All Knowledge

Sometimes I wish we had access to all the knowledge we needed.

It is difficult working in a vacuum, especially when we know that the decisions we make every day have impacts not just on ourselves, but on those around us and even sometimes those we do not know.  We try to come up with the best actions, of course - but I too often find that my even best actions do not work out the way that I had intended.

"You can chose your actions but you cannot choose the consequences of your actions" is attributed to Ayn Rand and usually in the negative sense of decisions - but it is just as true for the good that we try to do as well.   Our best thoughts sometimes work no better than if we had never planned at all.

Would more knowledge help?  The back of my head tells me that it would.  Somehow, it tries to convince me, if only we knew more, we could make informed choices do things that would incline towards better results.  If only I knew all, I convince myself, I would take the best actions.

That is a fool's notion, of course, because that is predicated on the fact that having all knowledge is the same as knowing the future, which none of us can do.  "Always in motion is the future, difficult to see" said Yoda - and it is true.  We act based on the future we see, only to discover that the actions and decisions of others make the future we thought we saw very different.

Is there a solution?  Not really - except, if possible, to abandon the belief that we need all knowledge to act or decide.  Rather, we need to simply accept that we will do the best with what we have and make do with that.

Precisely when did the speed of life increase?

Once upon a time it felt like life was a slow journey.  School lasted forever, summers perhaps not quite as quickly but for a while.  Activities existed, but there always seemed to be sufficient time to do them as well as the things that had to be done.  Life was, well, fun.

Even later - through college and into the beginning of work - there was still a sense that there was time. There was more to do, but then there was still the time to do things that were fun and important and felt like it something I did because I wanted to for no good reason.

But then life began to pick up speed.

It starts with work.  Work begins to consume more and more of your time and energy.  You like to convince yourself that in fact you are building a career but in fact it just feels like you are working more.  And it is not just time - it is mental energy and emotional energy spent trying to make things work.  Your commute extends but you convince yourself it is not that bad.

If you have children, you have the additional critical mass of their activities as well.  You are helping them to develop in their lives - after all, doing well in school and doing activities is important - but this takes more time too.  Time that comes from somewhere.

And then one day you realize that you are doing almost nothing which you is strictly for you.  Life has become a blur of moving from place to place, rushing from drop off to work to pick up to another activity to home for a quick dinner and perhaps a little time for yourself.  Life has become a speeding car through which you occasionally see the blur of the scenery.

Which brings up this legitimate question:  If you have reached this level of speed, how do you slow it back down?

Apology and A Request

Friends, I beg your forbearance once again.

Life is happening again, in a way that I had not quite anticipated (it seems to be a great deal like that).  I have a decision to make - yes, I know that sounds a little cryptic (and it is meant to at this stage).  It is certainly not a bad thing,  

But it is a thing.  And it needs to be carefully considered.

And so today will be less than my usual (wishfully thoughtful, thought the writer) piece.  I would like to believe an apology, but almost a bit of an excuse I guess.  My apologies.  Hopefully things will begin to clear and I can turn my attention back to thinking tomorrow.

And if you have a prayer or a good thought, I would happily accept that as well.

Ways to Know That A Decision is Probably Not The Right One:

Ways to Know That A Decision is Probably Not The Right One:

1)  Your stomach ties up in a knot whenever you think about one particular outcome.

2)  You start avoiding people or situations that might cause you to have to make the decision.

3)  Your vision becomes narrowed from your complete life to the focus of that decision to the point that you cannot function.

4)  Every conversation somehow involves the decision and potential outcomes.

5)  Your mind actually starts bringing to mind reasons not to make the decision.

6)  By making the decision you will ignore some very common good sense.

7)  You are making the decision for one particular reason, not for a whole series of particular reasons.

8)  People you respect tell you it is not the best outcome.

9)  You have no peace about it.

10)  You actually think that it may not be the right decision.

Technical Difficulties

Today's extremely short memo is brought you by the "My Virtual Memory is completely full" and "My hard drive is really full too".  We'll be talking with our sponsors and get back to you soon...

Change in Perspective

Funny how perspectives can change in an instant.

One phone call, one e-mail, one conversation - and then the entire frame of reference shifts.

I guess it should not surprise me that this is the case - after all, I have been around long enough to know that such things can occur.  Good heavens, such things have actually occurred to me from time to time:  learning you will have a child.  Learning that your job has suddenly disappeared.

I guess where the surprise comes in is that more and more, it happens in the midst of life.  Not when you are expecting it or even when you think of things as being at a crossroads but simply occurring where we are, meandering through daily life.  The perspective changes, and suddenly everything that you have been considering or planning with goes completely to the winds.

In a way I suppose this is good - it means that we are constantly being brought back to what is truly important, not what we think is important.  This is often a problem for me - I let my life become too much about me and my life and what is going on in my head and not the bigger picture of what is going on in the lives of others - sometimes that is as much or more important as what is going on in mine, although I am often unwilling to acknowledge it.

But the one thing that must happen for the change in perspective to really work is that I must acknowledge it for what it is - not a minor interruption or a passing idea but a true change, that turn in the road before and after which nothing is completely the same.  To do anything less is deprive the change of what it is really saying and to then continue to operate in a world that is no longer completely true.

Perspectives can change instantly.  But we are the ones responsible for taking that change and incorporating it into our lives.

Apologies

I am sorry.

I feel I have not serviced the blog the way that I should be doing so.  I can only beg your indulgence from  the reality of daily living.

Life seems to have conspired to completely eat most of my available time.

School and activities seem to have taken over our lives.  Suddenly we have become "Them", those families that always seem to be everywhere else but at home and anywhere else but spending time together as a true family unit.  Instead we find ourselves rushing out the door early to drop one child off and coming home late after picking another child up.  Activities seem to be reduced to the radius of activities which are directly or indirectly done for Na Clann.  Time has become wedged into a small section in the morning and a smaller section at night.

This is not really the life I was hoping for, obviously.

Except.  Except that this is life as it really happens.  Except that life really does consist of the spaces between the things we thought we wanted to accomplish.  Except that every activity done, every volunteering second spent, every game or competition watched, is another item that goes into the memory banks and into the concept of others believing in you.  This stays with you long after the moment of my desire has come and gone.

So forgive me if I seem a little bit distracted and rushed and writing at less than my full capacity.  It is just that my time - and mind - are elsewhere being utilized, hopefully for the greater good.

Last Licks of Summer

Belying cloud cover,
The last "Huzzah" of summer:
hot and humid run.

Decisions

Standing on sword's edge
I look down, as mirror-bright
the blade says "Decide".

Reorganizational Chaos

So one of the most chaotic and disruptive thing any company can do is a reorganization.  I am always surprised by the fact that companies do not understand this.

In my experience and those I know, reorganizations tend to happen in one of two ways.  In the first version, the reorganization is lightning quick.  Everyone shows up and suddenly you are reporting to someone else.  Maybe you know who it is.  Maybe you do not.  And in some cases, the person to whom you are now reporting may know precisely nothing about what it is you actually do.

In the other version, the reorganization is pretty much an open secret.  Everyone knows it is coming, yet for some reason it is delayed  or held back, sometimes for days or weeks.  Not everyone may know where they are going and so a certain concern permeates the air as individuals wait, knowing that something is coming but not know what it will be.

In either of these versions, the results are the same:  Chaos.  Concern.  Often there is no clear reason for why the reorganization is occurring - in some extreme cases, it is announced but the full details of it are not so people know that something is changing even as they have no idea what it is.

People like communication.  They like to understand.  They like to know what is coming - maybe they cannot change it, but at least they can prepare for it.  And people certainly do not like the instability or lack of concern that is demonstrated when these sorts of things occur.  They begin to worry -first about the company's stability, and then most certainly about their own futures.

Why is it then that companies never seem to understand this?

Picking Cabers

One of the surprisingly great things about Highland Athletics is simply what you can learn about yourself in the course of throwing things.

Yesterday, for example, I managed to get three perfect picks on the challenge caber.  I do not believe I have ever had three legitimate picks on any caber that in which I got it to the point of throwing, even if I failed to have a full turn.  In the course of these picks everything went right:  the caber was balanced, I got low, and I scooped it from the bottom.  All of this with an actual crowd cheering for me.

The focus is what surprised me:  that in the midst of sun, cheering, and my general concerns about lifting the caber in the first place (the event I struggle the most with) I was able to start the first part of the process.

I have a great deal of work still to do, of course, such as overcoming that initial moment of realizing that I have picked the caber and what the heck do I do next and remembering the timing of the caber (you have to pull it sooner than you think you do).  But if I look back to three years ago when I first threw a caber at this venue - my very first games - and see the improvement over time - I can be nothing but amazed at my generally un-athletic self.  I can see improvement.  And it is measurable.

