's just that emotions in and of themselves don't really seem to resolve anything.

Action, someone says?  True, actions can solve things - but undertaking actions in the midst trying to live with all the consequences based on choices one has leads to either one of two choices:  a sense of complete exhaustion or a neglect of some important thing for something else.

It comes down to values, I suppose:  what do we value most?

It's odd, in that this sense of being held in place sneaks up on one.  In times past, decisions were not nearly this difficult to implement:  one simply decided and acted.  But with the addition of others in one's life, one's ability to choose becomes curtailed.  It's not just myself I'm deciding for, it's everyone who is influenced by my decision.  Suddenly, decisions which were easy at one time (such as "Yes, I'll take that job" or "Yes, let's move") become far more difficult ("That job would be impossible because of the money" or "Everyone else wants to stay here because we like it").

And then question of values comes up:  what do you value more, yourself and your development and pleasure or the group as a whole?

The thing that is slowly surprising me is how little this seems to be bothering me.  Is it acceptance?  Is it resignation?  Is it maturity (seems unlikely in my case, but a possibility)?  There is just a real sense that some of the things I wanted - or want - may simply never come to pass, because of circumstances. 

Is that a failure of my will?  Is it a failure of my drive?  Or it simply beginning to accept that if one is a mature adult, there are really circumstances which rate higher than ourselves?

Reaction Drills

Last night in class we participated in reaction drills.

The concept is simple enough:  You are in the middle of a circle of your fellow students.  Everyone draws to chudon.  Then, randomly one by one, each student kiais (shouts) and makes an attack.  Attacks can be as simple or as complicated as the sensei calls for; in our case it was a single type of cut.

The great difference - and the great problem - of reaction drills is simply that things becme much less of an exercise in the art of iaido and much more of an exercise in simple survival. A constant series of attacks - even slower ones performed by fellow students - too often seems to drive every technique I've learned out of my mind.  As they say, we study for the dojo, but we practice for life.

But the one thing that was embedded last night in my mind - let us say re-embedded, as the thoughts were already there - was the art of letting the mind go.

When one faces a series of attacks, one's mind will tend to become rushed and confused.  To dwell on the attack that just happened - to try and consider a different way to do things, or reflect on how badly one did - is to invite being struck.  The mind cannot dwell on that which just happened; instead it must move on to the next attack that is coming.

Takuan Soho in The Unfettered Mind  discusses the same idea.  He makes the point that the mind must be free and stop on any one point.  If the mind stops at blocking the attack, it will not continue through to complete the cut and certainly not be ready for the next attack.  The mind instead must simply move through blocking the attack to responding and then moving to the next attack.

As in all things, of course, iaido mirrors life.  Too often we tend to cling to what just happened, the mistakes we just made, rather than simply move through the situation to the next incident.  Is this saying that there is no place for meditation and reflection upon our lives and how we act?  Not at all.  Consideration of and reflection on our actions is an important part of our growth.  It is simply a question of choosing when to consider such things.

Ultimately the point of iaido is to have the mind and body flowing as one, to spontaneously move the mind and body in responding to or executing to an attack.  I sure did not flow last night (though several of my fellow students did), but I saw the first great mental step:  we cannot flow forward in the stream if we cling to the rock that just went under water.

Cabinets Drawers of the Soul

Last week when I was poking around an area of work, I came across something that was almost 12 months out of date.  It was not obvious and had certainly been missed in periodic cleanups, as it was placed in a cabinet out of sight and due to a number of factors (personnel turnover, lack of use of the area) it simply was never discovered.  I pointed it out to someone, where it was promptly removed.

It reminded in general how little a fan I am of such things as drawers, cabinets, and closets.

Why?  They would seem to be terrible useful storage area, right?  We are always in need of additional space to store something or other, especially things that we don't always need right away.  And who is against organization, right?

All true. I am freakish on my own organization, especially at work, to the point of maybe I have a problem.  Clean and organized is the way I like my workspace.  No, my complaint against the innocuous storage device is simply that it enables us to keep that which might better not be stored.

We often seem willing and able to place something to the side which we fully believe we will use one day.  Waste not, want not, as the saying goes.  But things change, people change, priorities change.  Suddenly the thing that was so critical is now consigned to the dustbin of history, and things have moved on.  But having placed things away in cabinets and drawers, they are now out of sight and therefore out of mind.  It becomes a question of having the time to go back and sift through the detritus of time or simply move on with what is important now.

But to be fair, do we not do the same things with our souls?

We all bear pockets within ourselves of items not dealt with, relationships that ended badly or we simply just placed into limbo, of interests that we never really stopped caring about but really stopped doing, of feelings that we simply had no time for (or couldn't deal with).  And so, rather than go through the hard work of either organizing and incorporating them into our lives or simply disposing of them, we temporize:  we put them into the storage areas of our souls.

We never really deal with such things of course.  We find them every now and again as we go through our daily lives:  the anger at something that suddenly rages and we don't really understand why, the recurring interest in something we gave up years ago and was hardly healthy for us then, the thoughts of people that drift into our lives.  It's as if we were going through cabinets again, randomly finding things.

I don't wonder if use this storage device the way a pack rat stores things, that somehow these things are the potential lifeline in case of an event which may never happen.  Or is simply the denial of the life that we actually have, an act of resistance in keeping those things which we once held dear and have no hope of or ability to do?  Or perhaps we're simply lazy:  we've learned to clean our living areas, but not clean up our lives.

That's what it comes to, of course.  Cleaning out our lives.  Like a facility cleaning day, where everyone takes a day to simply clean out the contents of every drawer and cabinet and closet.  Get the garbage bins, get some pizza, start sorting through the detritus of some number of years, keeping that which is important or relevant, disposing of that which is not longer so or simply expired.

Because like most everything else, lots of things in our lives have expiration dates.  Keeping them out of sight prevents us from disposing of them, lightening our load, and moving on.

Pushing

I became extraordinarily frustrated with myself this weekend.

It was around writing.  Specifically, it was around the fact that I simply could not get myself motivated to write. 

The idea is there.  The first few chapters are there.  But I just seem to have hit a wall.  And not just creatively.  Output as well.  Sure, I put together a list of how much I need to write each day, yet most days fly by and there is no output because I can conveniently find something else to work on, and the fact that the text is not flowing is no incentive either.

My frustration hit a peak on Saturday, when I had accomplished all I need to by noon and was feeling as if I had nothing else to do.

So I started writing.

It was not the work I have been toiling on - in fact, it is something completely different, something inspired by this blog.  I had written one chapter and part of another.  I finished the chapter, sat back and looked at it.

And wrote another.

Before long the afternoon had descended into a marathon of writing, of an intent - which became a commitment - to finish this thing I was working on.  To finish something.  To not, as so often had been the case, to have yet another idea hanging in the closet of my life, not quite finished with no real deadline for it to be.

It struck me as odd (the farther that I got into the writing)  how easily a fixation can become a mania.  In one afternoon, I seemed to pass the the line from not being able to write a thing to having to get a completed draft out on paper.  It's almost as if the underlying pent up frustration of not being able to move forward on this - or seemingly any - front of life manifested itself into a driven passion - almost frustrated anger - of filling up the empty page with its blinking cursor.

The remarkable thing:  after 5 hours of relatively focused concentration (and mania-like manifestations)  I had a draft.  A draft, of course, is hardly a working final copy and this one promises to be a bit rougher than most, but a draft all the same.

