A Failure of Subject

So today is yet another one of those days when the cursor is just sitting there at me blinking, wondering if I am going to write anything.
I hate it, of course.  There it sits blinking on and off, black and white, the visible/invisible line between myself and my writing.  Although it is really not between me and my writing at all.  It is not as if the cursor is the thing that prevents me from finding my inner muse, it is myself.

There are mornings like this, of course, where the brain has nothing to offer and creativity flicker has taken leave and gone to where such creative things go for the winter.  I wish I knew where it went - it is not as if I had have plenty on my mind or other things that needed writing about.  But for some reason, all of this has disappeared at the very moment I need it to use, leaving me with only a bit of a headache and a blinking cursor.

It happens, of course.  I just need to reconcile myself to this, let it go as I would let a bad throw go, and start over tomorrow, confident that a new thought will present itself for consideration.

But in the back of my mind I still wonder:  where did it go?  Because if I could only find that place and recapture it, how wonderful would that be?

Just Run

Putting aside time
and ignoring the distance,
I become the wind.

This morning I just ran.

I put aside the timer.  I put aside the distance counting.  I just went out and ran this morning.

Why?  Because I realized this morning that I starting to flag in my running - and that is not a good thing.  I need to keep up with it, get better at it, continue to do it, when in fact all I am finding is that my enthusiasm is waning a little more every day.

As pondered this in the morning as I prepared to run I realized that part of the issue was that it was become a regimented activity for me:  get ready at a certain time, run the course I always run, look at my time and enter it, and carry on.  No sense of fun there.  No sense of seeing something different or getting better at something.  Just day in, day out, mechanical running.

That is not a good development.

In order to have the desire to become more skilled at anything, one must have some level of fun involved with the thing:  one has to want to do it.  One has to have some level of "Hey, I enjoy this" and sometimes just do it for the sheer pleasure of doing it.  Without that, the activity will simply become a duty - and duties, as well know, will be cast off as soon as we no longer have to do them.

So I just ran.

I will enter a distance of course and some kind of time, but that is it.  I will not check to see my splits or averages.  I will just glory in the fact that after an evening of pounding rain I arose and saw the clouds and sun - and just ran.

Bella The Great

Bella the Great is sitting on my lap as I type this.

Her emergence from her cage has been extraordinary.  We have had her since 2007, a mini-lop purchased for a 4-H project that never really took off, and in all of that time she never wanted to get out of her cage.  We began keeping the cage door open because it was inconvenient in the morning - and she did nothing.  In fact, she fought whenever someone would have to remove her from the cage for its cleaning.  She never wanted to be held and only pet on her terms, when she came up to the cage door.

Until about 3 weeks ago, when she just spontaneously jumped out of the cage and started running around.

Now she has become almost a tyrant in her quest for freedom.  Every morning, as soon as she sees the light go on, she starts gnawing at the cage door (it is closed now, of course), demanding to be let out.  When it opens she immediately hops out and begins hopping about.  She seems to have a circuit:  first the family room in which she is in, then out to the living room to hop around the perimeter before she plops down on the tile or carpet by the entry way.

When I come to sit down in my chair she will hop over and look up; sometimes she tries to climb my leg for attention, sometimes she just hops up in the chair and makes that sort of sound only a rabbit can make.  She sometimes just sits there demanding to be pet; at other times she makes a quick circuit over my lap to the other side and then hops back down and carries along her way.  Just now, she hopped up, sat to my side as I pet her, gave me a couple of bunny kisses (Rabbit for "I Love You") and then hopped back down on her business.

This is an unlooked for gift, something that I had expected after years of having her and trying to convince her that we did not really seek to harm her but wanted to love her.  Suddenly, it seems, those years of trying have finally paid off, and we are beneficiary of the love of a happy rabbit.

Revenge

The Moment arrives:
greater than confronting them
is to surpass them.

Shielding Ourselves From Others

How often I fail.

Sometimes it feels as it my personal life is just a series of failures as I sort of lurch from disaster to disaster.  You would not know this from looking on the outside, of course: you would just see me with my usual demeanor, laughing and carrying on as I try to get this thing accomplished or that thing done.  But inside it so often feels that there is a battlefield of choices and ideas going on, and too often I feel I am on the wrong side of them.

It makes me wonder what life would be like if the contents of our minds and hearts were as audible and visible as the expressions on our faces.  What would people think?  How the illusions we have of each other would be ripped away in the reality of how we actually go about our daily lives?

It gives me pause as to why God never gave us the gift of telepathy.  You would think that this would be an excellent thing - mind to mind instant contact in a way that would enable people to to truly know each other.  Instead we kind of wander through words and thoughts and actions, hoping that we both express what we are trying to express and not reveal the rest of it.  Perhaps the lack of telepathy is an outcome of The Fall, a privilege that we are now denied.  Or perhaps it is simply a protection God put into place to protect us from having to regularly engage others in an overwhelming assault of our selves.

I have often said - and believe - that a truly successful personal life would be the one in which my outer and inner selves are the same.   I sometimes wonder if that is really possible, if in fact the outer self helps to buffer others from what is truly going on inside of us.

To protect others from our own demons.  And shield us from our own failures.

Rotten Habits

Today in my morning pages (the three pages in my journal I am trying to write every morning) one of the questions from The Artist's Way" I had to consider was "What are three rotten habits - obvious and subtle - that you have?  What is the payoff from them?"  Wow, I thought to myself - that is going to be fairly hard to come up with - not so much that I do not have them but rather that I will not be able to find a theme amongst the three of each.

I was wrong.

Three obvious rotten habits:

1)  Spending time surfing the Internet reading instead of doing something productive.
2)  Letting myself that this will take so long to do that I put off doing them.
3)  Putting off tomorrow what I could do today.

Payoff:  I do not actually have to take action on anything and by not taking action, I cannot fail.

Three subtle rotten habits:

1)  Not speaking up when I should.
2)  Not defending my position when I should.
3)  Being flippant when I should be serious.

Payoff:  People will never think ill of me or my opinions or criticize me.

In looking at these in a printed form, I see a trend.  In both cases, I end up trying to not do or say anything, because I am worried about failing (by action or opinion).  I find that interesting in that I knew that my fear of failure and criticism was high - but not that high.

What to do?  The first three are relatively easy to consider:  act.   Time your Internet.  Instead of thinking about what doing something, do it.  And do it as soon as you realize it, not tomorrow.

The other three are more difficult because they involve self image, not action.  How does I overcome the need to be liked - or rather, the incessant need in my case?  How does I stand one's ground intellectually?  And how does I accept that flippant is not always the way to be?

What are your rotten habits?  And what payoff do you get?

Best Day of My Life

One of the advantages of being slightly behind the popular culture scene is that you find things that are relatively recent but have had enough time that the bad material has settled out.  Such is the song "Best Day of My Life" by American Authors.  I have been somewhat surprised by my reaction to it, one of delight.  Why?

1)  I love the message of the song.  What would life be like if every morning we woke up and said "This is going to be the best day of my life?"  Every day?
2)  It has a banjo.  That moves it to the top of the list.  Nothing wrong with banjos.

The best line of the song?  "But all the possibilities, no limits just epiphanies".



The lyrics:

I had a dream so big and loud
I jumped so high I touched the clouds
Wo-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh
Wo-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh

I stretched my hands out to the sky
We danced with monsters through the night
Wo-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh
Oah-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh

I'm never gonna look back, woah
I'm never gonna give it up, noo
Please don't wake me now

Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife
Oo-o-o-o-o-oooooo
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife

I howled at the moon with friends
And then the sun came crashing in
Wo-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh
Oah-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh

But all the possibilities
No limits just epiphanies
Wo-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh
Oah-oah-oah-oah-oah-oh-oh

I'm never gonna look back, woah
I'm never gonna give it up, noo
Just don't wake me now

Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife
Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife

I hear it calling outside my window
I feel it in my soul

The stars were burning so bright
The sun was out 'til midnight
I say we lose control

Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife
Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my life
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife

This is gonna be, this is gonna be, this is gonna be
The best day of my life
Everything is looking up
Everybody up now

Oo-o-o-o-o-o
This is gonna be the best day of my l-ii-fe
My li-i-i-i-i-ii-ife

Running in Summer

A vast damp salty sheet
wraps me; I become the cloud
that brings the moisture.

Finding Courage

Finding courage can be a very difficult thing.