And I remind myself once again that I can do far more than I think I am capable of - if only I can focus.

Friday Morning

So I should already be at work this morning.

I should have already been up, showered, and rushing around to get out the door.  I should - right now - probably be sitting in traffic, cursing my commute and hoping that it will go more quickly.

I am not, of course.

After helping with Nighean Gheal's  band last night and being informed that I had no child drop-off responsibilities this morning, I decided that I was not really in that much of a hurry after all.

So instead I got up at the unheard of hour of 0645 on a work day.  I read.  I did my calisthenics.  I drank coffee and fed the animals.  Right now the sun is crossing my fingers as it rises over my typing - something I almost never experience.

I am relaxed - so relaxed I can contemplate the fact that I really should be doing something else yet feeling no particular drive to do it.  In fact, my stress level is almost nil for the same amount of sleep which, were it yesterday, made me a stress ball.

Work calls, of course.  The e-mails are there.  The questions are there.  And over the horizon, the larger questions of life are looming.

That is okay.  For one morning, I can simply take a little time and be, instead of be doing.

Quail in the Garden

Among the okra
brown and white feathered heads bob,
finding a late snack.

Doing the Basics Well

Along with commitment, I was reminded that I need to focus on doing the basics well.  This is hard for me - much hard than one might think.

Why?  It is not for the reason that you might think, that somehow the basics are too difficult (they are not) or too hard (again, they are not).  It is because I get easily bored and I look to more knowledge as the way to be admired and be great, rather than doing the basics well.

1) Bored:  I get bored easily.  Or maybe said differently, I have a short attention span.  Either way, I have problems focusing on the same sort of thing week after week or year after year.  I lose interest because I have done the same thing over and over and over (and often times, it seems like I am not getting any better at all).  My solution is to continue to want to learn new things rather than truly mastering the basics well.

2)  More knowledge:  I want to be acknowledged and recognized.  Badly.  So badly that I think that quickly moving forward to more visible appearances and presentations (through greater knowledge) is the key.  I often tend to skim over the stuff that is difficult (or boring, see item 1) rather than work to really dig down and get that right.  Why?  Because somewhere I have come to believe (and maybe in the business world it is presented this way)  that this is the way to move forward in life.  Which works - up to the point that you are actually called upon to us the basic knowledge only to discover that it is really not there.

It was a needed reminder (iaijutsu is good for all kinds of life lessons) that my focus needs to be on the basics:  knowing them, doing them well, being able to show them to others.  It may mean that in fact the "greater knowledge" is never achieved - but I need to realize that such a thing is not the ultimate value of the learning.  It is in doing something well, knowing it fully, and being able to execute it completely - even if it is basic - that the true basis for success is found.

Asking for Signs

Sometimes you have to ask, you know.

Not for the subtle or minor signs, the sort of thing that kind of dissipates into the night with a sigh.  No, sometimes you have to ask for a big sign - a large one, as big as the fleece that Gideon used before God.

Why?  Because you do not want to mess anything up.  You truly want to make the best sorts of decisions.  And sometimes those decisions have consequences.

So you ask.  You summon up your courage and ask "God, I need a sign.  I need a definitive one.  I need something that will truly guide me in the right decision to go."

And then you wait - believing, not just hoping, that such a sign will make itself apparent.

"If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you." - James 1:5

Chores and Life's Destiny

I have always had a problem with the things that I am supposed to do.

I would guess (if you asked me) that this comes from a time and place where I somehow believed that I was something special and that I was destined to do great things.  Real life intervenes, of course:  one sometimes has to take the job one has to take, and then comes items and marriage and children, etc.  Suddenly those things that you were "destined" to do have been replaced by a series of things that need your attention.

You fight this, of course, find reasons for it not to be so.  You start begrudging your responsibilities your time, especially if they keep you away from the important stuff.  You find ways to minimize the time and energy you have to spend on such things, always looking for a little bit more of "your time".  Even the things that really should matter in your life become less important as they are overrun by the vision in your mind of the things you are supposed to be doing.

And then something happens.

The car breaks down.  Your fence falls over.  A pet falls sick.  And suddenly you realize that all the things you should have been paying attention to, those hours of maintenance and the dreaded "chores", have come back to haunt you.  Because while you were off trying to re-demonstrate to yourself how important the things you were destined to work were, the inevitability of life happened.

It is a change of mind to get back there, the sort of change of mind that once upon a time you remember being taught as a child:  chores first, then fun.  The problem is that you got the idea of chores mixed up with a life destiny - when in fact most of us do not have the overriding life destiny that we think we do other than the simple act of living ethically and responsibly in a world that desperately needs the example.

The solution, thankfully, is not as hard as it might seem even if it as boring as it sounds:  chores first, then fun.

Sure, it might not sound as exciting or even as interesting as doing that life's destiny that you thought you had - and it might even mean you do not do most of the things you thought were destined to do on a regular basis.  But it does do at least one thing: it allows you to sleep at night knowing the important things, the things you are responsible for, did not go undone.

And that may allow you to sleep best of all.

Mis-taught Learning

Mis-taught learning is the the worst of all.

I like knowledge - in fact, I may quality as a collector of knowledge.  I love knowledge - but I love to be able to apply the knowledge in ways that benefit myself and others.  And in this sort of world, the worst thing of all is knowledge which is presented as useful and productive but is presented in such a way that it is not applicable at all.

The knowledge may be wonderful.  The examples may be useful.  But they way the knowledge is presented is such that it is not at all relevant - or will be relevant - to the sorts of work one is doing.

It leaves a bad taste in one's mouth - not just for presentation of the material, but for the very material itself.  That leaves the sort of taste in one's mouth that one finds disappointing, especially if one had high hopes for the knowledge and the application of it. Given a long enough run, it creates issues for the very nature of the knowledge itself.

I wonder (on a higher level) if this is a problem with much of learning as well - not just that it is taught poorly but that it is taught in such a way that the relevance of the material is not presented as something which is valuable but rather something which must be suffered through.

Latin is useful.  Chemistry is useful.  But only if it is presented in such a way that individuals can make the connection of the value (and trust me, the value of knowledge goes far beyond coding and the ability to play games) with life as it actually is.

Hating Crossroads

I hate crossroads.

I hate crossroads because one has to commit. One  has to make a decision and go with it.

And I am terrible at making decisions.

Well, maybe terrible at making decisions.  Maybe a better word is terrible at committing.

Why?  Because commitment means choosing one thing above another thing - even if the thing you choose is wrong.  Which is sort of odd, because if you ask me of decisions I have made which I regret, the list is probably a great deal less than what I would consider it to be.  But even in those decisions, I suppose there is seldom I feeling I have that I really committed.

My sensei reminds me of this constantly.  It happened again last night - practicing ukimi (rolls)  he said "You have to commit.  If you do not commit, you find yourself rolling off to the side instead of rolling straight."  Iaijutsu is a great deal about commitment - when you put your hand to the hilt, you are committing to drawing.  Putting your hand up and pulling it away makes you less of a threat and in fact brings into question whether you will use your sword at all.

"What is the symbolic meaning of drawing the sword quickly?  When you have made a decision, act immediately without hesitation."  How many times have I repeated these words to myself in the car driving to work in the morning - and yet how seldom it seems I am willing to do them.

Here is the reality, of course:  crossroads come.  And in that decision of three roads (less the one you have come on, of course)  a definite commitment not to follow one become s a passive decision to follow whichever one becomes most convenient.  Hardly a way to get to a destination - or live a life.

When, coming to a crossroads, choose.

Commit.  And see what happens next.

Cleaning a Garden

I am terrible about cleaning up gardens.

I struggle with the idea of removing plants before they have completely died.  It is as if I feel this psychic connection with the plants in my garden.  They have survived the initial planting.  They have survived the rains of summer and the crazy  heat.  And so I hold on to them until the very last, dry leaf falls to the ground or it gets far past the season.

In point of fact, gardens are to be managed just like any other resource, especially if you want to get the most benefit out of them. True gardeners are regularly swapping plants in and out as soon as they have completed their prime production season or if they are simply not working out  in terms of production.  When the garden is a matter of survival, it significantly changes the view of it and how it should be managed.  It is no longer a hobby but something which needs to be carefully monitored and the waste removed from the system.

And then in a moment of shock, I realized that my life is no different.

I tend to keep things - hobbies, relationships, even just simply things - long past the date of their usefulness.  They integrate themselves into my life of course, and then they feel like they have always been there and need to be there - in fact, to remove them sometimes feels like a betrayal.  But the reality, much like my garden, it that they simply do not serve the purpose they were originally brought in for.  In fact, they may become so overgrown that they bury the opportunity for anything new to take bloom as they choke out the attention and resources that could be deployed to them.