Looking at the file window with the chapter name neatly arranged, I wondered what had gotten me to to that point in the afternoon.  What had started me from feeling nothing was happening to a complete rough draft in an afternoon?

Pushing.  I pushed myself. 

I am not a man that typically likes to push himself to his limits.  I know this about myself, even as I despise it as a characteristic.  I don't enjoy the pushed, the driven, the times that I have known them.  They are too often socially inept, unpleasant to be around, so focused on their own project that they have no time for anyone else.  In so many ways, they make social interactions harder, not easier.

But they do get things done.  And this is the issue I need to resolve:  is there a method of pushing which does not involve collapsing into relational limbo, into a world so self and project centered that the great task of daily life that one becomes useful for anything else?

I hope there is. Because finishing a draft is the best feeling in the world.

Lazy

Today I have an eye appointment - the what now has become an annual pilgrimage to the doctor to discover when the need will finally arrive for glasses. 

In getting ready for this - and because I don't know what will happen today while there - I did something I haven't done more than twice a year for the last 5 years:  I took a sick day.

I got up this morning knowing that I wasn't going to work at the usual time.  It's amazing how slowly the morning has progressed since then.  I'm not quite sure whether to chalk it up to unmotivation or simply a sense of "I don't really have to be anywhere in particular".

This always makes me question my commitment to anything, of course.  One should always practice something whether or not one is on a schedule.  Anytime I don't, I start to wonder if it is something I really wanted to do in the first place.

But that's as it may be.  Maybe, perhaps maybe, it might worth considering that every once in a while, simply being slow about getting moving and doing is not so much an indicator of any laziness as it is the simple self courtesy of allowing one's self, periodically, to simply wander into life instead of being enmeshed in it.

Making Peace with What Does Not Happen

To what extent is making peace with our lives a sign of giving up and to what extent is it a sign of acceptance?

This has always been a matter of some debate for myself.  If I suddenly stop trying on something, I feel as if I'm not doing everything I can and that I'm settling.  On the other hand, if I keeping chasing after something which at some point becomes self evident that is not going to happen, am I denying myself the pleasure of simply being?

Certainly the general sense of society does not contribute.  There is always seems to be a sense in which we should always be trying harder, trying again, pushing.  Very often we are told that a failure to succeed is a failure to continue trying - which holds in it a seed of truth.

But how do I reconcile this with the reality that always striving after things results in less than a happy existence?

To be always striving is to deny one's self a simple sense of being, of existing in the moment, in many ways participating in the life that one actually has.  To be constantly looking over the horizon means one's eyes are always firmly fixed on the future.  That's useful when driving down the road; it may create a life in which the scenery is always being missed as we focus on the dotted line.

The other danger is that having arrived to where we think we wanted to be, we found out it's not what we wanted at all:  the job we pushed and shoved for is not where we were meant to be, the relationship we positioned ourselves to have occur is less than we thought it to be, the thing we so desperately wanted is only a thing, not a life satisfaction.

Perhaps we need to simply accept that fact that the reason we do not seem to achieve or reach certain goals is not a failure of ourselves or our abilities but rather the gracious favor of a God who truly knows what will and what will not really satisfy us.  We fight against the fishbowl, not willing to recognize that all that lies without it is not at all what we wanted.

6 AM

There is little worse in life than laying in bed awaiting the day you don't want to have.  It's even worse when the thoughts start showing up by themselves.

I laid awake this morning, vestiges of the night's dreams floating through my head - which, apparently, involved various Italian dukes of Ferra and Sforza from the Middle Ages - confusing me to no end.  Why were they there?  What possible reason could they have to show up randomly?  Why would I be thinking about them before I go to bed to invade my dreams?

Ah, Headache.  My old friend.  Apparently you missed the memo last night in which I requested we postpone our meeting until a later date.  No matter, I suppose.  You're here now.  We'll just carry on today, shall we?

Well, at least it's Thursday, the end of the week is near...What?  It's only Wednesday?  No wonder the week is feeling like an eternity - because it apparently is.  Sigh. There really is a whole additional day of work to be completed.

Hmm?  Ah, Work Plans.  I see you've taken the opportunity to visit me even though I have 3 hours or so before I actually have to start thinking about you.  No, I'm not really concerned with what documents I have to get done today.  Or tomorrow. Thanks, no, I'll pass right now on considering what I will say for the meeting I have at 4:00 this afternoon.

Interesting.  Hope?  Excitement?  Fun?  No, they don't really seem to be up along with everyone else this morning.  Maybe they've taken the opportunity to sleep in.

Maybe they're on vacation in Italy, visiting the villas of the Italian Dukes.

Sigh. 

Why yes, I think I'll get out bed, thanks.  Who could resist these charming invitations?

Press

Last night at dinner, Nighean Bhan asks me "Dad, can we make Pepper Jack Cheese?"

Now my cheese making skills are still what I would define as being in a nascent form - the regularity is not quite there.  Sometimes I get great cheese, sometimes I get cheese that I can eat.  Additionally, making cheese seems to be like any other activity:  there's always a little more equipment you can acquire, something else which will enhance the process.

"I don't think so" I replied.  "I need a cheese press".

A cheese press, for the non-cheese educated, is simply a glorified press which, when used with a cheese form, allows a regulated amount of pressure to be applied to curds (here's an example from the good people at New England Cheesemaking Supply Company).  The ultimate purpose is to remove the water and condense the curds into cheese.  They're also a bit pricey - $160 for a simple unit to $279 for the Cadillac of Cheese Presses.

Finally,  I conceded that I would look at my cheese making book to review the recipe.

I pulled The All Powerful Book of Cheese and turned to the jack cheese page.  Sure enough, in the list of ingredients it stated "Cheese Press".  "Well, there you go" I thought to myself as I flipped to the second page to see what the pressure was.

And got a surprise.  It never defined a specific pressure.  It said "medium pressure." 

Medium pressure can come from a lot of things - in my case to date, it's come from a 1 gallon water jug with a plate under it sitting on the lid of the cheese form.  It's not elegant (as if this is suddenly a concern of mine), but it gets the job done.

I went and looked at another recipe.  Sure enough, it said "Medium pressure", not a specific pressure.

Suddenly, my cheese making world opened up.

Am I suddenly going to drop everything and make Pepper Jack all day?  Hardly.  It takes a long time to age and I like my cheese steadily, not making now and waiting for four months without any.  But what it did teach me was an important lesson that I need to apply to every aspect of life:  Just because something is listed doesn't there's not another way to do it, and double check everything before you say you can't.

The important people in your life - including pepper jack loving daughters - will thank you.

Clinging to The Past

Am I clinging to that which is past?

I was struck this weekend as I was contemplating projects that I wanted to work on:  did any of this really make sense?  Are any of the these things actually relevant to my life or what I am doing today, or are they echos of  a past that simply no longer exists except in my mind?

We passed our three year New Home-aversary this Saturday.  On the one hand, it's hard to believe that it has already been three years - which is a blessing, since it means (to my mind) that Na Clann and indeed all of us have blended in so well here that there no sense of time merely passing but of being engaged in the world around us..

But as I thought about this - and the realities of a life with a family - I began to look at what I was doing and wanted to do and asking the question "Why am I doing/holding on to this?"

The question initially started in the context of a random discussion about other potential places we might consider living.  The response was "If it's all the same to you, we like it here a great deal".

This was not the answer I was really expecting.

On the one hand I am exceedingly grateful for the answer, because as mentioned above it means everyone has blended right in.  On the other hand it was the answer I didn't really want, because it implies certain things about where we live and what we do.