Finding courage is quite easy when it is just for a moment or the nature of the situation is such that is something truly noble.  Then one can find one's fear consumed in the moment or overcome with the greatness of the task at hand.  In these times courage is at hand like a trusted sword, easily available to draw out and engage.

But courage can be very difficult to find in the daily grind of life, when there is no great event that calls it forth or a truly noble task.  Instead, it seems that courage can be required for the simple task of living day to day or facing down the demons of the quiet spaces within our own souls.

It happened to me last night, driving back from class.  I suddenly just found myself overwhelmed - almost to tears.  Concerning what I do not know that I could tell you - certainly nothing had happened in class to garner this kind of reaction.  But there I was, feeling suddenly bereft and alone and wandering, to the point that disconnected from my where and when I stopped at a green light, looking two lights down to the red one I saw in the distance.

It takes a sort of courage at those moments to, the sort of courage to pull one's self back away from the brink and continue to move forward into life.  It does not feel like courage, of course:  we often associate courage with great feelings of power and fearlessness, while this kind of courage feels like I am just dragging myself out of a pit to stumble forward.  But it is a sort of courage none the less - perhaps even more critical than the first sort of courage I wrote about.

For the first sort of courage there is often a sense that the outcome is not necessarily relevant - one could conceivable die or lose a job or even simply be yelled at, but it is subsumed in the overwhelming sense of rightness and doing right and greatness of heart.  However the second sort of courage is based not on the moment but on the outcome if one does not take action of courage - the depression that one will slip into, the despair that one will find on the morrow, the emptiness of one's own soul unless the courage is engaged and the sense of defeat is overcome with the thought of "One Day More".

It is the unrecognized sort of courage of course, and hardly the sort of thing any movies will be made of. But that moment of finding courage can become the most important exercise of all - because unlike the courage of the moment, the courage of endurance is habit learned like any other and if faithfully practiced even in the darkest of moments can become a life of courage:  not the necessarily the courage of greatness but the courage of pushing forward in the midst of a life which may so often feel like it is collapsing upon itself.

The Great Quarterly Meeting

Today is the Great Quarterly Meeting.

I remember the first time I had to give one of these.  It was back in 2009, shortly after we had moved.  I had no idea what I was actually going to have to do.  Given guidance and a presentation, I sat and spoke quietly and sweated profusely and got through the meeting.  As I recall, I had a fairly high level of terror due to the other people who were present in the room with me - one does not often spend 1.5 hours with virtually all the senior management of a company.

That was 18 meetings ago.  Today will be meeting number 19.  Do I have the same sense of terror that I did?  Not the same sense of terror per se, but certainly a sense of terror as I approach this one as well.

Why?  Senior staff can make me nervous.  In a sense I am a consumer of their moods and the issues going on in their worlds.  For example, they can be very attentive - or very disengaged, depending on what is happening around them.  They can move past points that I thought would be critical to discuss - and then spend a great deal of time on something I would not have predicted.  And always in the back of my head is the primal fear of being called out for being wrong or incompetent.

Perhaps this is really the source of my fear for these meetings:  not that the meeting or information itself is wrong or without value but that I am perceived as being wrong or incorrect.  It is that sinking feeling that one gets when in the slide that flashed up on the screen one realizes the spelling error or data error that escaped notice every other time that this document was reviewed.  That every secret belief I have of my inability and my lack of knowledge will be put front and center for everyone to see.

I have tried to combat this.  I have reviewed and re-reviewed the presentation.  I know the data backwards and forwards.  And yet, every time I think of doing this, I get a little bit fearful.  Because buried beneath this collection of living is a small boy who, somewhere he cannot even fully remember, felt like he was unprepared and got attacked for it.

The meeting will come and go as they always do; the boy, however, remains in the center of my soul, waiting to be answered.

Sins of Our Own Choosing

We all choose our personal sins.

Not precisely by choice, mind you.  We all seem to have predispositions to certain ones.  But there are very few of us that can seem to pack all potential sins into one package.  And even within that, we tend to have a certain core of sins that we are most likely to fall into or spend most of our time battling.

Interestingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), these tend to be the sins that we do not speak out about.  Sure, we can protest something like immorality or excessive greed but we just as soon tend to not focus on the sins that perhaps we practice ourselves:  gluttony or gossip or covetousness.  In fact, it can often be amazing to what lengths we will go to justify our own sins while still crying out the phrase "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at Hand" - we will say something like "Well, it is not that I am coveting that car that my friend has, it is just that I really think it is nice and should be something I work towards" while we ignore the fact that the car is on our minds 24 hours a day, filling our thoughts and our aspirations.

We do not fool anyone, of course - especially the world, which has keen antennae for hypocrisy.  Put aside the failings of those that cry out against things and then are found to participate in them:  just the simple fact that we as Christians portray ourselves to be against sin - but not the sins we like - is enough to destroy our ability to carry a witness forward.  To this extent the old phrase is true, "I am okay with Christ - it is His followers that bother me."

We walk a fine line as Christians, moving between the fact that we are saved but not yet yet completely glorified.  As a result, we find ourselves in the position of crying out against sin even as we ourselves continue to battle the sin in our lives. But it is one thing to call out against sin in general, while it is another to call out our own sin first while also presenting the Gospel, that all have fallen short of the glory of God (yes, even those of us that are presenting it) and all of us sin - but that there is a way of hope and redemption.

We mistake our roles sometimes:  we are not to be traffic officers  on the road of life,  pulling people over when they exceed the law.  Instead, we are to be construction workers and roadside assistance, guiding people around areas where the road is weak or being repaired and fixing their cars when they have a problem and are on the side of the road.  The first implies that we are the law. The second implies that we are not the the law but merely helping them to get where they need to go:  the road is not ours, the laws are not ours - we use the road and obey the laws as they do.  There is no superiority, only assistance and guidance as we all travel the road together.

But to accomplish this - any of this - it takes a simple admission from us:  sin is sin. No matter what sin it is.  Even if it is the sin of our own choosing.

God and Marriage

I usually do not post videos, let alone watch them.  This, however, is worth 10 minutes of your life.  It will humble you in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

http://www.faithit.com/people-stunned-chose-marry-him-they-said-never-work-3-years-later-couldnt-be-better-ian-larissa/#.U4W9vl7ffHD.facebook

Passion

Passion.
To Live.
With joyful abandon,
To embrace the world.
To feel with our being
that we live our true potential:

To fully be in every single moment.

Or to live without its energy,
living in the twilight gray
an existence of sadness.
The Living Death.
The Rut.
Passionless.

Appointment and Disappointment

There are days in which I am very disappointed with large chunks of my life.  Which brings up the not unreasonable question, What is disappointment?

Appoint:  To fix or officially set; to name officially; to determine the disposition of by power of appointment.

Disappoint:  To fail to meet the expectation or hope of; to cause disappointment.

When I read this, I was confused.  Typically I think of disappointment as the opposite of appointment - apparently not.  But not so unrelated as I might have thought:  a failure to meet an expectation or hope can include not being officially set or naming officially, perhaps even in the sense of being dis-appointed (un-named or removed) from a position or outcome.

And how does any of this help me actually fix the problem I was hoping to fix?  How do I combat the sense of disappointment that I have?

Perhaps, just perhaps, it starts in the area of appointment.  How did I appoint these expectations of life that I have - or rather, who appointed them?  Are they valid?  If they are, then I can feel legitimately let down by the fact that things have not gone the way I would have wished.  If not, perhaps those were not valid appointments (goals, wishes, thoughts, affirmations) to begin with.

Certainly this extends itself to others' expectations of me.  These are things that others have appointed (officially set, disposed by power of appointment) to me - but again, are these legitimate?  Are they reasonable?  Are they correct?

And if I find myself disappointed in the things that are legitimate and within my power, what do I do about that?  Well, the nice thing about dis-appointing is that you can re-appoint things as well.  So perhaps the better question is this: if disappointed, how do I set or fix things for success?

A final thought:  appointees serve at the pleasure of those that appointed them.  If something turns out to be truly unreasonable, one can simply act - to dis-appoint it from a position of power.

Enforced Humility

I have such problems with humility.

Not the humility that I self impose, of course.  No, that is something that never seems to be an issue.  The conscious setting aside of one for the betterment of another may sometimes be difficult, but there is a sense of the rightness of  what you are doing.

No, the humility I have problems with is the humility imposed by others.  The humility that comes from other seeing the position as they see - perhaps rightly as it is.  The realization, however painful, that in fact your position is really what it is and you really are who you are, at least in the eyes of certain situations.