I am better than I was, of course.  I am more likely than not to remove things, possibly before the end of the season.  But I have yet to truly reach the point where I am viewing it as a battlefield and my plants as soldiers, needing deployment (and perhaps removal) to help my reach my ultimate tactical goal.

Would that I could bring the same level of management to other parts of my life.

September Winter

Moisture from the sky?
Cool winds and clouds?  Has winter
come in September?

Thanks Bruce

So it turns out Bruce Lee was my height.

This is actually pretty significant.  No-one ever confused him with being less than a top-notch athlete, yet his stature was no more significant than mine.

He worked for it of course (as I am finding out).  Worked very hard for it.  Became a fanatic about exercise and nutrition and training.  But that still means that such a thing is achievable, if only one will spend the time and energy to do it.

I also found a quote of his, a quote which I like very much and may move to the pantheon of quotes that I try to live my life by:

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” 

I sometimes wilt in the face of my friends - not so much that they ever say anything (because of course being gallant and kind-hearted they never would) - but that simple fact is that I am far removed from their levels of athletic ability.

But Bruce gives me hope - not that I will ever reach his level or that of my friends, but simply that even for someone with my height, much more is possible than I can imagine if I will only pay the price.

There are no limits.  There are only plateaus.

Thanks Bruce.

Midnight and Snowball

Black, white, and dry brown:Rabbits hop through the twilight,
yin and yang and heat.

Drained

Post audit days are mostly days of recovery.

That strikes some people as sort of amusing or even as something which does not seem possible - after all, is it not true that during audits all you really do is sit there, pull documents, and answer questions?  That is true of course - but the reality is hardly apparent to the eye that does not know better.

To be in an audit is to constantly be in a state of preparedness.  It is to constantly be trying to out think the auditor, to be ready for every potential outcome of the question they are asking, to listen to them in silence or perhaps when my head is nodding while in my mind I am racing ahead to find the solution to what they say, to avoid the potential observation or nonconformity.  And above all, to live in constant dread of finding the chink in the armor, the one thing that had been missed during preparation, the one failure that will bring the observation or nonconformity.

It is exhausting beyond all measure.

When it is done, one almost just collapses into one's chair.  One collects the various documents that were brought out for the audit and piles them up for filing or disposal later - doing it the day of is simply beyond the realm of rational thought.

And then comes the next day.  Today.

My aspirations are low indeed:  file and assess documents, close out the audit from our books, perhaps catch up on the work that I needed to do but did not because of the audit.  That might be all.  I cannot fully describe the feeling that body has now:  drained, tired, a little slow.  The thought of initiating an actual new project sounds so remote from where I am that I can scarcely must the energy for the thought.

Most people would never think that just sitting there could be so mentally exhausting.

Trying to Complete

I have a tendency to try and complete things.

This, one could argue, is a good characteristic to have.  We want to finish things.  We should want to bring things to completeness - in a real sense, success is merely continuing to bring things to a completed state.

But what happens if you are trying to complete things that no longer matter?

I wonder how much of my life is dominated by this, trying to complete projects or relationships that have traveled into my past.Things are that are no longer relevant.  Relationships that no longer have the context.  Projects that no longer have the impact or even the necessity. And yet there I am, toiling away with the bits of my free time, trying to make them complete.

Gardening is a good counter weight to this - in gardening, once something is ripe there is a limited time to act.  Waiting to do something only leads to rotten fruits and vegetables - all of the best intentions cannot make up for the fact that time and bacteria are also on a schedule as well, and that if you do not act, they will.

The unfortunate fact is that this is true for everything else in our lives as well.

Why does this matter?  Because if we choose to continue to complete that which has passed its time, we find ourselves trapped in a past doing the irrelevant for no purpose.  Things change, things move forward - but our eyes and hearts and minds are constantly looking in the rear view mirror, seeking simply to finish that which we have started.

Sometimes, it is really okay to simply let go and say "I am not going to complete this - because now there is no reason to."

A Gentle MIsconstruing of Purpose

I wonder if I have misconstrued my purpose.

I thought I had worked it out in my mind:  I was an encourager.  I was there to help lift other people up to succeed at whatever it was they were trying to do.  I was there to be a helper - perhaps in my my mind, a loyal servant, eager to do what I could - listen, assist, service, raise up - to help.

But I have been questioning that.

I suppose the error might be on my own part.  This was a role that I appointed for myself.  There was no sense that this was "God-Given", except that I was trying to find such a role after the things I thought were those roles - first ministry, then leadership in the Church - were demonstrated to be ideas that I had in my own mind.  I had tried to craft a meaningful mission statement as well  - "To Write for Impact, To Preserve for the Future, To Lead for Change, To Glorify God".  but that really did not seem to work out either:   my writing for change truly seems limited to this blog and inspirational quotes I post, the preservation for the future - The Ranch - has become impossible to contemplate when I am so far away, my leadership attempts have never really worked out the way I hoped (I always envisioned the strong, noble leader - instead I am the first among equals who does get things done but not in a strong, noble way), and only God truly knows if I qualify in glorifying Him.

Which leads me here:  what happens when you realize you purpose may have been not what you thought it was?

I am judging by results, and my results seem to be haphazard at best.  The reality I perceive is those I thought I was providing this to have moved on from it - or maybe they have simply got what they needed and carried on, which I suppose would be a justification that it was the right thing.  In either event, I find myself at a painful crossroads:  the purpose I thought I had seemingly done with no direction of where to go next.

It might sound like I am am angry or bitter.  I am not.  Confused is a more appropriate assessment, maybe a little hurt in the confusion.  If this is success of a purpose, I would have thought that would have felt, well, more accomplished - instead I am just sort of aimlessly floating in space, grasping at something (once again) which I thought was "it" but turns out at best to be just another step.

Where  do I go from here?  I have no real guidance.  I feel as if I have run out of ideas, leaving myself in a great heath of featureless heather and small bushes with no landmarks, no path leading to the next step.  I would love to say a time of meditation and consideration is here - but even within that thought, life rolls on.

But I can only turn my face towards the future. One thing I have learned, at great pain to myself:  once you realize that a purpose has passed, you must let it go.  One can never resurrect the dead, no matter how good and hopeful the intentions are.

Upon Finding A Closed Door

Closing doors can be the most confusing things of all.

It is not the typical "closed door" that confuses me.  These are pretty straightforward - one moves in a straight line until one finds the door that is closed, hopefully  by merely testing it but sometimes by running flat into it and breaking one's nose.  Closed door, will not budge - off to try another door, another direction.

Instead, the ones that are confusing are the partially closed doors.

These are the ones that either one gets part of the way through and sudden one realizes one cannot squeeze through it or - even worse - the ones that start moving closed as one is trying to get through it.  These are the toughest and most confusing of all, because the initial instinct is to try to get through the door more quickly only to find out the door is closing as fast as you are trying to force your way in.

In either case you find yourself outside of the door, perhaps holding to everything that you had planned to take in through the door with you.  It is as if you planning to move into an apartment - perhaps were even in the process of moving in - only to find out that no move was going to happen and you are left standing in a pile of your possessions.

You stop and take inventory, of course.  Did I misread the door?  No, it was quite open when you first started to go through.  Did I not move quickly enough?  Well possibly - but then again, sometimes moving too quickly just slams you into the door that has shut more quickly than you could get in.  Or perhaps I should have simply pushed harder on the door and made it yield to my will - but in reality this hardly ever works as well as it seems to be a good idea as broken doors become useless, letting all kinds of things in - or out.

No, the reality is simply this (as painful and humiliating as it sounds):  after jiggling and perhaps testing to discern that the door is truly closed and not merely stuck, there is nothing left for it but to begin the process of picking up your things and moving to another door.

Because there is little more foolish and unfortunate than continuing to bang on the door that has obviously been closed and locked - and miss seeing the open door that is right next to it.

Dreams of Glue, Cell Phone, and Plastic Parts - Follow Up

Yesterday we tried to go through my dream of earlier this week.  My counselor introduced me to something call dreammoods.com, which is a dictionary of images in dreams and what they might me.

A couple of highlights from the dream and their possible meanings:

"Key:  To see a key in your dream symbolizes opportunities, access, control, secrets, freedom, knowledge or responsibilities. You may be locking away your own inner feelings and emotions. Or you are unlocking the answer to some problem....To dream that you lose your keys signify fears of losing control of yourself or losing your position or status in life. It may also indicate unexpected changes, frustrations, and unpleasant adventures. The dream could be analogous to lost or missed opportunities. If you give your key away, then it suggests that you have given up control of some situation or responsibility. "

"Bus:  To dream that you are waiting for a bus indicates a temporary setback in achieving your personal goals. If you miss the bus, then it indicates that an aspect of your life is out of control. You need to slow down and map out a new plan."