Suddenly, I looked at the things I want to do - or dreamed of doing - and cast them in the mold of New Home.  Not surprisingly, many of them don't seem to immediately fit right in.

Which leads me back to the question:  am I clinging to the past?

How I - how all of us - spend the limited time and resources presented is based on a concept of how we believe life is going to be.  Over time, we collect interest, hobbies, things, even acquaintances based on the direction our life seems to be moving in.  Sometimes we take overt steps towards that end, but I suspect for most of us it's a careful balance of living our life and working towards where we believe (or want or hope) to be.

But what happens when that all gets moved aside?

If suddenly I'm thrust into living in a desert situation, my interest in Scuba may be interesting to me, but it will hardly make a difference with the live I am living most of the time.  Likewise an interest in running a cattle ranch  when I'm trapped in the suburbs may give me hours of thought provoking ideas on free range cattle but will not address the actual reality of where I am.

So if this is true - and on some level for all of us our lives are much different than we anticipated - the question remains:  Are we clinging to the past?  Are we clinging to ideas and interests and hobbies that don't reflect the reality of where we are?

Can they be transformed?  Of course.  A career dream of writing only can be transformed into writing meditations and an occasional book (for example).  A free range cattle ranch dream can be transferred to an urban garden with quail and ducks. 

But this change requires one thing:  an honest look at where we are and what we are doing and if what we are doing makes sense.  This willingness to question needs to be met by a second item:  the willingness to let go.

By clinging to that which has always been in our hands, we lose the ability to grasp that which is in front of us.

Shadow and Reality

A branch whipping fast
in the sun's shadow.  A storm?
No.  Just Syrah's tail.

Listing SIns

Have you ever made a list of your most prevalent sins?

This was thought that floated upward in my consciousness last night reviewing the days events, especially a conversation in which things which I had not thought would work their way to the surface appeared.  As I looked into my soul at the end of the day, the thought floated up "What is this indicative of?  And have you really thought about where it's coming from?"

Which lead me to try and list one prevalent sin, which lead to a list of five (well, six really).

The surprising thing to me was that as I made my list, I discovered the rather interesting thing that I seem to have become remarkably comfortable with my sins.  I say comfortable in the sense that as I made my list I went "Well of course that one is on there" and "Oh yes, let's add that one too.  I struggle with it awfully".

What I ended up was an indictment on two levels:  On one level, it pointed to the fact that have way more that six major sins in my life.  On another level, it pointed out how comfortable I have become with my sins, that I recognize and acknowledge them without really being impacted by them or concerned that they are still so prevalent in my life.

Have I become so comfortable with the thought of being a saved sinner that I have simply surrendered any intent of trying to eradicate the sin in my life?  That scares me if it's true, because that means that I have come to accept - nay, embrace - a certain amount of evil and failure in my own life.

Evil and failure.  Those are words that make me shudder as I write them, almost attempt to pull them down off the post.  It's not that I'm evil, I protest, it's merely that I'm a sinner who's saved.  Sinner has come to sound okay.  Evil is still stark.

But comfort is not the Christian's ultimate goal - nor should it be mine.  It's Christlikeness.  Will I sin free - never this side of death.  But can I deal more fully with the prevailing sins and move on to others?  By God's grace, it is possible.

But only if I realize that sin is something to be fought against, not lived with.

Disobedience

In reading this morning, God brought to mind the story of Saul and Samuel.  It's found in 1st Samuel 15 where Saul, then King of Israel, fails to completely execute the word of the Lord as sent by Samuel:  instead of wiping out all the Amalakites, he spares King Agag and the best of the flocks.  When Samuel arrives and asks why Saul didn't obey the voice of the Lord, Saul temporizes:  first he blames the people, then he blames the need for perfect sacrfices.  The Lord's response through Samuel?

"Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrficies,
As in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
And to heed than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of the LORD,
He has also rejected you from being King."
 - 1st Samuel 15: 22-23

This sat on my mind after I read it, having just finished a part of Henry's Blackaby's book Experiencing God where he discusses the same fact: that in order to be on mission with God, we need to be obedient to God.

Which circled me back to my own life:  how well am I being obedient to Christ?

Not very well, I'm afraid.  Simply put, I feel as if I'm nowhere near where I need to be.  And the disappointing thing (if one can use such a mild term for something God feels so strongly about) is that I fear the impact that such disobedience is having on my own life and the lives of those around me.  Yes, I understand that everything going well is no particular sign of God's favor and everything not going well is no particular sign of God's anger, but I am struck by the fact that so often I hit those walls I have so often written about.  Could it be that those walls are really just the limits of my obedience?

Which, I suppose, is good in one sense:  disobedience is something which an be remedied.  Not easily all the time, of course, but remedied.  Certainly one of the great aspects of God is that in returning to Him He does not immediately demand supernatural feats of brilliance.  He just asks us to stop what we're doing, agree it's wrong, and start (in concert with His spirit) doing the right thing.

But this whole discussion leaves me haunted in one aspect:  Saul was rejected as King over Israel because of the incident listed above, even though he went on to reign for many more years.  Has my disobedience already cost me such opportunities as will never come again and can never be redeemed?  And if so, would I know?

Responsibility

Responsibility has been much on my mind of late.

Why?  It weighs heavily on me, in both my personal and professional life.  I am told that I am responsible for a great many things, yet somehow that responsibility neither empowers me to act nor results in the rewards of being being responsible.   It sometimes seems that responsibility is merely a word for shifting the burden of action and decision.

What is responsibility? 

Responsibility:  The quality or state of being responsible, as:  moral, legal or mental accountability; something for which one is responsible:  burden.

Accountability.  That's a word I'm certainly familiar with in my professional life.  It is a word that people love to seemingly hold above one's head.  "You're accountable for this"  they say, often almost seeming to take a perverse amount of joy in making the pronouncement, then leaving without any further assistance or suggestion.

Burden.  I had not anticipated that word being there but that is too often what responsibility feels like: a burden, something which must be borne in the face of daily living.

But is this what responsibility was meant to convey?

Responsibility with only accountability is not, I think, the entire story.  Practiced this way, it truly is a burden, something which must be carried endlessly.  The missing bookends are choice and reward.

Choice:  In being responsible, I am taking accountability for something that is the result of a choice.  Too often it is a choice I have not made and not been involved in.  To be truly accountable, I need to be involved in the initial choice that lead to that accountability.

Reward:  One holds one's responsibilities and is accountable because, in the end, one  has the hope of some reward, be it financial or physical or "Well done, Good and Faithful Servant".  The hope of reward may not even be something as definitive as that; it may only be the hope of victory or a better tomorrow.  In any case, there is the suggestion that there is a end and a treasure for the discharge of the accountability.

But notice that of the three steps - Choice, Responsibility, Reward - too often many people want to be involved in the first and last step but not the middle.

Charting a course?  Deciding on a goal?  That's important stuff. Of course people want to be involved.  It's exciting.  It's fun.  It's future.  And Reward?  Who doesn't want a reward?  Who won't show up for a party?

But that long center climb - accountability - ah, there's the rub.  That's work.  That's unrecognized work, more often than not.  It's thankless.  If you fail, the hyenas of any social group will be there to tear and mock.  If you succeed, well, that's just what you were supposed to do.  Carry on.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is a revolution - at least, a revolution in my own life.  A change - not only in how I perceive and understand responsibility, but how I practice it.and allow it to be practiced on me.  Perhaps by redefining the difference between a responsibility (choice, accountability, reward) and an accountability (something given to me with no choice before and no reward after).   