It is the realization that you are a doer, not a planner.  That you are here to do smaller parts of larger things - and seemingly most especially not the parts that get the reference and recognition.  That people in positions above you may not view things as a participatory event but really as a top down situation where your job is to do what you do - and shut up about it.

I have made the reference before to my position in life being considered by most to be that of an automatic transmission:  always functioning, always quiet, just there.  I am realizing that for a lot of people that is how they tend to view other people a lot in general.

And this is where the humility comes in.  Even in these situations, I am called to be humble: not lashing out, not angry, not grumpy.  Recognized and rewarded or not, I called to work and serve.  And be humble.

Even when it is enforced.

Rain Again

It is raining again this morning.

This brings both happiness and sadness.  Happiness of course because we need the rain quite badly - and from my point of view, any rainy day is a good day.  Sadness because, of course, today was the day I was going to try to start off on a different schedule.

But perhaps that is okay.  Rain is a good metaphor for a lot of things.  It can represent the washing away of old items.  It can represent the renewal of life.  It can even represent the simple fact that our plans, for all our carefully planning of them, can be easily swept aside by things beyond our control.

I am keeping my ear attuned to hear if the rain has finally stopped, thinking that perhaps I could still get a run in this morning.  But the thunder and lightning continue their march by the house as well, booming and lighting up the sky as they have all night.  The thunder will roll and roll and roll, not at all like the short cracks of thunder I recall from growing up.  Again, another wonderful metaphor about how what that which we have always known may not be all that there is.

Ironically I have changed my schedule a bit in hopes that I might be able to get more done.  Instead, it appears this morning that I have changed my schedule so that I can in fact get less done - but have more time to think about what I am doing.

Which is in itself an unexpected gift.  The gift of time to think, to ponder, is one which I continue to undervalue within my own life.  Somehow I got off on a track that says that doing is the only way to move a life forward, not remembering that without thinking and reflection there is no doing - or at least doing with meaning.

I poke my head outside the door one last time.  The rain is still there, gentle and beating down, putting my last hope of getting a run in this morning to shame.  The coffee pot is sputtering the final notes of its morning song, a precursor of the smell that will make its way to where I am sitting with its siren song of warmth and caffeine.

The day is coming rushing at me with the full force of reality itself -but like the rain, is soft enough in its coming to allow me the courtesy of some thought and coffee for a few fleeting moments.

Sergeant MacKenzie

In honor of those who have served, Sergeant MacKenzie:

Lay me down in the cold cold ground
Where before many more have gone
Lay me down in the cold cold ground
Where before many more have gone

When they come I will stand my ground
Stand my ground Ill not be afraid

Thoughts of home take away my fear
Sweat and blood hide my veil of tears

Once a year say a prayer for me
Close your eyes and remember me

Never more shall I see the sun
For I fell to a Germans gun

Lay me down in the cold cold ground
Where before many more have gone
Lay me down in the cold cold ground
Where before many more have gone

Where before many more have gone

This arrangement was taken from the Soundtrack of We Were Soldiers Once - And Young.  Well worth your time on a Memorial Day.

Sergeant MacKenzie

Anniversary

Anniversary:
How can those many years seem
so fleetingly swift?

Ask Your Father

So I mentioned yesterday that I had sat down and made a list of things I was thinking of doing.  Last night I ran part of it through the ultimate test:  my father.

One should hold their father's opinion in high regard.  In my case, I especially should hold my father's opinion in high regard since he seems to have been right about virtually everything that I have asked his advice on, especially the things that I asked his advice on and then did exactly the opposite.

It was my father that asked me hard questions about The Firm - questions that I should have listened to and pondered instead of plowing through and thinking that hope was a better answer than facts.  It was my father that, after the debacle had occurred, calmly watched me try to rebuild my situation without a hint of "I told you so".

So it was with interest that I listened as as mentioned some of the things that I was thinking about.  In the one case- that of advanced degree - he did not specifically say "Do not do that" but he hesitated from saying anything at all.  For another - that of a practical skill that I would probably enjoy - he evinced much more enthusiasm.

The decision is ultimately my own of course, but what (hopefully) 9 years of painful rebuilding has taught me is that it is not enough merely to consult myself, listen to my own carefully crafted logic, and then move forward.   It is better to seek the advice of those who have more experience, even if just to bounce the idea off of them for their perspective.

Or more simply, ask your father.

Planning for the Future

So this weekend I sat down and construct a careful time line of what I needed to do for the next 5 to 10 years.  After my recent personal successes in April of publishing and in-dojo certification, I realized that there were a number of other things that I could do - and if I stagger them appropriately, I can get them on the list.
So I sat and worked.  By the time I was done I had a series of learning and certifications out for the next 10 years.  It covered a lot of ground:  language, career related skills, in-dojo certificates, maybe even an additional degree.  All cascaded, one leading into the other such that I am not doing too much at a time.  It was a thing of beauty.

And then it hit the wall of reality.

Of everything I was listing, what there was actually going to improve my life (ignore the financial implications - at this point financing anything is not an option)?  For those things that were career related, is there enough there to give me bang for my buck?  Or am I just pursuing things that I want to that will eat time and energy and not really impact my life at all?

Which gets back to choices, of course.  What kind of choices am I making?  Am I making choices on a system that will continue to exist or am I clearly seeing the world as it is and acting accordingly?  I am guilty of that, of course - trying to see the world as I wish to see it rather than how it is. That can work out well and not so well for one of course - sometimes simply by seeing the world as we wish to see it we can bend certain things to our will that common sense tells us would not be possible.

But doing requires the investing of time - even as does the pursuit of those items I made my list for.

Ultimately the question is this:  What future are you really preparing for?

10 Things I Love About Conan The Barbarian

I have had the distinct pleasure of getting reacquainted with Conan The Barbarian - not the hideous adaptation or remake created by Hollywood but the originals as written by Robert E. Howard.   I read him once long ago but the books moved on; it has been my pleasure to start finding them and reading them again (thank you, Used Book Stores!).  And so, without further ado, 10 Things I Love About Conan The Barbarian:

1)  He is the eternal optimist.  He always believes he can accomplish what he sets out to do.

2)  He is a man of action.

3)  He is is in really good physical condition.

4) He is an adventurer.

5)  He is actually a pretty good linguist.

6)  He makes a practice of becoming an expert at what he does (He is a warrior of course, but he always strives to be the best).

7)  He is the ultimate fantasy success story, rising from poor barbarian to the king of the mightiest realm in Age.

8) He has the ability to enjoy life no matter where he is.

9)  He is a great leader of men.

10)  He has an ultimate unerring sense of justice and chivalry.


I know, I know - he is just a fantasy character.  But with so many real leaders and celebrities with character flaws or actual flaws, it is nice to have an example somewhere to emulate, right?

Happiness?

Happiness is deeper than we think it is.

In speaking with Snowflake last night, one thing I commented I was trying to work on was my state of mind - my happiness - when I come from work.  Frankly, it is far less than what I think it should be - and it seems to be affecting others.  No matter how much I try coming in the door with a hearty " I am home" has eluded me - for years.

But Snowflake made me think deeper about it.  "It is not just then"  she said, "it is always.  Is your mood in general happy?  And how are you in general when you are around people?"

Ouch.

The truth is that I am not a very happy person.  Oh sure, I can put on a grand show, be the jovial "Hail and Well Met" fellow that appears to have things well in control and moving forward, but in reality I am not very happy.  Not psychotically so mind you, and not to the point that it prevents me from being a functional human being.  But certainly not anywhere near what I often seem to portray.

Why?  Well, here is an even more difficult question:  What is happiness?

I wish I could answer that question conclusively.  It would resolve a host of other issues.  I could then confidently say "This is what I define happiness as" and "These things hardly make me happy".  Instead, I am left careening through the day and a listing of activities, some of which provide me joy but perhaps contribute little to my life, some of which provide me no joy but must be done, some which provide neither joy nor a sense of purpose, and a very few which make me happy but do not seem to lead anywhere.

What would a life of doing mostly activities one likes look like?  I certainly grasp that there are always things which must be done, but what if the bulk of my activities were things that I either enjoyed, added value to my life, or allowed me to live on purpose.  What would such a life look like?

I cannot imagine - I can only imagine the negative, which I seem to be living every day:  a dull sense of grinding activity in which I grit my teeth, trying to endure another day or week in order to make it through to the things I like to do.