"Telephone:  To see or hear a telephone in your dream signifies a message from your subconscious or some sort of telepathic communication. You may be forced to confront issues which you have been avoiding. Alternatively, the telephone represents your communication and relationship with others."

"Sign - To see a sign in your dream indicates that you need help.  You need some direction and guidance in your life. Pay attention to what the sign says and what it is pointing you to do. Perhaps the dream is highlighting "a sign of the times".

I am usual not one for dream interpretation, but these items - along with general feelings that I awoke with from the dream - made for interesting thoughts as we walked through things.

Key - The key was not directly involved in the dream except as something I was trying to spell out but could not, and questioned why I was not using actual letters to build it.  Is it a form of the key missing, something lost or control given up?

Bus - Pretty much missed the bus in the dream.  Is there an aspect of my life that is out of control?

Telephone -  Again, not directly involved in the dream except as a tool for someone else.  Is it that I am always trying to communicate for others and not myself, or that I was avoiding an issue that I need to deal with?

Sign - Road signs bent over, arrows facing towards the ground.  Have I lost direction or that my directions all simply seem to be in one direction - down?

I suppose that if you look at the general tone of things - lack of control, out of control, lack of ability to communicate or lack of communication, and loss or lack of direction, you seem to come up with a few central themes:  loss of control of where I am going and what I am doing and how I am communicating.  It would seem to support the general sense I have right now in my life of being trapped by events and circumstances with little ability to chose.

And my feelings when I woke up?  Songbird said it far more wisely than I could have:  "Seems like your subconscious is saying you let personal interests distract you so that you will deliberately 'miss the bus'...the activities you did were redundant and slow, something you chose to do out of a perception of personal necessity, which caused you to miss the important bus".

Something to mull over, at any rate.

Pride in Work?

As I was pushing through my pile of things to do at work, I had one of those occasional moments of questioning exactly what I was doing.

I spent the whole day more less attending to different tasks - e-mails, follow ups, setting meetings, preparing for upcoming visits, catching up.  At the end of the day I looked to my desk and my in-box and found that just by viewing those two metrics, you would be hard pressed to tell that I accomplished anything at all at work.

I think this is one of the more frustrating aspects of what I do:  it is very hard to point to something and say "Behold what I have done". The fact is that most of this hardly exists except as a electrons and physical sheets of paper that are moved, reviewed, signed and filed in a vacuum that seldom if ever see the light of day.

There is no "finish line"; no point at which the building is complete or the book is finished or the artwork completed.  Seldom, too, is there the ability to go back later and be able to point out to anyone what you have accomplished.  The accomplishments dwell mostly in the mind and on hard drives and in paper files that exist only to be filed away and destroyed at some later date.

We are taught that we should take pride in our work - but when your work is essential invisible, inaudible, and transient, it becomes very difficult indeed.

A Slight Malaise of the Soul

I have been suffering from a slight malaise of the soul over the last few days.

I cannot truly define it greater than that.  It is not fully a physical sickness - although I have been feeling run down.  It is not fully mental - although I have found myself distracted.  And it is not fully spiritual - although my soul seems leaden down by things I cannot fully explain.

It is a restlessness of sorts, a wandering sense of not being connected to anything or anyone even as I find myself surrounded by people and things to do.  It lowers my energy to the point that I do not feel like doing anything at all,  even as it steals my interest in doing anything at all. I feel trapped yet I do not want to go anywhere, alone in the midst of people, forgotten even though it is quite clear I am not, and fallen even though I am not aware I was taken down.

I do not like feeling this way because I cannot tie it to a particular event or action.  That makes it much easier, of course - after all, if I can find something to tie it to I can easily go back, look at what is going on, and then come to some kind of resolution or at least figure my way out of the situation.  That has been denied me right now as I seem to have nothing to figure out - only this vague sense of something being wrong, something which I am unable to identify to fix.

Every look inside turns awry; every attempt to name the thing falls into silence; every attempt to cheer myself only leads to hollow laughter in my own head.

I do not know this thing, and by thereby not knowing it I cannot understand it.  And by not understanding it, I cannot fix or repair it.  All I can seem to do, like a bull in a snowstorm, is set my face towards the wind and hope that I can outlast it.

Dream of Glue, Cell Phone, and Plastic Parts

One of the most vivid dreams I have had in a while, certainly the first one in a while I can remember.

I was at company meeting which for some reason had to occur over a weekend.  There were a number of people there I recognized - not the whole company, but enough of senior management.  The person in charge, from our legal department, was going through a presentation.  The point of it was that a project we had been working on - a project that had failed - still had to be closed out.  The meeting was to cover the list of things that needed to be written or completed to make that happen.

At that, the meeting broke up and we were walking down a residential street with door opening onto the street.  I stopped to tie my shoe at one and kicked the door frame.  It looked to me like I might have cracked it but I could not be sure.  Suddenly the door opens and the resident, an older fellow, looks out.  I had apparently accidentally knocked the door.  We briefly talk - and I say nothing about the door frame.  Maybe it was that way, I reason to myself.

We walk farther, and then I am caught by another man and his wife.  Can I make a cell phone call for them, they ask?  Certainly - but it is not a cell phone call.  Apparently they need me to take a picture - but they need me to make a picture in order to take it.  I see  a bus in the distance with all of the people from work on it, ready to go.  It will only take a few minutes, I say to myself.  So I start forming letters on a jacket they have given me with glue and small plastic things.

It is taking a long time.  My letters are not perfect, I have to ask them at least once what the phone number needs to be - all the time I can see the bus there, waiting.  I run out of letters and space, and am trying to spell the word "key" and failing.  I have the thought of why did I not just use plastic letters instead of trying to spell things out, but keep trying.  The bus is still waiting.  Finally they bring me more things to work with and I lay the jacket down - on a red Mustang cover, like the one I used to have to finish.  As I am working on it, I hear a group of people coming up.  Some of them start arguing with the people next to where we are about something I cannot understand while others are prompting me to "hurry up, hurry up, we need to go".  "Wait"  I say, "I'm almost done".  I lay the jacket out and take the picture - only to turn and see that they have driven off.

The last thing I remember is the couple thanking me and the next thing I know it is dark and I am at a place with bent over sign poles, waiting for another bus.  "Why are you here?"  the couple who I called for asks me.  "Because I missed the bus" I reply.

And then I woke up.

Quail!

The quail have come.

Technically these are a birthday present for Nighean Dhonn; she has some at her school and decided she wanted some of her own.  However, they coincide with my own goal of greater independence at any level.

They are a mix:  4 Texas A&M Coturnix quil and 2 Straight Coturnix Quail.  They are somewhere between 3 and 4 weeks old at this stage:  old enough to be away from the brooder but not fully feathered out yet.  From everything that I read, they reach the beginnings of maturity and egg laying starting at 6 weeks.

I am excited.  We cannot keep chickens where we currently live but quail should be small enough to escape the notice and annoyance of everyone:  they are quiet, they are small, and their caging can be low to the ground.

I still have a few things to work out, like ultimate living arrangements (I have an idea, but I need to get some cover going) so they are ensconced in a cardboard box where we can hear them talking to each other.

This is going to be good - and fun.

Welcome Quail!

Ichiryo Gusoku

I realized on this Labor Day weekend that I needed to catch up on an old point of business which I had started some time ago but never really talked about.

If you had not noticed, about a month ago I posted two new pages here at the blog:  One on "Ichiryo Gusoku" and the other on goals around this.  The concept is one that I have been working with in my mind for some time, have tried a couple of alternate attempts at, and then decided to connect them with my blog and how I am attempting to evolve my life.

What were the Ichiryo Gusoku?  They were the samurai of Chosokabe Motochika (1539-1599) of the Japanese Island of Shikoku.  The term literally meant “one fief, one suit of armor” – which meant the samurai who not only fought but also worked the land as farmers and only had enough land to support themselves, not any follower - or what we might think of, a sort of yeoman farmer who provided for himself and his family but served a higher cause.

“These rustic samurai were known as ichiryo gusoku, because what they possessed was “one fief and one suit of armor”.  They were essentially rough-and-ready characters, who armor came to pieces where the plates where laced together.  They only thing they  prized was courage in battle, and it is said of them that when they were working in the paddy fields they stuck their spears into the ridges between the irrigated sections and fastens their sandals to the shafts, so they could be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.” – The Book of the Samurai: The Warrior Class of Japan, Stephen R. Turnbull

The thought intrigued me as I was introduced to the concept because it combine two areas of interest to me:  my interest in sword arts and my latent interest in doing more to support my own lifestyle by what I produce for it.  As I continued to work through the concepts I came up with a set of goals (that is the other page) of ultimate ways I would like to directly provide for myself and my family.