One, if practiced properly, leads to maturity, success and personal growth.  The other seems to lead only to hopelessness and despair.

Adjustments

"Many of us want God to speak to us and give us an assignment.  However, we are not interested in making any major adjustments in our lives.  Biblically, this is impossible.  Every time God spoke to people in the Scripture about something He wanted them to do through them, major adjustments were necessary.  They had to adjust their lives to God.  Once the adjustments were made, God accomplished His purposes through those He called." - Henry Blackaby, Experiencing God

What is God calling on me to adjust?

I've written off and on about feeling like I'm coming up against walls in my life, of pressing against the edge but not ever really able to break through.  Maybe it's time to ask the question:  can I not break through because I'm not willing to change, to make an adjustment?

That's a dangerous thing, of course.  When God takes change, He seldom discusses minor changes.  It's always for a purpose of course, and always to ultimately help us do His will better and glorify Him more, but they still are generally major sorts of changes.

What kind of change?  This is the part that I always stumble on.  I always tend to think of it in terms of things I have to give up or not do. But that's not the totality of change.  Change can be attitudes and directions as well.  It can be the giving up of things that are not physical:  dreams, goals, passions.

I dread the discussion, of course.  I've managed to create a comfortable sense of myself over the years.  Sure, it's not everything I could want and everything I might desire, but I'm comfortable - or at least, I've come to accept where I am.

But that is precisely where God does not want us.  He doesn't want us comfortable with ourselves, He wants us relying on Him, glorifying Him, doing those things that without His involvement would be impossible (thereby giving Him to glory).  Comfortable with ourselves and our lives tends to breed reliance on ourselves and allowing our world to be bounded by our own goals and dreams.  God calls us to more.

The question is, are we - am I - willing to make the changes?

Purpose, Submission, Self Confidence

One of the things I have always struggled with in my considerations of God's purpose and submission is the relationship of self confidence.

Full disclosure:  I have - for most of  life - struggled with self confidence.  Even when doing things that I am relatively skilled at, I struggle with having any confidence in myself and what I am doing.

Why?  There are probably a host of reasons buried beneath the surface.  The one that is germane to the conversation at hand is that it often impinges on my understanding of what submission to God and His purposes means.

The crux of my problem is this: if I am submissive to God and His purposes, seeking His plans, then I feel as if I have lost the ability to have confidence in my own ability to choose a path and my directions.  This lends itself to constant sense of looking over one's shoulder, of trying to ascertain if what one is doing is really correct or if it is a misdirection of what was intended.

Do this long enough, and what one finds is that one becomes immobilized, never really sure what direction one should be taking or failing to put full effort into what is at hand, fearing that it is the wrong thing to be spending time on but never sure how to figure out what the right thing is.

If you think this isn't crippling, you can't imagine the level of uncertainty - perhaps even fear - that enters one's life when one is never sure of direction or effort or if one is doing the right thing at all.  It makes days a thing of concern and nights a thing of waste (after all, you should be doing something more useful than sleeping, right)?

How does one resolve this?

I'm not sure.  I've just written, deleted, rewritten, and re-deleted a phrase three times in this spot.  I can come with the answer I think I should, but I'm not sure that it's the honest answer.  Matters such as these are too important to leave to trite phrases and passionless mouthings of things I have not really made my own, a form of rote chanting without understanding the words.

How does one bridge the gap between God's will and purpose and the daily self confidence to competently live one's life?

The Act of Lowering

Submission:  The act of being submissive, humble, or compliant; the act of submitting to the authority or control of another.  Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin submissio/submittere, the act of lowering.

One of the ugly little not-so-secret secrets of my life is that I have a terrible time with submission.  I have problems submitting to authority of any kind - especially if I think the idea/thought/request is ridiculous or a waste of time.  But topping the list of my submission issues is my submission to God.

Frankly, I'm terrible at it.

Oh, I'm great at the things I want to be submissive about.  But as soon as we start to meander over into things that I think are foolish or silly - or worst of all, things I really want - the hackles on the back of my neck raise up and suddenly I become...."difficult".

Me, arguing with the God of the Universe.  Silly, isn't it.

The silliest thing about it is that submission to God is freedom, not control.  It's staying with the guardrails of living.  It's transferring the outcome of relationships, events, and even my life over to the authority of God.  "Do it my way"  says God throughout the Scripture, "and I take ultimate responsibility for the outcome - and the ultimate outcome is very, very good.  Do it your way - prepare to be responsible."

Why can't I get that?  Why do I constantly struggle with doing the thing that will bring ultimate joy?

Simple.  Look at the Latin root of submission:  the act of lowering.  When I submit, I make myself lower than something else.  In human terms in can be a government, a pastor, a business, a boss.  Ultimately, I make myself lower than God.

And to lower one's self is to lift something else above it.  Pride - that ever present sin, the one C.S. Lewis considered one of the greatest sins - bursts forth in a paean of self-praise.  You, it says, are equal to or better than all others.  You need to submit to no-one."

How do I learn to submit more? For myself, it's often as simple as looking at the outcome of what I have managed to accomplish on my own when I did it "my way".  Trust me, the track record is not that spectacular.  If we take on the responsibility of doing things our way instead of God's way, we take on the responsibility of the results in our life.

I have to ask myself this question:  "If I did X God's way instead of what I did, what were the possible outcomes?"  Yes, I know we can't fully know what might have happened, but I think we can safely extrapolate other things based on what did happen. 

It comes back to the question of pride:  will we lower ourselves before God? 

Because in the end everyone will lower to God - every knee will bend and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord.  It's when we decide to lower ourselves that has the eternal implications.

Purpose?

How does one find the purpose - or even a purpose - for one's life in the midst of all the other things seeming to offer none?

There seems to be a combination of factors in my life - a renewed realization of the amount of selfishness I possess within myself as well as level of instability - that is causing me to question what my old purpose was - indeed, even if I had a purpose - and what, assuming the old one is defunct, the new one should be.

In my career, I seem to be butting up against the wall of reality; that suddenly the limitless blue sky of possibilities - career advancement, salary - is coming to a halt, that I can perhaps expect the normal advancement of time but the dream of moving to a significantly higher position (with higher pay) has moved on. 

This then combines with factors of self-centeredness within my life - for me, perhaps, the escape valve of my life for doing what I would not really like to be doing - to create a situation where even though I may be at what and where I am for a long time, I cannot just "check out" with my own activities and life.

I'd love to say that I've had some blinding vision from God, some passionate uplifting dream to move me over this hump into the next phase, something so utterly clear that I cannot mistake it for anything else - but alas, I have not. I just have the walls of reality seemingly continue to close in on the circle of my life, leaving me with a smaller radius and and increasingly narrow view of the sky.

How does one find a purpose in the midst of this?  How can one take the ordinary, mundane events of one's life and craft a purpose of it or weave a purpose through it?  How does one find a purpose - not a canned response, but a real motivating one?

I can just make up my own or quote one, but it hardly changes anything - more of a justification of events that are already in place than a guiding statement. And eventually, I will see it as such and it will become irrelevant, one more in a list of things that I thought was real or mattered or I could do.

In the darkness of my soul I ask myself:  What am I doing wrong?

Sin and Selfishness

All sin, ultimately, is selfishness.