And this one thing I can speak to definitively:  enduring is simply not the same as happiness.

Goals and Rewards

I have a problem with goals.

Oh, not the setting of them.  I have become quite good at that part of it.  I can whip up a set of goals for a day, a week, or a year within the course of an hour.  I can even come up with a tracking metric.  The problem is that I have a very difficult time maintaining the fire to accomplish those goals over a long period of time.

I guess the thing I always believed about goals was there was a linear progression: set goal, accomplish goal, get reward, move on.  What I have found is that the end points of goals, even if clearly defined, often hardly amount to a single actual output at all.  Work tasks completed simply mean there are other tasks to be completed, not that there are riches or rewards at the end of it.  And often personal accomplishments are the same:  the books I complete, while being a significant investment of time and energy, hardly result in the influencing of almost anyone or acting as a ticket out of what I do know.

Is it that I define the goal ineffectively?  Or is it that I do not tie it specifically to a reward?

This is the why and result question:  why am I doing what I am doing?  And what do I expect to get out of it - not just the finishing of another task, but the actual outcome:  an item?  A certificate?  A promotion?  Or something checked off on my list to my larger goals?

This is where a "visual inspiration" page in a planner would be useful with pictures of what one is actually working towards or what one wants to achieve?  If I want to live at The Ranch, why is there not a picture there?  If I want a new katana or naginata, where is that picture - and where is my commitment to buy it once I complete that goal?

Because I think this is the part I am missing.  If I could tie my successes to accomplishing my goals - not just the intellectual exercise but the actual physical or emotional accomplishments of those goals - I suspect my incentive to achieve would not be an issue.

In fact, I think I would be about goals and accomplishing things all the time.

The Inflection Point At Work

There is a point at every job I have been at when something turns.

It is not time based.  It is certainly nothing that you receive a shirt for - and quite likely, it may very well be something that is never spoken of.

It starts as a sense.  You suddenly get the sense that you are involved in more and more meetings.  And then you realize that almost every moment of your day is consumed with one task or another.  The work keeps stacking up, more and more items that need your attention but are getting pushed off because you have something else you need to be doing at the time.

It is always at this moment that the change occurs.

I have contemplated about this for a while.  The only thing I can come up with is the that when this point is reached it is a sign that actions which should have been taken - say, an advance in levels or additional resources - have no intention of being taken.  In other words, the company has no more investment in you as a future growing resource but only in a resource that is good for doing more until such time as you no longer become necessary.

There are two choices when this point is reached.  The first is simply to accept that this is the way things are and to hope that more effort will result in a final recognition of your effort and the need.  The second is to accept that your time where you are is over:  any chance of moving forward in level or resources will only occur somewhere else where you have not be pigeon holed into the role you currently role.

Let us simply say that the first choice seldom works out.

The Day of Trivialities

Yesterday was not a good day.

Oh, it was not a terrible day by any stretch of the imagination.  Nothing truly bad happened.  A crack did not open up in the earth and swallow me.  No flat tires.  I still have a job.  No one died.  But it was a very dispiriting day none the less.

Why?  Because it was a day of triviality.

It was a day like so many that I spent in the past in my career.  A day where I spent time doing things I have done for the past 14 years:  pushing documents through the system.  Preparing presentations for visitors.  Following up on required paperwork that no-one really seems to care about and feels perfectly okay to ignore.  In other words, a day realizing that my career has not progressed one iota in a very long time.

This is the most dispiriting of all - to realize that one's career has simply become a never ending cycle of small tasks that repeat themselves without the possibility of escaping them and moving forward, a sort of horrible career reincarnation where one never really moves beyond what one is doing.

The options are minimal and somewhat grim.  The concept of moving up where one currently works is simply a non-starter at this point - after all, why would anyone promote someone who is doing the items that need doing?  Trying to find a new position - a promotion ideally - at a new company is another option, although it creates its own set of issues in terms of family and moving.  A new career - as we have discussed before - brings with it its own set of issues, the first of which is merely starting over again at the bottom when one cannot really afford to do so.

The part that is frustrating - the part that is the most debilitating - is the horrible sense that nothing is going to change.  14 years of doing the same thing is enough to make that plain. And the realization that even in the doing of these things the inherent triviality that exists - that most of what is worked on will simply slip into the dustbin of history without a second thought, that the critical items of today are really nothing more than the failed and outmoded projects of yesterday - does nothing to promote a sense that somehow, somewhere, what I am doing is for the better.

But today is another day.  Another day that I will get up and head out and do my thing - and perhaps somewhere harbor the hope that today, somehow or somewhere, something about it will be different.  Different enough to make me believe that careers really do move forward instead of just remaining the same.

Rain

We had rain last night.

Large amounts of rain, pouring from the sky.  The sort of rain that one wishes we had all the time - not the immediate downpour which is here and then gone five minutes later but the longer rain that lasts all night (it will still spitting rain when I went outside at 0530 this morning.

We got the full show as well - wind, thunder, lightning, heavy rain and light rain - as we went through the evening.  And it was pretty consistently spread out as well - thunder was still passing through at 0400 this morning during one of my intermediate dozes through the night.

The final total was about 3.5 inches.  That is a stunning amount to me for rain that comes in an approximately 12 hour period.  Where I come from we measure it in inches over a day to two days, not in multiple inches in hours.  And it is badly needed where we are right now - the cracks have started to appear in my yard where grass is not covering them and we find ourselves already in watering restrictions (unheard of in May when we are supposedly coming out of one rainy season.

The most remarkable thing to me is that the rain here is not nearly as cold as it is where I come from (seeing as how the rain comes in summer) and so sitting out on the porch watching the rain can actually be an event.  I sat outside for a while last night as the rain poured down, watching the sheets pass along the street as the sky lit up with lightning and the trees danced.

This morning, of course, it is hard to tell we had that much rain:  the sidewalk is damp but not that damp with only receptacles able to demonstrate that a storm of such magnitude washed through last night.  And my memory, of course.

It is always good to take a moment to rejoice in the simple things that God provides through nature.

Monday Morning

There is little so disabling as a Monday morning.
For me it begins the night before as that general feeling of "Sigh" creeps over me.  The nights are not better - on Friday night I could sleep through a hurricane, on Sunday night I wake three or four times until at last I leave the bed to keep from waking others up and lie on the couch tossing and turning until it is close to the time that I think I should actually be up and about.

It is clear, is it not?  The disabling sensation, the tossing and turning is directly tied to what I have to do right after it: my job.

The lack of sleep does not help my perspective on things, to be sure.  It is easier to be enthusiastic about something when one is well rested but how does one become well rested when one's life keeps pushing into one's sleep patterns.

I will get through the thing of course - I have to.  I will suit up here in a few moments, drive to work, and submerge myself in the needs of what has become my career.  I will probably have a few good moments and a number of items I need to work on as I go through my day.

But there, in the back of my head, the countdown to Friday has already begun.  And with it, the ability to sleep through the night once again.

Bored

I am bored.

This thought suddenly crashed into my head at about 1430 yesterday as I was paging through something to review at work.  It is a type of document that I have been reviewing for almost five years at my current place of employment.  And in a flash I realized that I was bored with it.

And with most of what I do constantly.  Every day it has become the same round of tasks to do and arguments to have.  Documents which need my signature, items which need my review, things which I need to accomplish - all have become the same in my mind.  Literally, I have nothing to look forward to any more.

It explains quite a bit if I stop and think about it.  No wonder I have found myself on the downward trend of enthusiasm and energy.  It is exceptionally hard when every day becomes like every other with no hope of anything changing or becoming different.  Are there new things coming on line?  Possibly.  Do I believe that they will in any way change the content of my work or the shape of my day?  Not at all.

What do I do with this thought?  I am not sure.  Certainly this is the first time - perhaps ever in my work life - that I have consciously realized that I am bored. In other areas of life, when one is bored one begins to find things to do to become not bored.  Not as easy in a job where change comes slowly and there are a certain level of expectation of the tasks that need to be accomplished.

But one thing is certain:  getting better at the mundane and boring does nothing to advance one's career or fulfill one's life.  It only ensures that one is better and skilled at doing boring things.

And that is no path to success.

Faux Rain

Clouds belie the rain,bringing only the faux rain
of humidity.

Out of Control

Feeling a little out of control of events this morning.