The goals are a work in progress both of time and location:  where we are now we can only probably do a small fraction of what we I would like to do.  Still, putting them down - and more importantly, putting them out there - is a sort of goad to me to get on with the process.

As I have stated multiple times, I make no commentary on politics and few comments on current affairs on this blog.  That said, there is one truth that transcends all of this and is applicable:  the more has control of the components of one's life and what one needs to survive, the greater degree of freedom one controls over one's destiny.

Bella

Rabbit hops closer,nose twitching, asking for love:
fear and love combined.

Dog Qualities and People

It occurred to me yesterday evening as I was walking Syrah the Mighty that there are certain qualities that we value in dogs, things that make them pleasing and attractive to us as pets and companions:

- Happy:  Dogs are so often happy when they see us.  They hardly ever seem to hold a grudge.
- Playful:  Dogs are playful.  They are alway ready for any number of games.
- Protective:  Dogs are protective of members of their pack, sometimes annoyingly so.
- Ready to Please:  Dogs like to do things that earn them the praise of their owners.
- Content:  Dogs are generally content with whatever their circumstances are.
- Service:  Dogs like to help, even if it is only helping in the way a dog can.
- Loving:  Dogs can just be there whenever you need them to be, just to give love.

We value all of these traits in dogs, but when people have the same sorts of traits they are sometimes seen as not assertive enough or too silly or not goal oriented enough or the sort of people that will always be followers and not high achievers.  We value such traits in our pets and companions, but not in our fellow humans (or perhaps we say we do, but in practice we do not).

It just struck me as odd.

Releasing the Sword

One of the greater misconceptions of many that I have had to overcome in my pursuit of Iaijutsu is the concept of always holding on to the sword.

At first the thought seemed counterintuitive to me.  After all, we constantly train with the sword to block and then attack.  We drill with nukitsuke (drawing), nigashi (cuts) and various cuts until they are drilled into the core of our muscle memory.  We practice constantly getting the blade between ourselves and our attacker or taking ourselves off-line to avoid the attack.  So in all of this, the concept of dropping the blade came like something that was going against everything I have been training for.

The reality, of course, is that one is not just "dropping" the sword.  One is releasing the sword to get a greater advantage.  Musashi discusses this in his Fire book of A Book of Five Rings":

     "'To release four hands' (yottsu te o hansusu) is used when you and the enemy are contending with the same spirit, and the issue cannot be decided.  Abandon this spirit and win through an alternative resource.
     In large-scale strategy, when there is a 'four hands' spirit, do not give up - it is man's existence.  Immediately throw away this spirit and win with a technique the enemy does not expect.
     In single combat also, when we think we have fallen into the 'four hands' situation, we must defeat the enemy by changing our mind and applying a suitable technique according to his condition.  You must be able to judge this." (translation by Victor Harris)

To release the sword at the critical moment is to seek to take the greater advantage.  If I do not expect myself to release the sword, neither does my opponent.  Now I have the moment of surprise or unexpected reaction that I need.  Now I also have two hands with which to maneuver and pull my opponent off balance or trap him in a lock and bring him down.  Now, as Musashi says, I have released my spirit and am contending by alternative means.

To release the sword is also to expand my view of the situation and resources.  When the sword falls to the ground, I am left without my primary means of attack and defense.  I am forced to evaluate the situation and come up with another means of resolving it.  I have disengaged my muscle memory and am now forcing my mind to work in other ways to achieve the objective.

Another interesting fact: most often when I release my sword, my opponent will not.  It is taught to the point of instinct that we are always to hold on to our swords.  By releasing the sword I gain an instant of hesitation on the part of my opponent, a moment which - if I have truly trained - I can use to my advantage.

Ultimately the sword is a tool, like any other that we have in life.  And if we insist on clinging too tightly to our tools and not sufficiently keeping in mind what we are actually trying to accomplish, we will find ourselves in the position of ourselves been surprised when the sword falls to the ground and we find ourselves in a position of defeat while still holding the superior weapon in the confrontation.

Forging of The Soul

I feel as if my soul is being forged right now, beat out on the anvil of life.  It is not an overly pleasant feeling.

That strikes me as odd because I would think that it is something that people - well, at least myself - would actually like. After all, this is what I write about a great deal, correct?:  becoming more of yourself, pushing yourself towards doing more of what your actual purpose in life is, having the less desirable parts fall away.  This is the goal, or at least what I am striving for, right?

Certainly, in theory.  The practice is a bit more difficult.

Is it the heating that I do not like?  That sense of being thrown into the furnace of life and having the temperature of your life rise as the flames heat you, to feel first the outer core and then your inner self become infused and then hot with the transmitted heat of circumstances and people that seem to push you to the break point as the events and circumstances expand your life while it seems to maintain its present form?

Or is it the hammering, that place that finds you between the hammer face and the anvil, as you are pounded repeatedly or twisted uncomfortably?  The pain of the heat may be removed but now it is replaced by blows or twisting that just seems to come and come without any sense is going on or hope that things are going to stop.

The ultimate problem, of course, is that the piece of metal can never truly know what the ultimate outcome of the forging is.  It is nothing without the master hand of the blacksmith, who has the design in mind as does not heat merely once or twice but repeatedly, ultimately converting the steel into something pleasing to the eye and useful to others.  It is the blacksmith that determines how long to heat and how many blows to lay and where to lay them.  It is the metal's job to heat and form.

We often fool ourselves, I think.  We feel ourselves to be the blacksmith, heating and hammering the metal, when really we are the metal and being formed by a Blacksmith greater than us.  We become surprised when the heat and hammer are applied in ways that we did not anticipate - because we forget that we are the thing being forged, not the forger.

I know who The Blacksmith is, and I have a wavering trust - not the level I should have - in what His ultimate outcome is.  I just wish that I could understand what He is forming me into.

Petals of Memory

I apologize.I seem senseless sometimes,
looking at the world through lenses
that only I can see.
These are not the lenses others view the world through:
they are heroic and romantic,
redolent with tales of bravery and laden with emotion.

I forget, sometimes,
that everyone else has a life as well:
plans to be made, plans to be executed,
lives to be lived.
I become so engrossed in my own lenses
that I fail to account
for the lenses of everyone else.

The result?
I constantly walk in a garden filled too often
with dreams and memories,
where the memories whirl like petals
blowing in the wind,
never remembering my petal snowstorm
is not the extent of the world.

And so, forgive me:
Sometimes petals of blowing memories
obscure the bright sun,
leaving me to look through lenses
that have become so clouded
they do not reveal things
as they really are.

Summer Garden Woes

Blazing sun lays waste:
Only okra and peppers
lift praising green leaves.

Productivity Without Joy

Yesterday was not a good day.

I have been making a sincere effort to work hard and be more productive.  As one aspect of this, I have been making a list every day before I go home of things to do for the following day.  Every day, at least 10 items on the list.  When I get to work I start on the list; by the end of work, I must either have completed every item on list, made progress on those I cannot complete, or indicate who needs to take the next step.

Arguably my productivity has gone up.  I am becoming more effective at making sure that things get done - not only the things that need to be done now, but the things that are upcoming such that I am not rushing to get a thing done right before I am required to product it.  It is starting to be so effective, in fact, that I am already starting to get to the second tier of items that need my attention.  Compounded over months and years, one can begin to see the power of using a tool such as this to make things happen.

And yet, I went home completely crushed.

Why?  Because accomplishment of tasks is not the same as having meaning.  One can perform all of the tasks that need doing and still be no closer to happiness or purpose than the one who never does one task at all.  Doing work which drops off into the abyss leaves one not with a feeling of accomplishment but rather a feeling of emptiness, that one has done something of negligible value to the actual things in life that matter to one.  One may perhaps earn money for the tasks of the day, but such money scarcely pays for the sense of meaningless that accompanies one as the door clicks shut.

This bothers me.  I cannot turn aside from the need to accomplish things, nor can I turn aside from the need to work - right now, at the position I have.  Both of these are critical to my survival.  At the same time, i do not perceive that I can continue to indefinitely maintain this level of deep commitment to a thing which leaves me feeling so utterly empty inside every day when I leave, even though I have been very productive.during the day.

Or perhaps I am just fooling myself.  It is not that I cannot do it indefinitely - anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it.  It is that I cannot do it indefinitely and pretend that it is anything other than what it seems to be - not a joy, but an interminable chore which, joyful or not, must be done.

To What End?

To What End?

This is the question
that looms in the back of my head
as I try harder and harder
to do more and more;
to be more efficient,
more effective.

To What End?

I try to fill
every moment of my day
with something of value,
something that matters,
yet the days always end
in exhaustion and silence.

To What End?

Why can I not see
beyond my efforts?
How do I spy
the goal I cannot see?
Where is the powerful "THIS!"
that gives meaning to the "WHAT"?