That's a hard saying, hard in the face of a world that so often elevates the individual and individual achievement.  It suggests that in fact we should spend less time on ourselves - do we ever really get to spend enough time to suit ourselves? - and more on the things outside of ourselves.

A little enlightened self interest, sure - but sin?  Really?  That's a pretty drastic word for the unkind thought I think or the candy I sneak or the thoughts I have that I shouldn't.   That's more just catering to myself.  I do work hard, you know.  Sacrifice a lot. 

All sin, ultimately, is selfishness.

Sin is simply (if such a word can be used for so devastating a thought)  not doing as God does and not willing as God wills.  It can be anything - an action, a thought, a word.  But when I choose to sin (and as much as I'd like to excuse myself, I do choose it), I choose to do something other than what God would or not will as God wills. 

Why?  Because I have chosen to elevate myself and my desires (or my world, my "deservings") above God and His desires and will.  Whether it is a flagrant sin or simply something secret, the root is the same:  I, O God, am more important and know better than You.

Thus the danger of a culture that worships the individual, that indiscriminately tells us we are the most important thing in the universe and that we are here to self-actualize ourselves:  we believe that our interests, our lives, are the most important things that are going on.  We carefully learn to soothe any sense of "sin" beneath layers of being "God's Creation" and "Unique", forgetting what those words actually mean and imply.

All sin, ultimately, is selfishness.

I write this out of a sense of being first in line.  I have created a plethora of justifications in my life when I sin (and let's not bother with the discussion of if it's sin.  Let's just go with the fact it is).  In my case, I too often hide it beneath a veneer of the "sacrifice" I make by doing what I do (which is not what I love), that I am "owed" whatever pleasures and time I can scratch together, even if such things cause me to ignore the real responsibilities and tasks I am called to. 

I hate writing this, because to shine such a light is to reveal the shriveled thing my inner most self has become - by becoming "rich" in things for myself, I have become poor both in the things of God and the things of responsibility that I am called to do.

All sin, ultimately, is selfishness.

The cure?  Ah, the cure.  Just the most simple and most difficult thing a person ever has to do.  Die to self.

Die to self.  Live to God.  Let go of all that I claim are my rights.  Change my thoughts and my will into God's thoughts and will, my actions into His.  Start by rejecting those ways that I cater to myself, even in the smallest of things.

Repent, of course.  Repent of sin.  Repent of thinking that the clear is not clear, that good and evil are not gray bands moving between each other but clearly defined.  Repent of thinking that my needs outrank anybody else's:  my own, my family, my friends, strangers, God.

All sin, ultimately, is selfishness.

All God glorifying, ultimately, is selflessness.

Back on Schedule?

The problem with exceptions to the program is that at some point, you have to go back to the program.

This is what I'm facing now that the audit has finished.  I have to return to my life - which is fine, I'm ready to be back in it - but in order to get there, I have to get back on schedule. 

This is the difficult part.

I had realized for many years that I am a creature of plans and schedules.  I like to know what is coming up.  One of the most annoying things that can happen in my world - The Ravishing Mrs. TB says I get wild eyed when it comes up - is when someone comes up with a spontaneous plan when I've already got my mind set that we're doing something else.

But we're not at the spontaneous at this moment, we're at the point in which we are trying to reconstruct the morning and evening schedule of my life.  And what I'm finding is that it is drastically more difficult to get back "into the groove" than I had anticipated.  The interesting fact is that it does not take long for me to target - or in my world, lazy.

It suggests two things:  either 1)  I am really unmotivated or 2) I was fooling myself in what I was doing.

So now the re-evaluation process starts:  What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  Is it the most important thing I could be doing?

Heady questions for a morning routine, I'm sure.  But the underlying theme - what I'm doing with my time - is one I take seriously, as I have come to appreciate more and more that time is in frighteningly short supply compared to all there is to do.

I got at least four things that I usually do done this morning.  Tomorrow I'll try for five, and we'll start rebuilding from there.  But always in the back of my mind I hear the clock ticking and the questions ring:  "Why are you doing this? Is this the best thing you could be doing with your time?"

Audit Last Day

Last day of audit:
I will be very grateful
to get my life back.

Instability or Boredom?

Which do I hate more:  Instability or boredom?

This is brought to forefront ever time I have to manage an audit.

One the one hand, audits do break up the boredom.  8 to 9 hours a day you are in a room, on your toes, constantly waiting for questions like "Can you explain this?" or "You don't seem to have..." or that worst of all possible words, "It looks like this is a non-conformity". 

On the other hand, audits are exhausting.  One exists constantly in  a state of heightened awareness, trying to end run questions before they arise, constantly dreading the words "nonconformity" or "observation".  Yes, you may not be responsible for it, but somehow it always seems to come back to you.

Then there's the going back after they've left to prepare for the next day, perhaps prepare answers in hopes that they will change their mind, and attend to the work that has had to go wanting over the last period of days while you performed the audit.

So the days are instable - but exciting.  On the other hand, most of my days are relatively stable - but boring.

Which one do I really hate more?

Audit

Audited each year
minds me the Great Auditor
is coming someday.

Dying to Self

Dying to self is one of the hardest things in the world.

It's hard to me both because it's a seemingly endless activity and there is always something else, something more, that I need to look at.

Not that I'm good at it of course - in fact, I'm one of the worst I know.  I'm forever finding reasons to justify my independence, my holding on to this or that.  But that's not an excuse for an activity which, every day, I need to be engaging in more and more.

The pervasiveness of it is astounding, if one really thinks about it.  What does it mean to have one's thoughts, one's opinions, one's mission in life replaced by Christ's?  The implications are farther reaching than I can even contemplate:  if I die to self and live to Christ, what does that do to my language, how I speak to and about others?  What does that do to how I work?  What does that do to how I live?

On a more personal level, what does dying to self do to my own life?  Does that give me the blank slate to continue to pursue my own interests when God may have other needs for my life?  Do I become more important than my children?  Than my wife?  Than my family unit?

Christ used the example of dying to self as a grain of wheat falling to the earth.  This, I know something about having grown wheat and barley for a number of years.  And the reality is that if the grain you plant dies, it produces anywhere from 10-20 grains itself per head.    It's a great example of the gardening world - but when it's brought to my own life, it becomes a much more dicey thing.  The example is there - it's just that I don't feel like I'm a grain wheat.

Which is probably a bit arrogant in and of itself.  The wheat and barley were created to do one thing, which they do quite well.  I, as God's creation, was created to do something else.  The wheat and barley (so far as we know) do their job without complaint; it's only we humans that seem to have an issue with doing other than what we're created to do.

But that requires an abandonment of self, an abandonment of the centrality of one's own life in pursuit of the life God calls us to.  It is sacrifice, even as the grain of wheat sacrifices it's being for the sake of the 20.

The question is, will we be the one that sacrifices into many?  Or will we remain cold and hard in the ground, clutching to our dreams and aspirations of what it means to our own grain of wheat?

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.

Play the Pipes Lowly

An experience that is tragically becoming all too frequent these days:  Boudicca of the Iceni is leaving.

It is another bittersweet experience, happy with a sting.  The happiness engages from the sense of release and moving on that exudes from her pores as she prepares for her last day; the sadness stings with the fact that of Monday, our world will be a great deal dimmer.

I owe a great debt to Boudicca.  By watching her, I have learned a great deal about actual management and planning.  I've seen someone who knows process and product so intimately and well that she knows more by thinking than most of us do by looking something up.  I've seen what real, practical expertise is and how a deep knowledge of something is a thing of power.