My life seems more and more caught up by events that are completely outside of my control.  I am caught in the vortex of decision which are beyond my ability to make - but which impact me a great deal.  It is in more than one area, which makes the whole thing a little more disconcerting to me.  Bottom line:  it feels like I control the fringes of my life.  I seemingly have no control over the center.

What bothers one, of course, is that one wants to actually take charge of the situation and make those direct changes which can make impact.  But it feels like one cannot, of course:  we are tied by a thousand tiny threads, any one of which we could break but a thousand of which tie us to the ground.

Is this it?  That is what the inner core of me cries out at moments like this.  I feel so trapped, so ineffective, so much a product of an industrial age to which I am merely a cog in several other wheels.

Dangerous, of course.  These are the moments where bad decisions are made, where disgust and anger rise up in a torrential wave leading one to say and do things which one will later regret - viscerally satisfying at the moment of course, but eventually leading nowhere.

But even as the blood cools (or perhaps just accepts that this is way things are) one is left with a single question:  is this all I can really expect from the rest of my life?

Planners

So I have been struggling with a planner format.

I like the concept of a daily planner.  I like the concept of writing down tasks so you do not lose track of them, of having your goals available to you every day, of having a single place to record ideas and quotes just random things that come into your head.  The problem, of course, is doing it in such a way that it is actual useful for you.

I have tried various versions of the "Non-Planner Planner" for the past 8 years or so - more of a large journal than a planner where I would write down some of the various sections noted above and include daily or weekly entries with tasks.  The problem was it worked really well for some things - like a place to keep goals and quotes and ideas - but it worked really badly for daily tasks.  I do not quite understand what it was, only that I found that the writing down and marking off of tasks became such a chore that in the end I would not do it at all and ended up with empty pages at the end of the year (empty pages make me sad).

This year I tried something different:  I got a simple notebook to write down things like quotes and goals and a simple calendar planner to write down tasks.  This too has proved disappointing:  my tasks do not get written into the calendar and I still end up with empty pages.  My compromise at this point is to start writing down some daily tasks in the notebook and write down events in the calendar.  I am still not happy with this compromise either, as I am carrying around two books where I need one and my ability to write down and execute tasks is still pretty minimal.

Or am I looking in the wrong place?  Is my ability to create and execute tasks that is the issue and not so much how I record them?  Surely I am not dependent on owning a particular type of book to record tasks but on the ability to write and execute them - for some people, post-it notes are enough.

But I like some kind of planner.  I like having them from years past, able to look back and see what I accomplished and wrote and (indirectly) what I was thinking for the year.  It is a unique historical perspective of years gone by.

So where do I come down?  We will see with trying to enter daily tasks - and executing.  Perhaps my failure is truly not the vehicle I have chosen but how I am driving it.

A Simple Phrase

We badly underestimate the power of a simple phrase.

It happened to me again the weekend at a Highland Games.  I turned in my usual performance i.e. relatively consistent for me but vastly behind the performance of everyone else.  I do not throw for competitiveness except against myself, but I am sure that to those watching it is something of a mystery why I am throwing with everyone else on the field.

Near the end of the day on of my fellow competitors - A guy whose athletic abilities are super good now and with practice will only get a lot better - says, kind of out of the blue, "You are one of my favorite competitors out here."

Boy, that will sure make a guy's day.  In fact, that will pretty much make a guy's week.

9 simple words.  They did not cost him anything to say - other than the sincerity that he had behind them when he said them.  But they were worth a million dollars to me - not just then, but all the way on the 3 hour drive home and then throughout the day yesterday as well.  And, I am pretty sure, throughout this week as well.

We badly underestimate the power of a simple phrase.  The more important question is, what are we going to do about it?

Book Number 5

I passed a milestone Monday that I failed to account for:  my fifth book is now published!

I am pretty excited, as much for the content as for other factors as well:
- This book was started on 01 November 2013 and published on 27 April 2014, a period of 6 months, which is almost a record for me (I conceivably could have done it in less time but I published another book in the mean time).
- It was by far one of the smoothest books I have written in terms of flow, although it hardly ended up where I expected it too.
- I already have sold some books! (Yay profit!)

It is the sort of thing that encourages one to write again.  All efforts should be like this.

And there are more efforts, of course.  One time I tried to explain to someone what it was like to write and have other ideas floating around in one's head:  "It is having a number of people in your head trying to talk to you as you say 'Wait, wait - I will get to you as soon as I can.'".  They are there in the back of my head, clamoring to get out.

And they seem to keep multiplying.  I have gone from the book I intended to write for Nanowrimo 2013 (which will go to Nanowrimo 2014 - but this time I will prepare) to that book plus a second one on Christianity to that one plus the one on Christianity to another one that popped into my head last week ("Hi, I am your new book that needs to be written.  You were not doing anything important, were you?").

I enjoy writing so much and find it an incredibly rewarding effort.  If only I could figure out a way to make a living at it.

Opportunity versus Motivation

I got one of those fairly rare offers in that comes only a few times in a career:  the chance to reinvent everything.

With Hammer Fall II, my manager (among others) has left.  His fingerprints - and that of his predecessor - are all over the system under which I have had to work for the last five years.  Two layers of excessive bureaucracy for the sake of an opinion of how things should be done does not lead to a highly effective system.  After a while of battling the opinions one simply becomes quietly numb and tries to figure out the best way to work within the confines of what one has.

But they are gone now, gone with the shifting winds of the industry which seem to engulf us all at some point, blowing us on to another destination or place of employment.

And so the suggestion came yesterday - or more of a question really, the question of "What is your vision?  How soon can you provide it?  What would you make the system?"  Heady questions - the sort of thing that can make or break a career.  And yet I find myself struggling.

Why?  Because I have been so long in a system where incompetence and overbearing authority seems to be rewarded and all things must have the imprimatur of the person above you that the thought of being able to actually effect change seems to have become quiescent within me - indeed not only quiescent, but almost a thing which cannot be resurrected.

This is remarkable if I sit and think about it for a moment.  My personal life over the last few years - indeed, over the last weekend - has definitively demonstrated that with effort and practice and dedication anything is possible.  I know this to be true.  I have seen it work now time and time again in my own life.  Yet presented with the same sort of opportunity, I merely sigh and try to generate some level of motivation.

It is belief, of course - belief that something like that can be definitively changed and that my efforts can actually pay off.  That is the core of my reluctance to attack the problem.

How does one overcome such a barrier?

Numbers

So I follow my views of this blog.
Seems kind of silly, does it not?  After all, there is no financial benefit for me from this blog and it is not as if as if the Meteor of Success has suddenly fallen on my head as a result of someone reading this and saying "Good Heavens, we need you writing right now!"  Still, it is a form of vanity that the purveyors make far too easy:  with the click of a button on the side, you can see daily, weekly, monthly, and forever listings.

As I wrote in December, I finally passed the 33,000 view mark.  Not too shabby, I thought to myself - after all, that was after 5 years of writing (more or less). And if I look today it is at 34,614, almost a 5% increase in 4 months.  April was my second highest month ever in terms of views.

And then I start getting visions of grandeur that I probably should not have:  what would happen if I got 2,000 views a month?  3,000?  What if got so focused on driving people to the site that I was getting as many views in a year as I got in the last 7? What if?

Except I know part of the reality.  Many of my "views" are really spammers just seeing that if they can find a way to post something in the comments section (surprisingly, I am popular in Russia.  No idea why). Another large chunk is actual a small group of people known to me (family and friends) that come here to see what my latest concerns or issues of the day are.  A third group (no idea who you are, but welcome!) are those new folks drifting around or through, either directed here by the kindness of people like PioneerPreppy or the faceless Google search because some word caught the search engine's fancy.

The worst part about becoming concerned about numbers?  It makes the writing all about the numbers, how many people can I drive to the site and how many can convert to do (fill in the blank).  That was never the point of this when I started it.  It was much more an exercise in writing what I wanted to write.  The people reading it were just the extra nice part.  

The secret, of course, is just to stop looking at the numbers at all.

So welcome if you are new here.  Feel free to kick the tires and try the car door locks. You will find we lead a pretty simple life here: No social trends.  No politics.   Some religion as it relates to my own struggles.  Lots of thoughts about how I deal with life as it comes and my struggles to become a better person.

We are happy to have you.  And please believe me when I say that you are never, ever  a number.

Remaining Goals

Time to pick up on the rest of my goals.