Holding On

Sometimes letting go of something is the hardest thing in the world.

I like to hold on to things.  I am not really sure why.  I am not sure if I equate clinging to something with being deeply committed to the point of not giving up or willing things into existence that are not there or even simply a sense of fear.  But I like to hold on to things - sometimes desperately.

Emotions seem to be the thing I cling to most of all.  I will fiercely grasp anger or disgruntlement in my heart and hold them there as a defense of why I have to feel or act a certain way.  I will think that they have become quiescent in my heart, only to find them roaring back at a time I did not expect.

Sometimes relationships can be the same way.  I think back to the fall of The Firm and how I failed to read the fact that friendship had really become the business. I clung because the friendship was old and cherished but failed to realize that lives had diverged to the point that business was the only thing keeping the friendship together.

Failed projects as well. I am almost quixotic in my quest to try to hold onto projects that have not worked or even simply things that I cannot do.  It is as if admitting that I have failed or even simply that I am no longer interested is akin to admitting that I cannot do something - and I do not like to believe that there are things that I cannot do.

Failure.  I suppose that is the underlying sense of all of my holding on.  I do not like to admit that I have failed, even though such a failure on my part may not be indicated by anything.  Things just do not work out sometimes.  That is just the way of it.

Investment of energy too, I suppose.  I invest energy in our emotions, relationships and activities.  I put time and dreams into them - and when the the thing does not work out, that time and energy and dream become something which may seem to be a failed investment.  It is not always true of course - learning and knowledge are never lost - but the primary point of the investment to feel that emotion or enjoy the relationship or become good at that thing are gone.

And so rather than admit failure, rather face the fact that dreams are all too often just that and that the energy and time did not pay off as I hoped, I cling.  I hold on.  I think that somehow by force of will I can make things different than they are.  And the fact that such a change happens perhaps once in a thousand times does nothing to disturb my willingness to try.

Because in my mind the thought of releasing my hands and simply moving on too often has the scent of someone who has come accept things as they are instead of how they might be.

The Difficulty of Being Honest with One's Self

Being honest with one's self is one of the most difficult things one can do with one's self.

In general, honesty often seems hard.  That thought takes me a little by surprise because it would not seem to be so.  I would like to think that honesty is the easier thing to do than prevaricate or fill the space with words while we really say nothing at all. Perhaps in my mind I have this image of honesty as a thing which it is not:  a blade which easily slices through the cobwebs and old trappings of our life and makes a path.

Honesty can indeed be a blade.  But the fact of blades is that the cut everything in their paths without a regard for what it is.  And that is where honesty with the self becomes difficult.  Because I am often very reluctant to turn that blade loose on my own soul lest I see things that I do not wish to see.

If I were honest with myself - genuinely honest with myself - I fear what I would find there.  I have suspicions of these things lying beneath the surface, waiting to make there way from hidden feeling to action.  I know that there are words there waiting to be said that would be destructive beyond belief, actions waiting to be released which could hurt others in my life - not the physical actions but the far more frightening actions of bad decisions, which leave psychic scars which never truly go away. I would find myself face to face with the illusions I carefully maintain and the dreams I carefully nurture in the face of a reality which says that neither are true and cannot really exists.

Would there be good to come out of a true session of self-honesty?  I believe that there would be.  But it is difficult to grasp what that would be.  Perhaps this arises from a sense that self honesty never results in greater clarity of mind or purpose but only in the revelation of that which I have buried and preserved inside.

Is it because I ultimately perceive myself to have failed in some great task, the one thing which I seem to keep pursuing as a goal even as I do not fully know what it is or what I should be doing?  Perhaps.  Failure often makes it difficult to be honest, except in a way which always seems to tear one down in the process.

As I write this there is a sense of walking on ice that is millimeters thick, threatening to crack lest I put too much weight on it.  I have come to recognize this feeling:  it is the feeling of being very close to something which is going to make me very uncomfortable to deal with and I am assiduously lest I suddenly find myself face to face with a truth.

It is beneath my consciousness, roiling beneath the ice.  The question is, am I willing to break the ice and look in?

Inner Walls

Inner Walls separate us.
I am surprised at my ability to build them - but I find them carefully constructed within myself.  Walls that have been constructed around almost every portion of my life.  They have not grown up naturally.  Neither were they (ultimately) put in place by anyone else other than myself.

Why do I build them?

Up to recently I would have responded that the reason I build them is to protect myself from other people, to defend against the vagaries of the moods of others (to be generous and a friend is to learn what to overlook and what to pay attention to) or the very really hurt that others sometimes can cause.  And maybe that is true in some senses and possibly for others.  But I do not think that is the real reason.

It it to protect others from myself?   Walls can not only keep things out, they can keep things in. But again, except for perhaps things I can keep of, there is not a conscious effort to protect others from me.  And so again I do not think this is the real reason.

I think I build them to protect myself from myself.

Why do I need to protect myself from myself?  It is not to protect me from myself per se that I do it - rather that I seek to protect myself from revealing something to others what will return the results that I do not want.

We have all been in the situation that someone exposed more than they intended to in an unguarded or truly honest moment - and the response was not what they had anticipated at all.  They perhaps thought to make a deeper connection or find a true moment of honesty or even simply be real.  More often than not, the response is hardly that: shuffling of feet, looking away, even a rejection of what was offered.

And so people (really me) learn to build walls around themselves.  They know the limits of these walls:  their height, their breadth, their construction, their appearance.  They know what they can and cannot safely do from these walls and how far to open the gates to allow access by others or to go out through them.  But even those gates are very carefully guarded lest in a moment of abandon what is behind the wall rushes out into the action at hand - with unexpected or unwanted results and reactions.

And the walls go higher and higher - in ourselves and thus between ourselves and others - until we find ourselves shouting across canyons of walls, the distances and the echoes obscuring the original message of what we wanted to say.  There is a danger of course, the danger that our walls will become so high and thick that we will never be able to tear them down and let what is out in.  It is a risk - but always measured against the risk of the reaction we did not want.

But Inner Walls ultimately trap us - they do not set us free but rather isolate us from all around us. And so we must learn to love the openness of relationship, even when it is painful and we are misunderstood and rejected and reacted to poorly, than we do the cool smooth protection of our walls.

A Small Degree of Hesitation

One of the items I am trying to become better at is the observation of people - not just for the practice of learning to observe but for the practice of trying to learn.  I have learned one of the most challenging items of observation is one's own children, because knowing both their history and their environment it is very easy to track the root of many of their behaviors and actions (too often that root runs directly back to me, their parent).

The incident in question occurred last Saturday at Nighean Dhonn's soccer game.  She plays defense almost exclusively, her job being to cut off the offensive players moving down the field with the ball and either force them to make an early choice or drive the ball back. As I watched this particular day I noticed something which I assume was always there before but just became apparent:  as a player advanced down the field she looked at the player, stood for a moment as if making up her mind, then drew herself up and advanced to where the player was.

Once I suddenly realized this was occurring, I started watching for it - and the behavior repeated itself a number of times.  A few times she would just go - and the play would be more likely to be stopped.

I pondered and wrestled with this following the game.  Look, Make Up the Mind, Go.  Look, Make Up the Mind, Go.  There was something here, something that really applied to me in far greater detail than it did to her.

What I came to realize is that the "Make Up the Mind" step was really a hesitation, a hesitation in which she was making the decision "Should I go?  What should I do?" - then, deciding what needed to be done (run to cut off the play), she went.  The problem, of course, is that the offensive player had no such hesitation and so advanced a great deal farther than she should have if the hesitation had not occurred.

I also realize that I have precisely the same issue.

We train in Iaijutsu in order to gain muscle memory, to remove that moment of hesitation and thinking "What should I do?" and replace it with instant action.  Attacks are varied and repeated in the theory that no matter what attack comes, there is an automatic reaction.  I should not think if an overhand cut (a kirioroshi) comes in; I should just react in one of three ways to block, move, or counter attack.  But this same logic of physical actions are not often applied to other parts of our life.

When I hesitate - when I try to make my mind whether or not do something - I miss a valuable opportunity to instantly act. When I fail to instantly act, I lose something - time, position, initiative - that passes to the situation or the other party, something that inevitably would be of use to me.

Is this the same as acting without thinking?  That is not the intent.  In the example given, my daughter knew what she should do.  It was not the course of action she was determining or even the rightness of it - the knowledge of the game of soccer she was playing and the nature of her position - it was "Should I do it?"

And so with me.  Too often I know what I should do, the rightness of what I should do, perhaps even the positive outcomes of what I should do - yet I hesitate, holding back for fear or concern or even second guessing what I am doing.  And in those moments, I lose something - not just the time or position or initiative mentioned above but something greater:  the ability to build the confidence in myself of ability to action and ability to succeed.