She be missed by the environment as well.  When she leaves, the living memory of the company and its efforts will be greatly reduced by a factor of 4 years. With her, an entire line of things disappears into the darkness of the past, to live only in moldering records in a warehouse awaiting destruction.

I will miss her companionship as well.  I will miss the ability to just drop by the office and talk for a few moments about anything; of the sudden rush for something to eat; of the magical "food drawer" from which things emerge from time to time.  I will miss the times she came by when I was obviously in distress and cheered me up.

I will miss the fact that she taught me one of the greatest lessons I have learned: about shutting my mouth.  And  a second great lesson:  about forgiveness.

Ave atque Vale, Boudicca.  Your new future is bright with promise, even as ours is dim with your departure.

Discomfort

I'm coming to believe I need a certain amount of discomfort in my life.

Why?  Because I easily become complacent.  Because I easily can fool myself into accepting the status quo as it stands, that any situation is really more endurable than it be (yes, I understand that many situations are endurable.  My point is that there are those that one has to be in and those one chooses to be in). 

Discomfort is the stone in the boot.  It's the light on the dashboard that won't go away.  It's the thing that constantly reminds me that something is not quite right, that something needs to be attended to.

I find ways around it, of course.  I try to convince myself that things are not all that bad, that I can continue to work with the stone in my boot.  I let things roll off my back, hoping that they will continue to roll but never questioning why  I should have to hope they roll off in the first place. 

But just acknowledging that the discomfort exists is not enough. This discomfort needs to push me to action, not just accommodation.  I need to use the discomfort to propel me to do, not just extend my skills in endurance of small discomforts.

Because in the end, both the discomfort and the endurance of it say less about the actually situation and more about myself:  my energy levels, my goals, my desire to actually act.  Given long enough and without action, at some point one looks back and realizes not only what the discomfort was trying to force in action, but what the cost of compensating turned out to be.

Far better to stop, remove the stone, and change your situation.

Forged

I am feeling a hardness starting to settle at the outer regions of my soul.  It is a sense I have known before:  the sense of being forged by circumstances.

It is a thing that comes when a realization occurs, the realization that circumstances simply cannot continue as they are and that to survive them, you will need to become stronger, purposeful:  forged.

Forging is heating and hammering, drawing and folding, shaping and forming.  Forging takes raw metal and makes it into something of use or repairs that which was of no use into something useful.

I can feel the hammers of circumstances beating me against the anvil of reality, stripping away that which of no use, forcing me to confront reality as it actually stands, bending my resisting life into something else.

It is hard, this forging.  It strips away pretenses.  It forces me to deal with things as they are, not as I would like them to be.  It asks me hard questions about values, about purpose, about what really matters and where I should be.

But the forge is a promise as well.  Something is only forged when it is intended to be used.

May the heat of the fire and the strength of the hammering make me more of, not less of, what I need to be.

Whither?

I find myself at a crossroads
(isn't life really series of crossoads?)
not knowing where to turn.
Only knowing that the direction I am going
seems to lead nowhere.

What does one do,
when the road one has followed
leads to a wall?

Do I scale it, hoping that the road continues,
even as I know there is another wall behind it?
Or do I turn right or left and walk a different road?

If the road you're on leads to nowhere,
where do you purchase a map?

The Path Without Footsteps

At what point do we take the path without footsteps?
It lies there to our right, waiting:
The detritus of decades' worth of leaves bury the dirt,
The branches of pine and oak create a passageway,
The blue and white sky beckons.

It's a hard thing, of course:
The course we are on is the course we have always run,
the dirt tamped hard by those that have gone on before us,
the way broad and clear.

But always there is the stress of this path:
the hurry, the rush, the maneuvering among others,
the sense that the faster and faster I go,
the farther and farther I fall behind.

And then I see it again:
seemingly abandoned and without footprint,
waiting, almost inviting the weary traveller
to rest their feet off the hard trod ground on soft leaves.

I stand, buffeted by the fact I am stopped in a unending flow
going where I know not in pursuit of that which matters not to me.
And then I see a single imprint at the head of the path:
Can the heart leave a mark?

Blinking

Sometimes the cursor just sits there and blinks at you.

"I'm ready"  it says.

"For what?"  my response is annoyance.

"For you to start typing."

"I don't really have anything to type about at the moment."

"That's not my problem" the cursor says smugly.  "I'm just a tool, you know.  You're the creative one."

I thrum my fingers on the keyboard lightly in frustration.  "I just can't think of anything.  That's not really my fault.  It's the creative process - I can't just make it happen."

The cursor just sits there, blinking on and off at me.  "Type, type"  it says as it flickers on, off, on, off.

Thrum on the keyboard again.  "You're not helping."  Sighing, I slump down in the chair a bit, waiting for inspiration to strike.

And waiting.  No lightning strikes today.

The cursor sighs.  "Wow.  You really have hit bottom.  Sorry."

"Thanks."  I smile wanly.  "Sometimes I sit down and I know exactly what I'm going to say; sometimes I don't have any idea. I wish I could find more themes, but when I theme something I miss the opportunity to wander off on a really good thought.  That's the risk that seems to come with this sort of stream of consciousness writing that I seem to have developed."

Blink, blink.  Thrum, thrum.

"Hey, I've got an idea"  the cursor finally breaks out.  "Why don't you let me drive this morning?"

I chuckle and half smile.  "Okay.  What are you going to write about?"

The cursor changes from a line to a parenthesis.  " ).  I thought we might write about sitting down at the keyboard in the morning...."

Making Space

How do I go about making space in life?

I seemingly have the least obnoxious commute to work I have had in years and can relatively control the length of time that I work but I seem to have less time than I have ever had.  This is a problem for me, as I can see the trap forming about my head as this goes on: less and less gets done and I move further and further away from directions I want to go in.

So how does one make space in one's life - I mean, with constraints like a job and a family?

First, it seems to me, is energy level.  Am I able to give the most energy throughout my day, not just at the beginning?  Do I expend the best energy doing the things that are least important and leave the remainder for the things  I really want to do? (In my case, yes)

Everyone's energy level is different - for me, it's tied directly to sleep.  That seems a conundrum to me, since time spent sleeping is time not spent doing something else - but if I'm too tired and low to do the other things with the extra time, then I've gained nothing.

Nutrition probably figures in here as well, although I'm much less versed in it.  I can make the generic comment that I need to eat better - what does that really look like?

Second is where I'm spending my time.  One large item, of course, is not giving time away unnecessarily.  It's easy to paint this as only being time wasted at work (giving extra hours, for example)  but it's not just that.  It's how I spend my time at work.  I've come to realize that in the case of bad work environments, people tend to cluster together like survivors to maintain their sanity.  It's necessary for maintaining sanity, but it comes at the cost of getting things done.  Be honest - do I really need to do everything that I think I need to do at work? 

Third, then is what I'm spending my time on.  This is where Stephen Covey's Urgent and Important matrix comes in helpful.  Am I spending time on the the things that are important but not urgent first and important and urgent first, or am I letting the urgent and unimportant or non-urgent and unimportant dominate my time?  The difference between these two is critical:  I can spend precisely the same amount of time in two different areas;  one will move me close to a goal, one will simply amuse me or take my mind off a bad situation.  The results are not the same.

Fourth is wedging in larger chunks of time.  This is something I am still trying to master.  In essence, it is creating larger and larger blocks of time that things can be accomplished - for example, learning to string five and ten minute chunks together, pulling them out of the things that don't matter at all and redirecting them.  Before long, you've made thirty uninterrupted minutes to do something in.