Of the eight I listed this year, three of them are now officially completed and one of them is either going to be completed this Saturday or will have to wait until Autumn (new PR for Braemar Stone).  That leaves four for the year, one of which - testing for a level in Japanese - happens in December.  So really I effectively only have three that need invention and action (the Japanese, of course, is pretty straightforward:  study, study, study).  What are the remaining ones?  Financial and career, of course. The ones it is always the most difficult to succeed at.

Why?  I suppose it is because at some level both of these are out of my control  - financial less so of course, but it is bounded by the fact that we live in a household of growing girls where expenses happen as well as the general living of life.  Career, as I have written about earlier, is ultimately out of my control - I can do a great many things but still not make any headway.

Yet these two areas have the greatest impact on my life right now.

Personal goals?  I have achieved them and then some this year.  That has never been a problem for me.  I am fortunate in that I have many and they stretch me in ways that keep my life interesting and entertaining.  No, it is these two areas that I struggle with so much.

But the struggle cannot be all bad.  Within each of these is the power to greatly enhance my day to day existence, if I can only master them.  Imagine a life with a job that I really love, not just a job I have to tolerate.  What would that do for my mood?  What would that do for my energy?  What would that do for my sleep (yes, we have reached the point that it is affecting that as well)?

Here is thing I need to fix on.  I have accomplished the other things. I  have made remarkable progress in personal areas of my life.  The question is this:  how do I translate these into the more difficult things that are not fully in my control?

Kesa no giri

Breathe in, commit, draw.The hamon slides out, flashing;
straw wara slides down

Passing Last Days

And so another round of transition comes to a close as the wave of Hammer Fall II prepares for their last day.

It is an odd thing, this unwilling but conscious leaving by some - and the fall out from that decision.  Within the week the composition of my workplace will be significantly altered.  Within a week, the group that I enjoy lunch with will be changed once again.

One would think I would get used to this - after all, we are rapidly approaching my five year anniversary here.  I have seen plenty of people come and go in my time, the composition of the workplace ebb and flow.  Individuals one works and eats and laughs with go from coworkers to acquaintances seen occasionally while in the workplace fewer and fewer who know them still work there; stories move to legends and individuals move into the workplace pantheon, forms and caricatures of the totality of their experience who would not be recognized as such if they were met in the street.

It saddens me because I see friends I have made over the years leaving, friends that have made the work environment a better place to be.  Others will come of course and there will be new legends and new stories but things always seem a little dimmer to me when those that I came in or have worked with for a long time depart.  It is not just a coworker that departs; it is part of a life and a lifestyle that is leaving as well.

Next week will come of course and the workplace will move on as it always has.  I will probably take a moment to walk by the cubes where my coworkers used to sit and look at the places that we had good conversations.  As I get coffee in the lunch room I will listen for the ghostly laughter shared over food.

And then, sighing and squaring my shoulders, I will take my memories and head back to my desk.

Finally Writing Goals

So this week I finally managed to put some 2014 goals to paper.

Yes, I know it is April.

What surprised me was my supreme reluctance to undertake this task. It is a little surprising - even to me.  It is not as if I did not spend time working on these at the end of the 2013 with my usual process of dividing and subdividing.  It is not as if I did not draft them and have the available for final approval.  I just could not bring myself to do them.

I came up with excuses of course.  At first my excuse was that I did not have a planner/book for 2014 (I changed formats this year).  But then I got one.  Then my excuse became "Well, I am not really sure that these are my goals" - but I made no forward movement in actually writing them down.  Then my excuse became "I am not sure that these are really the goals that I should be striving for - I need to have less, more focused goals."  And so on.  You get the idea.

But on Monday night I finally made myself write them down.

The odd thing to me was that as soon as I wrote them down I found that I could (or was close to) crossing almost half of them off already.  In April.  That has almost never happened.  That should have made me happy, correct?  It did not really - instead I sat looking at the ones that were remaining.

Of the eight listed, six of them are completely within my control to accomplish.  They are everything a goal should be:  specific, time bound, concise, clear.  The problem is the two that are neither of these yet are the most important: the most important of these is find a new job/career.

Why did I sigh?  Bogha Frois said it concisely to me more clearly than I could have said it to myself:  because it ultimately out of your control.  I could work and study and search and find, only to find myself at the point that this is not something I can achieve.

It bothers me even as I think about it now.  I have eight goals listed, four of which I am super close to having achieved.  Why is it I cannot look at those accomplishments and instead focus only on that which I have not done?

Nighean Gheal

Fifteen years are gone:
You  mature so beautifully,
I am quite humbled.

Reality

Our innermost souls,
suddenly pierced by events
seek that which matters.

Control

I have an issue with things I cannot control - more specifically, I have an issue with compensating for the things that I cannot control.

There are a great many things I feel that I have no control over in my life.  In fact, these things seem to fill my day every day.  Events I cannot control, things I cannot make happen, tasks that I cannot turn aside from - every day and every week, a life full of that which is not controllable.

My solution?  To find those things that I can control in my life - and do those.

The issue, of course is that generally such things are not good for one.  They run from the fairly benign (shredding my nails in frustration) to the not really good for me (binging).  They have consequences of course, consequences that I cannot avoid - but I do them anyway.

Why?  Because they are the things that I can control.  They are the things that I can choose or not choose to do (and generally they fall into the "choose category for me) because they are the things that I have power over.   I cannot turn away the task at work that is useless but no-one else will do it.  I can choose to eat or not eat a sugar laden snack.

I am not sure how to remedy this.  The easy answer is "find ways to take more control of more things in your life" - but that seems about as useful telling a penguin to fly:  without the ability to do so the thing becomes impossible.  Yet exerting control in these small things does not do anything for me either - the behaviors are at best not good for me and they do not really solve my underlying problem.

What I want to say the solution is is to find those things that I can control even in the uncontrollable situations and build on those.  I think that is the correct answer - but it does not feel like it resolves anything.  How do I find a sense of moving forward in the midst of small tasks in the midst of larger items?

A thought to ponder for the day:  Are all situations truly beyond my control?  Or is just some?  And if some, why or why not?

Burying The Dead

I need to bury the dead.

I realized it yesterday when I was having a conversation with some fellow coworkers about my former boss, who was caught in Hammer Fall II.  As we got to talking, we moved from the foibles that all boss (including myself) seem to have to a certain level of bitterness which was evident to the point that one of coworkers made the comment "I detect a note of satisfaction in your speech."  I thought for a moment and said that after getting the bus run over head enough times and being undercut it was difficult not to be too upset.

And then I realized I had to let him go.

I have conflicted feelings about him.  He was not a bad person, especially outside of work.  Certainly he only wanted to do what was right and best for the company.  And yet of all the managers I have had, his was the most fractious and least productive relationship I have had.  Of all my managers, his is the only example I can think of for what not to be like.  And even though I should not, I still let the bitterness from various incidents and comments in my review live in my brain:  Advancement may have been delayed, perhaps now  made unattainable, because of the fact that (at least from his perspective) he based as much of his response to me on the fact that I did not humbly acquiesce to his will without question.  I may never be able to resolve all of the issues that his decisions or lack of will have left behind.

But I need to let go.  For better or worse, he is gone never to return while I carry my anger and bitterness and rage with me as if he were still present and I had another staff meeting coming up.  Really I should be working on forgiveness - right now I would just settle for a tamping down of the virulence in my soul.

Why?  Because now I have tied myself to him - or rather, to his memory.  It is as if took the corpse to a grave and laid it there, buried it, and then continued to walk around as if I still had it on my back.  Once the dead are buried, it makes no sense to continue to act as if they are still alive, nor to carry their weight.  The stream of time has moved on; it is only I that continue to keep myself in that place.

"De mortuis nihil non est nisi bonum" - Speak nothing but good of the dead, said the Romans.

Or perhaps, better not to speak of some dead at all.

Job Change and Excuses III

So we have established that the thought of a job change is heavy on my mind.  We have also established the fact that the true reason I do not seem to want to do it is not for lesser reasons that can be resolved but that I have an image in my mind of how I view myself - a beggar pleading for a career rather than someone confidently making a career and being a valued resource.

How does one find this confidence?

It is not as if this is an unsolvable problem.  I have plenty of friends I know that have done this:  Miss C with her art or Himself with Real Estate or friends that have gone on to consulting jobs in companies they have founded.  People I know have done this - why cannot I visualize the much less difficult task of simply confidently looking for a new job?

Is it the system?  Sure, the job search system as it currently exists does not help.  One becomes a faceless number submitting a form - and even if one is fortunate enough to land an interview, one finds more often that not that a follow up is never given - more often than not, unless you get the position you never know that you did not get the position.