In Iaijutsu the symbolic meaning of drawing the sword quickly (which is the true spirit of the art) is once you have made a decision, to act immediately without hesitation.  Deciding is the time ponder, to think, to take the time to weigh the options.  But once the deciding is over - the decision to participate, the decision to engage, the decision to move forward - hesitation provides nothing but the ability to lose, never the ability to win.

I want my daughter to learn that in any sport - and indeed in life - instant action when you know what to do is more effective than reconsidering the action before doing it.  More importantly, I need to teach myself the same lesson.

Granting Myself Permission to Succeed

The thought process that resulted in "An Indistinct Guessing of the Soul" did not end with a reflection on the fact that I tend to shy away from things as if I were seeking approval.  It went further as it continued to percolate in my mind.

Why is it, I wondered, that I continue to seek the approval of others for things that are really activities that I do myself?  Why do I so cherish this level of approval - which may or may not come - that I am willing to sabotage myself in the doing of these activities?

And then the thought hit me - I have never given myself permission to succeed.

The concept almost seems intuitive.  It is a foregone conclusion that if a person has undertaken anything they have given themselves permission to succeed, correct? Otherwise, why would they undertake the activity in the first place given the true difficulty of accomplishing anything?  But as I continued to dwell on the thought, I realized that this was precisely my problem.

Why do I fear success so much?  Is it that I truly believe myself to be that unskilled?  Do I believe that I am inferior in ability or deed by nature?  Or is simply the unspoken belief that I am unworthy of success unless someone else approves it?

This is subtly different from the believe that one can succeed.  That is a belief in one's ability to accomplish something.  I believe that with great presence of mind and determination almost anyone can do this.  But the thought of giving one's self the permission to succeed is the "Fifth Column" of achievement, the hidden foe that will ultimately drain our efforts and cannot be overcome by simply doubling down on effort.

So I gave myself permission to succeed.

It was not a particularly extreme ceremony - there were no natural phenomenon, no crowds roaring, no sense of time standing still for a momentous occasion.  I simply made the choice - a vocal one - that I give myself permission to succeed in whatever I choose to do.  And the weight that rolled off of my heart was amazing.

Suddenly I do not need the approval of others to succeed.  Their help, possibly.  Their support, definitely - but I do not need them to grant me some permission to go forward and be successful in what I do.  What I simply need, as much as the believe I can do it, is the acknowledgement by myself that it is okay to do it - and do it well, to the point of being very good at it.

We always own our failures instinctively even if we say nothing - now it is time to permit ourselves to own our successes as well.

On Depression

(Today's regularly scheduled program will return tomorrow)

To those who do not know, depression is a terrible foe.

We all get depressed.  All of us.  At some point in our lives we face that sense where fate has buffeted us past our point of bearing and that things will simply never get better.  Our feelings are perhaps crushed, our outlook is perhaps less optimistic.  We may be overwhelmed with sadness.  But for most of us, this eventually turns and we come back to our usual selves and lives.

To those that truly deal and face depression, this experience is very different.

I cannot speak of every experience with depression. I can only speak of my own, which is a fairly mild case one time diagnosed as bipolar.

To the depressed, depression is not a one-time event.  It is something you live with constantly, like a sort of chronic pain that never really goes away.  There are days you may feel better and days that you may forget that it is there - but you know that it is always in the background, ready to strike.

When it comes, it is nothing like that of the depression of the ordinary.  As you become older, you begin to recognize the signs of it coming on - I would think that at some level they are different for everyone.  Mine tends to be tiredness combined with onrush of pessimism and the inability to see anything good in life, followed by depression.

It has come.

People sometimes ask why the depressed simply cannot "Pull themselves out of it".  I cannot - again - speak for everyone.- but for me, it cannot be pulled out of because you simply cannot see a future.  Depression is like a tunnel into which comes no sunlight, no hope - just a long unending sense that what is, is what will every be.  Things will not get better - in fact, they can only get worse.

You are overwhelmed with sadness in your heart and darkness in your soul.  Always the sadness and darkness.

The first time I faced this was as a senior in High School.  A good student, I was doing "poorly" (C level work) in Pre-calculus.  I was a bit socially inept and had never had a girl friend.  I felt disconnected from my life and could not see anything getting better.  I tried a very passive form of hurting myself.

For me, I was lucky. I had intervention: a friend, then a counselor at high school, then my parents who helped me to get some counseling.  It certainly did not prevent the depression from returning, but it did give me a sense that perhaps there was something that could be done.

The thing that sticks with me in my mind is that sense of nothing every getting better.  That is what I associate most with depression.  The point is clear enough, at least to me:  if nothing is getting better or even if I am continually on this cycle of up/down up/down, there is no hope.   And when hope perishes, why would one want to continue?

A final thought:  Depression is a life long struggle.  If you read my blog you know that this is something I have struggled with repeatedly - and continue to struggle with.  It never really goes away.

But there is something - maybe not a bright point, but at least something to hold onto in my daily battle:  Depression, at least for me, is triggered when I believe that circumstances are simply not going to get better.  I count myself blessed beyond measure that I have a God, friends, family, pets and even activities that remind me every day  "This is not all there is - there is no reason it is not going to change.  There is no reason to lose hope."

An Indistinct Second Guessing of the Soul

This weekend, as I sat down and tried to work out (once again) the things that I wanted to do and the things that I needed to do, I realized that I am once again the victim of activity overreach:  I want to do far more than it seems I ever really have time to do.  By my count I have at least 10 things I am trying to make happen in some form or fashion outside of my regular job.

As I sat and pondered a little more I realized that this is not only a trend for me, but that I have a history of half started things, projects that started to move along but never really got past the point of catching fire.  My bookshelves are littered with things I thought I would do once upon a time but did not and various portions of the house piled with materials "I intend to get around here to any day now" but never seem to.

Why is this?  Why do I start so much and finish so little?

As I tried to continue to slice through the outer edge of my consciousness looking in, I realized that one thing I felt to be different was that in some way I had "permission" to do some of the activities that I did while other were somehow "not sanctioned".  That is odd to me, since I have had the ability to choose what I want to do for 30 years now.  What would cause me to still feel like I needed permission to practice something.

Then the thought crept into my brain  "You do not do them full force because you are not approved in doing them."

Approved?  By who?  For what?  What a strange thought, that I should somehow need someone else to say "okay" before truly doing something.  Is it not true that the things that I have done and stuck with have been things that I started on my own, without "asking" permission but merely doing?

As I teased the thought out more what I found is that I am looking for the approval or the sense of pleasing others in this as I look for it in so many other areas of my life.  I start something but then, in the depths of my soul, there is a "second-guessing" that I do, a sense of holding back full commitment until someone (and this person seems to vary) says that it is "okay" for me to do.  I took up writing to please myself; it was not until such friends as Bogha Frois and Songbird and Otis said "Hey, you can write" that truly began pursuing it, just as it was not until Snowflake did the same that I was able to commit to writing a book.  Highland Athletics became a part of my life when some participants told me that my size and lack of ability did not matter as long as my spirit was there - in other words, someone "approved" what I was doing.

How confusing it must be for my inner self that I am not always conscious of, this constant back and forth of "Let us do this" and "Let us stop doing this", all by driven by this vague sense of seeking out the approval of others to really seem to commit to something.  Carried out long enough, it means that I will never really do a tenth of the things that I desire as I will always be seeking the approval of others to do what I want to do.

And that is really the rub - not the picking up of activities or varied interests but this constant and nagging sense that I need someone else to sign off on the activities to commit to them.  I continue to find myself trapped in a need for someone else to make me feel better about myself and my decisions.

(Note:  I am incredibly uncomfortable as I write this, a sense of turmoil and wanting to turn away present.  Probably means I am on the right track.)

How to combat this?  Strike at the root, not the branches.  The activities are hardly the issue at hand - the fact that I continue to seek the approval of others long after it is relevant is.

Somewhere in here, there is a very small boy continuing to ask others to like him and approve of him.  How do I tell him that it is okay to just be about doing - with no-one's approval needed?

Permanence and Boredom

Sometimes familiarity breeds not contempt but boredom.

I really wonder why this is.  Ironically we have a culture where reliability and durability are things which are desired but seem  more and more to be out of reach goals.  Our entertainment, our marriages, our entertainment, sometimes our very lives seem built on this dichotomy of permanence as a desirable but not one we actually intend to practice.

Why? I do not wonder if part of it is simply the fact that we do not see true value in permanence.