Time is time, and 24 hours in a day is all we get.  It's learning to make the space therein to pursue the important things that eventually differentiates those that accomplish from those that whine.

Thieving Time

I need to start stealing my time back.

I am having a conversation with  An Drumair about how I am spending my time and how I make progress towards what I want to do rather than continuing to wallow in what I am doing.  As I lamented the fact of how I spend my time at work he asked me the question I probably should have been asking myself:  "Can you integrate your passion - your writing - into what you are currently doing?"

(Behold the brilliance of the question, by the by:  not "What can you do to change where you are?" but "What can you do to integrate what you want to do into what you have to do now?"

I started to ponder after reading it.  What could I do to integrate my passion into what I am doing now?  On the one hand, not a great deal - my writing and my real work life are about as far as apart as two activities could be.  But on the other hand....

Time.  It comes down to time (well, really, time and commitment, as An Drumair so correctly pointed out).  The commitment, of course, comes from using the time.  The trick is finding the time.

So let's ask a different question:  If I have spend a certain amount of my day currently doing something I'm not crazy about and if I want to move towards doing something I am crazy about and I need the time to do it, where do I find that time?

By thieving it.

No, not by showing up at work and not working, that's not the point.  It's finding a way to take part of the time I otherwise spend uselessly and converting it into time which is useful to what I want to do.  This is partially accomplished by 1) working harder when I am there and 2) not dedicating additional hours beyond those I am required to give.  Fair enough - that adds 30 minutes or so to my day.

What else?

The what else came in two forms:  how are you spending your lunches and how are you spending your time driving?

Lunches?  Sure.  I eat lunch more with my coworkers than I have in 14 years - but is that as critical as achieving what I want to achieve?  If I could even find 15 minutes a day to write, that's an article or part of a chapter or something else for me to read and ponder for my writing.

And driving?  That's 70 to 80 minutes a day that is available for some kind of use, if I can only figure out how to apply it.  Surely I can speak and eventually convert something into writing.

A very wise man, An Drumair.  Adapt to where you are with what you have in pursuit of what you want.

Cutting Wood

The recent storm brought down a large oak limb in our backyard.  I could see it there Sunday night, hanging against the tree, not quite down but waiting to plunge.  It was still raining, so I moved it in rank of importance to the back of my mind.

Last night after I arrived home I saw it there, laying flat on the ground.  Everyone else was out to dinner and I was looking forward to some quiet time alone - but the branch kept catching my eye every time I looked out the window.  Finally I sighed and got up to go out, promising myself I'd only do some and finish the rest later.

Cutting branches - or even wood - here in New Home is certainly different from before.  I don't have access to the array of tools from my parents or friends, only what we brought out here.  So armed with only my brush cutters and my saw, I dragged the trash can out.

The weather was not as hot as it could have been, but the humidity from the recent storm hung like a reminder on everything as I looked at the branches.  It was resting  pretty firmly on the ground, so the chances of flipping over on me were low.  Grabbing my cutters, I started to work.

My procedure, when cutting branches like this, is to start by trimming off the end and minor twigs until I get to main lines only.  From there, it's a pretty simple task to cut them into forearm long lengths for burning.

When cutting, one gets into a rhythm:  Trim.  Dispose.  Saw.  Check balance of the limb.  Start on the next section.  Repeat.

The heat was not overbearing but was a little oppressive.  As I trimmed and started to cut, I suddenly realized I was committed at this point with the semi-convincing tale of "It's less than it actually looks."

I am my father's son in at least one sense:  I can keep a branch well balanced, not having it roll on me as I trim and cut lengths until I'm ready to move it.  I'm not sure that such a thing as wood cutting can be genetic, but then again maybe passive learning is more effective than I think.

The evening was quiet, the bulk of people and their pets still indoors from the heat and humidity of the day.  All that sounded were the snap of cutters, the crunching of branches being thrust down, and the brittle sound of the saw biting deep into the wood.  Above me from time to time doves quarrelled, apparently concerned that someone was near enough to their food source that flying down was risky and looking for volunteers to test the waters.

The last pieces are always the hardest to cut, both for their size (width of my upper arm at the end of the branch) as well as the balance.  Here again that genetic wood cutting helped:  with a skill I can't quite explain, I was able to balance and cut and joints and keep the rest of the limb balanced while I worked.

With the last cut and the "Thunk" of the wood falling, down, it was time to clean up:  cutters and saw to the garage, garbage can to the side of the house, cut wood into the recycling bin to be stacked by the side of the house.  The seemingly giant task had taken a little over an hour. 

As I stood under the porch and sucked down the cold ice water from a profusely sweating cup, I realized that once again I had managed to have a moment.  Once again, I had managed to lose myself in the task and hand.  Time flew, work was accomplished, and I was still here, shirt damp with the sweat of a humorless humidity but alive.

It is moments like these that remind one of the dignity and the greatness of work - true work, done with both body and mind, done with a task at hand, leaving an accomplishment that will be of use to somebody. 

Would that we could do this sort of work always. 

Second Starts

I'm starting to think about second careers.

Why?  The realization rose back to my consciousness this weekend that really, I can only do one thing.  Yes, I can maybe do it in other places, but it is still only one thing.  This wouldn't concern me too much except for the fact that 1) My industry seems to be shedding a great deal of jobs and 2) My skill set, years of experience and age are such that I may not be the first (or second, or third) choice in any job consideration.

Which raises the inevitable questions:  What career?  How long will it take?

Good questions.  I wish I had better answers.  I have managed to spend a lifetime discovering things that I'm not really good at, don't like, or do like but are not profitable.  This hit and run philosophy has not really given me an insight into what the next step could or should be, although it has given me a few pointers about myself:

1)  I tend to lose interest quickly unless I'm engaged.
2)  I tend to romanticize things and overlook the drudgery.
3)  I need something that keeps my mind and my body engaged.

The last point is the interesting one to me personally, something I have overlooked over the years.  I can be just as disengaged mentally as I can be physically.  The best tasks, the ones that not only are most productive but are most enjoyable, are the ones that involve both my body and my mind.  It forces me to focus, to be "In the moment" as Zen would call it.

What would that look like?  I'm not sure.  I'm paging through my local Junior College, trying to find a program that both looks interesting and would address the criteria above. 

Is it an investment? Sure.  Is it something I might never use?  Perhaps not professionally.  But I am dogged by the sense that in the event the bottom falls out, I have very little in the way of skills or skill sets to fall back on.

Being in the control of circumstances can be a frightening place.

Driven

"People don't walk into the top spot.  They're driven." - Eugene O'Kelly, Chasing Daylight

Why are some people driven and others are not?

I ask this question as someone who (so far as I can tell) is not particularly driven.   Certainly I am able to dedicate periods of time and concentration to a task or tasks, but that inevitably fades away and I seem to come back to my normal workaday and life pace.

I write because it seems to me that so much of life runs to the driven (and therefore, many of the rewards) that have to ask the question "Could I be driven?"  More importantly, "Should I be?"

Or is being driven something which we all possess but only in the context of something in which we are interested?  Does "Driven" equate to "Enthusiasm"?

It occurs to me no.  Enthusiasm can be about one or many things; driven is a way of life.

Could I become driven?  Could I perform at the uber-high level of performance consistently?  I honestly don't know.  The driven have a vision, a goal, that they constantly keep in front of them to keep them going.  They also seem to naturally be able to maintain these high levels of focus.