And there is always a high sense of competition in the interview process - not just that you are trying to do well but that you are competing with others not just on experience, but on price and your location.  To me it really does feel like you are are in a competition.  And if an competition long enough without results, you begin to suffer doubt.

So how does one overcome this?  Some thoughts:

1)  Remember:  Remember what you have done in which you have been successful.  For me, I have that string of things in recent history - Iaijutsu, Heavy Athletics- things where I have succeeded in learn to do something and accomplishing something.  If I have done it once, I can repeat the experience.

2)  Support:  Part of any successful effort is the people that one surrounds themselves with.  I am fortunate in that I have found activities where such support is readily found - Highland Athletes are by far the most supportive group I have met in a long time and my iaijutsu training partners give me confidence in areas where I feel week.  But I realize now it is just not enough to surround yourself with them - you need to engage their active support as well.  The reality is that most people are willing to be quite supportive but they can only so when they know there is a need.  Do not be afraid to ask.

3)  Fix:  Fix those things you can control.  If there is a skill to learn, learn it - now more than any other time in history the knowledge is available and the concept of self taught is not something that puts people off.'

4)  Be confident:  This is the hardest thing of all for me - but the most important.  If I do not believe in myself, no one can really believe in me either.  There is an aura of one that is self confident that is hard to define but easy to recognize, a sense of "I can do this - and if I cannot do it here, I will do it somewhere else.   My value rests with me, not with your opinion of me."  Believing this turns the most cringing of individuals into the most confident of interviewees or one who can face an uncertain future with the confidence that they can make their way through it.

The reality is that what I feel is not forced on me by anyone else.  I am saddling myself with it.  But if I put it on myself, then I have the power to take it off again.

Job Change And Excuses II

Why do I make excuses for why I cannot - or will not - look for a new career?  This is the outcome of my pondering on yesterday's consideration and going through the process of living through my day at work.

What are my excuses?

- Money, of course.  As Pioneer Preppy pointed out so well yesterday, money is a huge consideration.  The thought of disrupting the money flow is a terrifying thought at the best of times, and as The Firm proved, making a bad decision about money can haunt you for years after the decision both financially and personally.

- Experience.  I argue with myself that I have "invested" 16 plus years in my current line of work and starting from the bottom again will just be an exercise in futility that I do not want to undertake for a second time.

- Difficulty.  Yes, it is hard to find a new career field.  Lots of searching, lots of applying, lots of rejections.

But in writing them out, those are pretty tame excuses considering my rising level of unhappiness.  Not enough money?  Find a way to make more.  Not enough experience?  Be creative - how does your current experience level translate into other areas - or simply learn new skills.  Difficulty?  Sure, it is difficult - but lots of things that I have done in my life are difficult.  What is my point?

The last is the most telling to me.  Difficult.  But I have done many difficult things - I have sung in front of people, performed on the harp, created and written four books, wrote 50,000 words in 30 days, learned a sword art form, and competed in Highland Athletics.  Any one of those things could be considered difficult - yet I have done them all.

It comes down to self belief.

I do not believe that I can do this thing.  That is what it is.  I do not have the internally energizing belief that I can find a new line of work - or even create one for myself.  Always in the back of my mind I see myself as the one with my hand out, begging for a job rather than being desired for one.

How did I end up with such an image in my head?  Years of the job process I suppose, always applying for multiple jobs while hoping against hope that someone will say yes, that someone will beneficently agree that you are the one.  But in every other example I listed there was no deus ex machina which made it happen. Yes, I have had more help in each of those things than I could have ever dreamed off.   But that help would not have made a difference - indeed, would not have been offered - unless I made the effort to do the activity, and believed that I could.

So there is the key - changing my image from a beggar pleading for a career to someone confidently making a career and being a valued resource.

How does one make this happen?

Job Change and Excuses

The thought of changing jobs keeps haunting my mind.

It occurred again last night when I was tying up the final edits of my next manuscript, waiting for it to upload to CreateSpace.  I reminded myself again how much I really enjoy writing (no idea if I am any good at it, but I sure do enjoy it). And then I started going through my list of things that I want to be about this year:  two more books, more Highland Games, more God, more Japanese, more Iaijutsu, more gardening and cheese making and mead making, more family.

You will notice what is missing from that list of course.  My current employment.

I keep trying to nudge myself that way subconsciously - and then I keep beating myself back, convincing myself that such a thing is impossible.  As if my most recent manuscript was not about self imposed limitations (which it is).  Just like I thought that Highland Athletics were impossible - until they were not.  And writing was - until it was not.

It comes down to that self confidence thing that has bedeviled me for year.  A man without self confidence will not do many things if even he can.  The man with self confidence will do many things even if he does not know how at the moment.

And a priority.  I need to make it priority. Yes, I know that I love to do these things and yes, I know that career changes are never much fun, but what I am finding is that I am subconsciously burying this desire to move on by not making any attempt to change anything.  "It's not the right time"  I tell myself, "I do not know where to begin."  Silly when I type it out of course, because there really is no better time than right now to start anything.

It comes down to this:  if you do not love what you do, why are you doing it?  Or more precisely, what excuses are you giving as to why you cannot change?

Running in Weather

Looking out the door to run this morning I had my usual second thoughts.  It was hot and humid, hardly the sort of weather that I enjoy running in - coming back soaked in a shirt is not something that I do not really enjoy.  Still, running is running, so I compromised, took off my shirt, and headed out.

The air was warm and a bit sticky but with an underlying hint of cold in it.  I rounded my first corner and then my second.  The wind was blowing briskly but nothing to significant. It was a pretty good day for a run.

Right until the cold front hit.

I have been inside when cold fronts hit.  The wind is amazing - in one case, it sounded like a freight train hit the house.

But being outside is something else.

Suddenly as I turned the corner and headed North I was hit by a huge blast of wind that just blew and blew and blew.  The humidity of earlier was blown away in an instant, replaced by sprinkles of rain.  It was significant enough that I thought about ending my run earlier and going home but thought "Hey, it is only another mile.  How bad can it be?"

The rain started about a quarter mile later.  And not "Oooh, I hear laughter in rain" rain.  Large, heavy, driving drops that spoke more of the cold weather behind than us in winter than the spring we are supposed to be in.  And it just kept coming and coming and coming, until when rounding the final corner it finally let up.

My time was not too bad for a 5K: 25:10.  The temperature dropped 11 degrees during the course of that run.  The most ironic thing, of course, is that I came home soaking wet - without a t-shirt.

Maybe, on the whole, the T-shirt really does not make the difference.

On The Cutting Of Anchors

One of the activities I do five days a week is post a quote on Facebook.  I do not know that one can say that posting a quote on something is a "calling", but I like to believe that I am improving the lives of my friends by giving them something to start the day with.  Sometimes (at least to me) thought provoking, sometimes humorous, it has actually become a game to find them and post them.  You get responses of course:  some funny, some with additional words of wisdom, some just "agree" or some such.

Yesterday something happened which has happened before:  I received a response from someone that was...sarcastic.  Political.  And not, in my way of thinking, all that funny.

I was conflicted.  Part of me wanted to respond with an equivalent drive-by remark.  Part of me did not want to respond at all, as I have learned that arguing on Facebook or in any electronic media leads nowhere.  And part of me simply wanted to delete the comment altogether without addressing it, a sort of passive-aggressive response.

I started thinking about it more and realized that the only time this individual seems to respond is with some sort of sarcastic or internally funny comment. Not that this is any indication of the individual, of course:  good human being, very caring, has lots going on and has done lots for others.  It is just that the interactions we seem to have via electronic media always end up in this sort of intellectual cul-de-sac where nothing can be discussed.

And then I realized:  why am I continuing to allow this incident and this person to bother me?

The reality is that,  especially since the move, my life is filled with tons of wonderful people.  Supportive people, goal oriented people, people who are focused on not only making themselves better but making everyone else around them better.  People that are moving forward, not people that seemingly snip at every turn.

And then the thought came:  Why are you letting them hold you back?

Is it habit?  Is it comfort?  Is it holding on to something that passed a long time ago because I am unwilling to realize that I am someone different than what I was and I have found people that fit into that new situation?  Or simply the potential regret of cutting back on long time relationships that no longer fill a gap?

I am not sure.  What I do know is after thinking about it for a while, I instead let my mind be filled with all of those people who are part of my life, who do enlarge my borders and my make days brighter.  There are so many of them in all different walks of my life.  And my heart was much happier.