Permanence - in relationships, in jobs, in societies - is often the exact opposite of novelty:  it can be boring.  It can come to be expected.  The things that at one time seemed novel and exciting come to be expected, if not demanded.  The water works every day and so we first begin to rely on it and then expect it to work, in fact becoming angry if it does not: we forget that in parts of the world running water is a novelty, not a permanent fixture.  We start doing something for our spouse or significant other because we want to; the behavior comes to be expected to the point that when it is not done, it is as if a major tragedy occurred.  We take on extra tasks at work in hopes of advancement; we find that this work has now become expected of our current role - along with everything else we were doing.

And so we become bored with what we have.  We look to things to move beyond that permanence to "spice it up" - or we simply collapse within our souls. slowly becoming crushed under the level of expectations we have allowed to build up until sometimes it feels that we are merely another item in the area, like the coffee pot or printer that is used when needed.

How can this problem be solved?  I wish I knew.  It is like a car - you never really think about its operations until it suddenly dies and you need it to go somewhere.  Your entire world is suddenly focused upon one particular item and how it is not working.  Maybe you go through a quick list in your head of all the things you think you should have done but did not - and perhaps promise yourself that if only the car will work, you will take care of these things right away.

A closing thought:  if we celebrated and treasure the permanent and reliable and truly treasured them as much as the new and novel, what would our lives look like?  More importantly, what would the lives of others look like?

The Power of Being Ourself

Sometimes I think that we forget about the power of being ourself.

Oh, I am always myself, you might argue.  I make a habit and practice of only being myself.  I do not conform myself to those around me.  I am a rugged individualist in an age of electronic uniformity.

And that is probably true at some level for all of us.  But something happens, something a bit insidious, especially when we start to become involved in the lives of other people:  we start not being ourselves.

Some of it is probably natural, of course- after all, we are involved in relationships where we have to change a little to make the relationship go well.  Such is the nature of human interactions.  But what I am more concerned about are the parts and things we lose - perhaps not lose so much as set aside.  Why?  Because we begin to fear that if we practice this or that or do this or that, we will become less attractive to the others involved.  And once we have been involved in a friendship or relationship that is meaningful, we can become attached to it in such a way that we are willing to let parts of ourselves go.

And this is foolish.

Why?  Because we forget that part of the reason that we are in this friendship or relationship is what bring to the relationship.  Not just ourselves - our feelings, our skills and habits, our quirks.  These create the unique bundle that makes "us".  And being "us" gives a power like no other because there is (statistically) no-one like us.

But we forget this.  And so over time the people involved begin to lose interest because we are less and less ourselves and more and more a homogenized person.  We become desperate for the relationship and so we become focused on the relationship, not ourselves in the relationship and what we contribute.  Conversations narrow down to a few things - including the relationship  - and we no longer talk of swordsmanship or a movie or how lavender is our favorite plant.  And then we wonder why we feel we have lost a connection with the relationship.

There is a power in being ourself - not some sort of mystical power that will propel us through a wall or make us fly, but a gentle power which allows us to relate, accomplish, and be a valuable part of any relationship.  The only one that can ultimately take it from us is ourselves.  The good news is the only one that can also reclaim it is ourselves.

Be unique.  Be powerful.  Be yourself.

Never Really Ours

We sometimes claim ownership to things that are not ours.

Oh, we know the usual items.  Too often we claim credit for something we were slightly involved in or for someone that we tangentially know.  We do not really mean anything evil by it of course - we are not one of those people claiming stolen valor, for example - but we are almost instinctively drawn in by the fact that people are paying attention to it and if we are at all involved, we want a little bit of the attention as well.  It feels good. And after all, we were somehow involved, right?

But there is another kind of ownership we are quick to claim sometimes, an ownership of things that really are not ours but we wish they were.

It is a gray area.  It is not as if we are precisely lying - after all, we usually have some relationship to the thing in question - and often times the thing or people involved never know that we really think that.  And we may never verbally admit to anyone that it exists - it may only dwell in the recess of our heart, a secret thing that we lay claim.

The difficulty, of course, is that we actually never owned the thing.

It is a difference - a big difference.  It is the difference between actually having the money in hand to purchase something and telling someone "I can get the money to purchase the thing" when you are not sure you have it.  It is the difference between definitively having a date versus having the concept of possibly talking to the person about having coffee.  It is the difference between having the job offer and telling others you have a job offer when in fact you have only had a first interview.

It is often the distance between fantasy and reality.

Why?  Sometimes it is simply harmless, the sort of silly fantasy or wishful thinking that simply wishes a situation to be different in our life - that we are something, or know something or someone.  Sometimes it is less harmless:  we feel we do not have the ability or courage to actually do the thing and so hope that acting as if we did will make it so (this may work for changing our own behavior, but seldom in this case).  And sometimes it is desperation that we desperately need something to be different or better in our lives and so we grasp at straws with hands wide open, hoping that such a thing slightly grasped is the same as something actually grasped.

But it never is in any case.  The thing - be it an object or a relationship, a person or an experience - was never really ours.  We perhaps believed it to be, acted as if it was, told others that it was - but it simply was not.  Our minds, our hearts, and our souls perhaps created a reality where there was really nothing but fleeting images and  happy wishes.

It was never really ours.  But sometimes we certainly act as if it was.

A Fog of Our Own Devising

I wonder how many times we bring our own confusion upon ourselves.

Too often I think we like to believe that we are surrounded by a fog of living.  We believe that it is similar to the so-called Fog of War, that confusion that is well documented in the midst of military action where all becomes confused and unclear in the reality of explosions and death.  We look around us at the confusing set options and circumstances that we often find ourselves in and find that we, too, seemed to be lost in a mist of events, uncertain at times of what is truly going on and who we are truly with and what we should really be doing.

At least, that is the way the seems to us.  But does it seem that way to others?

I wonder if it that is fact not true, that the fog that we find ourselves too often ensconced in is something of our own making.  We have a grand tendency to confuse our own lives, to put up obstacles where none exist and to walk into walls that are clear to everyone around us.  We feel ourselves to be trudging through a mist we can barely see through, hands held straight out as we try and make our way.  To all around us, it must often look as if we are playing blind man's bluff in the daylight for no particular reason.

Often we lack the ability to see ourselves and the situations we are in clearly, completely, honestly.  This is part of what it means to be human.  We are a bundle of experiences and emotions, filtering the world in a way that no-one else can quite do.  That can be quite a powerful thing - after all, at some level all forms of art are the interpretation of an individual of the world around them.  But it also means that we can see problems that others simply cannot and create issues where none exist - things which are very really to us indeed but only because of the fact that we make them real.  And so we end up wandering through a fog which we have created, a mist which makes the easy difficult and simple confusing and the hard almost unsolvable.

Is there a solution to this fog?  Surely there is.  If this was a meteorological discussion, I would simply say that the sun or wind eventually drive the fog away.  And in this sense God, or a good friend, can often serve the same function, driving away the confusion and helping us to see things for what they really are.  Removing the fog helps us to see the true obstacles for what they are and remove those cobwebs of unreality from clogging our vision.

But here is my problem:  sometimes it feels as if God and friends are not enough.  Because there are times when, although the weather is clear and splendid, the fog always comes rolling back in.

Higher Value

So my week of training on Lean Principles of Manufacturing is completed.  Overall not a bad way to spend a week learning.  The thing that this has brought home to me is the importance of making the most of the time that have - not only by trying to do things more efficiently and effectively, but by choosing the right things to be doing.

This is nothing new, of course - Stephen Covey made a career (well deserved because he was a fine communicator) around these concepts:  Figure out the important things, then do them.  I have read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People several times yet in never really seemed to take hold.  That is beauty of universal concepts though:  one can keep trying different venues until you find something that clicks.

That said, what are my higher values?  I confronted this issue on the weekend when, after having accomplished a great deal on Saturday, I still did not feel like I had "done" anything.  When asked by Snowflake, I commented that I felt that I had not done the highest value things I could have accomplished that day.  I did a little better yesterday (interestingly, a higher value activity seems to be planning, something that we always justify not making time for) but still did not get everything done I should have gotten done.

I need to work on this (obviously).  Time is the great limiting factor and large chunks of my time (at least right now) are taken up with things that I would argue do not have the highest value in my life (other than paying the bills, of course).  That is okay, maybe for the first time in a long time:  I now have a rubric whereby I can take the activities, judge them, and then figure out how to make them even more beneficial to me.  If, as was presented, 50% of the activities at any company are waste (not value added, not improving the product, not willing to be paid for by the customer) can this be any less true of my life?

One goal:  Every time I undertakes something from now one I need to ask myself:  is this the Highest Value Activity I can possibly be doing right now for the product at hand - ultimately, my life?

Let us make it a goal never to spend our time on lower value activities again.  Life is too bereft of time, the stuff of which life is made.

Furuyama Blade

Mirrored katana
reflects my face; the hamon's
waves softly wash my soul.