That's certainly not me.  I have no overwhelming vision to keep me going - in fact, just keeping myself in the game from day to day is something of an accomplishment.  I am also not a person who can really maintain a high level of focus on one thing - after all, there are plenty of others things that also need to happen along with that one thing (sometimes driven people don't remember this).

Perhaps too, that thing I want is more nebulous than a specific thing or a specific accomplishment.   How do you become driven to a lifestyle and pace of life that is almost the antithesis of driven? 

The times that I have tried to drive myself - to become focused, energetic, active - have generally been periods that I can only maintain for a short period of time.  At some point the energy fades, the focus dissipates, and I'm again trapped with the meaninglessness of  most of what I have focusing on.  In fact, I often feel less engaged than when I started.

There's an exception, of course:  when it is something that I am interested in.  Then my interest does not die and the energy does not fade; in fact, the flame is only fanned.  But this often seems to fade as well - in this case not so much from a lack of ability to maintain as a lack of a place for that interest to take me.

If focus can mean succeeding (in the larges sense of the word), driven can lead to focus.  But enthusiasm can lead to focus as well - let's be honest, you can't focus long term on anything that you're not at some level engaged in.

So maybe I'm asking the wrong question yet again.  It shouldn't be "Can I become driven?" but "What am I enthusiastic about?  What do I love to do?"  Either way, that will give me the thing to focus on - and the energy to do it.

Stuck

How does one make a change to one's life when one has no idea what that change should be?

This is sense I have of things right now, as I sit and read God's word, meditate, pray, read and ponder.

I feel stuck - not trapped necessarily, just stuck, as if I were in a mud pit that I have little or no chance of pulling myself out of yet do not seem to be sinking further.

We've agreed, I think, that hope is not alone sufficient to get me out of this.  It takes achievement, of course - but achievement without direction is no more productive that hitting nails into a board on the ground:  without knowing what the board is meant to do and where the nails are meant to go, it's activity that accomplishes nothing.

There are ways in which I feel straitjacketed by choices, without a sense that I can make a choice that will significantly improve my situation.  It's having no really good choices even as the choices you have made are not really contributing.

I keep thinking that I need some kind of epiphany, some kind of break-out thought that will give me this direction and the change I need.  But nothing seems to come through:  a sort of blank, empty canvas continues to roll before eyes with nothing on it.

How does one break out of one's mindset and seeing to the perception and hope (there, I've said it) that one needs to inform the achievement one needs to make to alter one's life?

Hope and Achievement

What then do I do with temporal hope?

If hope is a desire or cherished dream, something we anticipate or expect to happen, how do I make hope something more than just a wispy thing that I cling to when I feel bad about my situation or my life?  How, like the alchemists of old, do I transmute that hope into something of actual value?

I face and address the reality that hope without action is simply nothing more than a dream.

Hope can be a grand thing. It can be the initiator of any number of great actions.  It can drive us to greater efforts than we thought were possible.  Hope keeps us up late at night or early in the morning when we would rather be sleeping; it drives us to try on more time to make that contact or initiate that conversation or simply send that resume.  Hope helps us to see the great things that can be possible in our lives.

But hope is not the same as achievement. 

Achievement is that less glamorous word, the word that reeks of hard labor and sweat and disappointment and being thrown back time and time again.  It is the thing that makes all other things possible - without achievement, there is nothing else. It's the word that expresses the concept of Henry Ford:  "Opportunity is missed by most people because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work".

Hope drives achievement as fuel drives an engine.  I work to achieve many things; without the hope that there is some greater purpose or desire being gained, my achievement merely becomes a dull grind of things I have to do.

Can achievement bring the certainty that hope implies?  It depends on what you mean by certainty. Certainly there is always an element of chance, of things not working out.  But in reality, if work and achievement don't make hope more certain, they certainly increase the chances the chances that one's hopes will become achieved - as Samuel Goldwyn said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."

So let us have hope and let us use hope, by all means.  But let us not make the mistake that hope alone will change our lives.  That expectation of hope can come, but only when it is undergirded by labor of achievement towards that hope.

Hope: Definition

If I say I am lacking in hope, what does that really mean?  What is hope anyway?

Let's take a short ride on the Bus of Knowledge:

Hope: From the Old English hopian, akin to Middle High German hoffen (to hope)

(Well, that's not very exciting - other than an interesting footnote that hope in the English language is not descended from Latin, French, or Greek).

How about a definition?

1)  Verbal:  to cherish a desire with anticipation; to desire with expectation of obtainment; to expect with confidence

2)  Noun:  a desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment; expectation of fulfillment or success.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

Look at the words that repeat themselves above:  desire, expect/expectation; obtainment (fulfillment's the same thing).  Simply put, hope is something that we desire, cherish, or expect to be fulfilled, obtained or successful.

Those are pretty high expectations for a four letter word.  Cherish?  Desire?  These are highly personal words, words that speak of something springing deeply within us.  To disappoint something deeply personal is to be in a great deal of pain.

Suddenly I understand why the loss of hope is so devastating.  If I have no anticipation that something I cherish or desire (or even that prosaic word, expect) has any chance of being obtained or successful, what do I have to look forward to?  More of the same - or even a downward trend?

Again, let's be clear that the definition listed above is not simply enough to be accomplished.  Just because I cherish or desire something does not mean it will magically come to pass without effort.  Many people fall down at this point, believing that hope alone is sufficient to accomplish things.

What is it that we desire?  What is it that we cherish?  What is it that we hope for?

Hope: Situational

Bogha Frois and I had another one of the liberating conversations last weekend that (inevitably) seems to result in additional deep thought. 

We were discussing the thoughts expressed last week here about trying to be something that you're not, and the inevitable conflict this seems to create within yourself.  Add to it one or more bad relationships in the workplace, and you've got all the makings of a personal moment of decision.

"It's hope"  she said.

"Hope?" 

"Hope"  she said again.  "Or the lack thereof.  There's no sense that anything is going to get better, that there is no timeline I can put on the situation to say 'After this date, I'm moving on to something better'.  Just the general sense that this is as good as things are going to get and it only gets less good from here."

As we walked through the ramifications of hope - what it may or may not be, what it would like like in each of our situations - I realized what a vital element it is and how, much like her, it was missing in great dollops from my own life as well.

Hope is the great element that we all need - in some fashion - in our life. Hope gives us the sense that this is not all that there is, that there is something better.  But at the same time we must be careful.  Hope is not a substitution for hard work and effort.  Hope is a feeling, an emotion, a dream - and these three things in and of themselves will not change anything. 

Remove hope from a person - any sense that things will improve, that there is a better something out there - and what is left is a dull drone-like existence of living from day to day.  Nothing will remove the zest from daily living more than a lack of hope.

Which of course raises the question:  How do you get and maintain hope?

Of course I wish I had better answers than  I always do.  Ironically, for the Christian eternal hope is always the easier of the two to point towards:  hope in Christ, hope in His saving grace and His promises, the hope of eternal life.    Temporally for the Christian - at least, temporally for me - somewhat harder to find.  I am subject to the same stresses and strains as all others; I am subject to situations that seem not to change and people that seem impervious to reason and days of the long black tunnel of existence.  I can literally go weeks without any wisp of hope clouding the iron-gray sky of daily life.

But we - I - need to figure this out.  Life without hope becomes not life at all but existence.  And at only existence, we can scarcely seek to achieve the excellence that we are created to do.