I am still holding the rope to that particular anchor in my hand as I face another morning.  I am undecided about what I will eventually do - but I do know this:  without releasing the anchor, one cannot sail on.

On Deciding in Writing

I am almost through my backlog of books I am working on.

Just getting to this point is always a struggle for me.  I tend to be one that likes to get to a certain point and then immediately move on to the next project, leaving this one almost finished.  I have had to set aside the manuscript I was working on to finish proofing the one that I had just finished (editing - not my favorite thing).    But that is almost done now and I can move to editing/proofing the manuscript in my possession (the goal is that I finish with that by the end of April).

And then what?

Well, I have one or two projects of course (I always seem to have more than I can do):  one more fable and one more theological book (comparing Highland Athletics and what the Church is supposed to be - I kind of like the concept). As with the rest of my writing, these could potentially be done by the end of the year depending on how quickly I write (I am trying to set aside some time on regular basis for that now to make sure that I start consistently doing it).

And then what?

A splendid question and one I do not know I fully have an answer to yet.  I have one or two conceptual ideas but at least one of them is something that I have never written before:  fiction.  Real fiction, not the sort of fable that I have written heretofore.  I find that a little daunting, actually - it feels like I would be writing something which is totally beyond my abilities (if you have read good fiction, you know how rare it is).  And yet I suppose I should not - 5 years ago I did not believe that I could write anything at all and I have self published 3 books with two more on the way.

So maybe the question is not so much what I will be writing next, but if I am willing to step things up to the next level to do so.  After all, I love writing - a great deal.  Why would I not try to get better at it?

A Change In Doing

I have been giving a great deal of consideration this week to what I should be doing next.

Oh, not the rest of my life.  That is going pretty swimmingly, thank you very much - I have more than enough activities that I enjoy to do, An Teaghlach is doing well, and there is really not a great deal to complain about, except that I never seem to have enough time to do things.

Which leads me back to my employment.

This week has been a little rough - not so much from the work side but from the personality side of work.  Add to that the fact that by staying late it actually means that the commute is less (but my time is more) and you begin to see the difficulty.  It is that sudden realization (or maybe gradually revealing realization) that things really are not going in the direction one would be hoping for and they are not likely to change any time soon.

But what next?  Therein lies the rub.

I have come up with a few items.  I do not really care to manage people again - I do not mind it, but I find my management style to be primus inter pares, not a hierarchy (which most places are).  I would prefer not to spend scads of time driving to and from somewhere - in fact, the less I am in the office facing people the more productive I seem to be.  And with the exception of a few particular experiences I have exceeded my limit on learning new things - instead I will be doing the same things over and over if I stay in my current line of work.

But what does that mean?  It means that the solution will not be easy because finding something that has those elements is not easy.  It probably means figuring out a way to do something outside of the box, something which I excel at in my personal life but not so much in my professional life.

But I can do it.  That is the thing.  My personal life is a series of events where I have figured out ways to string things together and make them work when there is no real reason to do so.  I have grown gardens in the worst of locations, made cheese and sometimes even recovered it, figured out how to recover initially bad batches of mead.

It is not that I cannot, it is merely that I have not applied the same sort of innovation to the other parts of my life.

But guess what?  I need to figure this out too.  Because coming home feeling defeated and small and trapped is no way to go through life.

Fire

I need to find fire.

No, not the fire as we typically know it, the sort that we warm our toes by or roast marshmallows by or young boys are incredibly drawn to try and make.  I am referring to the fire within the soul, the fire that drives us on.

I have found that I am lacking in the fire lately - and it shows.  It shows in the activities I do and how I do them - not that I am powerfully driven to do them, but rather that I just go through the motions.  This works itself out in the fact that my performance tends to level off and I am somewhat slow and sedate (or lazy, depending on what you want to call it) in execution.

Is it the competitive spirit?  Maybe - although I have never been a huge competitor.  I trace this mostly to the fact that I have never really been so good at a thing to be in a competitive mode. I am always "second best" - not bad in a world that needs second violins as much as first violins mind you, but hardly the sort of thing that will drive someone on to do better.

Perhaps it is finding that goal, to be driven on to achieve that goal.  But what does that goal look like?  Most of the things I do hardly result in the sort of thing that a man can handle or hold in his hands or put up on his wall.  They are the invisible markers of the soul that exist only in the mind.  But even if invisible, there is still that fire that needs to be there.

And is it finding or stoking?  Perhaps I am looking at the wrong factor.  The fire may certainly be there but what I am doing to make it hotter, brighter, more engulfing?  Is it that I cannot build up enthusiasm, or that I fear building up enthusiasm because I fear that I will inevitably fail and reveal my failure to others?

I need to know.  As Brian Tracy says, there's only one way to coast - and balloons will only rise with the hot air of fire, not the cooler air of settling expectations.

Caber

Rough under fingers,
rising up in grainy bliss,
breaker of spirits.

Gone

Ash drifts from my hands,
bearing the dreams that failed
into the night wind.

An Appearing Sadness

After yesterday's strong post today is a letdown:  I feel completely sad and defeated.

I have no idea where this feeling came from.  It was there when I woke up - in fact, I woke up feeling that way from a dream I had.  But then I got up and there it still was.  Prayed - could not shake it.  Read my morning Bible verses - could not shake it.  And so there I sat, my morning routine completely shattered by a feeling I did not understand and could not shake.

I hate it when this happens. 

Ideally I would like to be able to track this back to something - some event, some comment, some thing - that I can analyze, look at, and say "Okay, this is coming from that.  I just need to resolve this/let this go/do something different and shake the feeling."  But that is not happening apparently - instead, I am stewing in the juices of a sadness which I cannot remove from my soul.

The rest of day is looming before me of course and I have not choice but to engage in it.  Everyone else and everything else does not stop just because I am under a cloud.  I will need to pick myself up and carry on about the day.

But even within this I almost feel my eyes tearing up over the thought.   There seems to be something really, really unsettling in my life today.

And I do not seem to understand what it is

Wrong Place and Time

I am in the wrong time and place.

At heart I am a man of romance and heroism, a man of noble deeds and glorious causes (some of them lost).  I long for causes to lose myself in, evil to fight, great deeds of heroism and romance to accomplish. 

Instead I find myself in the role of a bureaucrat, a small man doing small things of little import and little lasting value beyond my stay at the particular place I happen to be.

Not surprisingly this creates a cognitive dissonance in my life.

I know, I know: make the problem statement and then resolve the problem.  Fine.  The problem statement is this:  I feel a calling to something that I simply cannot seem to live.  I want to live in a world of great deeds and heroes and romance.  I do not.

Okay, so how do I fix this?  Surely the world is not going to rearrange its time/space continuum to address my particular need, and my time travel/fabric of space bending powers are simply not what they used to be.  So that is not really going to work for me.

The next option,  I suppose, is to find a way to live in such a way that this is a possibility.  Again, this seems to be a little difficult.  Meetings cannot be resolved by whipping out my katana and battling my way to the door.  Evil bosses and opposing departments (not that they are really evil or opposing, I suppose) cannot be thrust aside against overwhelming odds, nor will throwing down my gauntlet get a document signed.

That leaves one option:  live as if you were this thing.

Live as if you were the thing you seek to be.  If I seek heroism and romance and glory, live as if this was the ordinary way life should be.  Be a hero in the smallest of things.  Be romantic in the largest of ways.  If something does not suggest itself as a quest, make it one. 

And never give up trying to find a way to make your life even more this way.  Because I firmly believe that even in this technologically advanced and seemingly socially disparate age, heroism as a way of life remains possible.  Great deeds of glory and romance are still possible - in fact, we still seem to crave them (look at the entertainment industry and tell me they do not understand this).  Most people just refuse to acknowledge this.

Be different.  Be a person of romance and glory and great deeds.

Be a hero.

The Heart Speaks

What is that, you say?
My heart wishes to speak?
Excellent, dear friend.  It been long
since we have heard from you.

What is that, you say?
Let me think about it:
No no, I think you must be wrong
in the matter.

You speak to me of clouds
and I live on the ground.
You speak to me of wisps
and I live in the rain.

Fine, fine;
I will take your considerations
under advisement.
All advice is welcome.

It just, sometimes,
I find myself troubled
by the suggestions
you give me.

Although I wonder:
Is it because of
expanded fear?
Or contracted vision.