Warmish, and certainly damp. Although the national forecast shows clear for a while, I expect some minor precip at some point today or tomorrow, if only because it feels like it. It was not bad at all yesterday, with highs in the sun in the low 80s. Felt like spring.
I did get out of the house and made my trash run. Went by my storage unit too. Didn’t get half what I wanted to get done, done. {wow, that’s an awkward construction}
It’s much easier to not do things than to do them. Especially when you are tired, or bored, or melancholic… or you have unbalanced humours and too much black bile in your spleen. Or it could be the siren song of teh intarwebs. Whatever. Slacked off again and got too little done. The bill for that WILL come due, and be higher because of it.
It’s hard to maintain momentum and forward progress. My whole working life was very project oriented, and the nature of the work was very ‘bursty’. Work hard for a while, then have time off. Even working full time for BigCorp I was traveling to customer sites where I’d work, or the office in Canadia, or fighting to get my expense and travel report in on time…. all of which took bursts of hard work, focus, and sometimes dogged determination to just get through it. But then there would be some time where nothing was required of me or the level was so low I could phone it in. Sprints rather than marathons (although the sprints could last as long as a marathon), quick anaerobic strength moves, not aerobic workouts.
Lately though, and coming after 3 years of not normal, it’s been a never ending slog. Anyone else noticed we don’t do the ‘what have you done to prep this week’ topic any more? Because we’ve been living the disaster for the last three years. But this one is really fading to black, despite the spasms and paroxysms of the powers that be. Problem is, no formal end. No closure. No doing the expense report, AAR, “lessons learned” meeting. No putting the files away and cleaning up the workspace… and moving on.
But there is another disaster coming. There is ALWAYS going to be another disaster coming. To riff off of JimB, the end will be ‘nearerer’ again sooner or later. Flooding and mudslides in Cali, and an earthquake, barely ping our awareness. Tornadoes and freak storms in the mid-South hardly register. Maybe we’re all fatigued, disaster fatigued. That would be bad by the way, because we wouldn’t be thinking straight, we’d be mentally pliable and subject to manipulation. We’d be looking for someone to make it end. And that ain’t good.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Kinda making this up as I go along today, but I think some of us (me) need to reset our baseline expectations. Accept that what we’ve got now IS normal, and move on to living in it, and getting ready for whatever comes next. Just about everything is harder now, takes longer, and costs more than 3 years ago. But humans are nothing if not adaptable, and adept at telling ourselves stories that justify or excuse or motivate. In a sense we will our personal reality into shape around us. We enter and leave relationships, surround ourselves with people and things, spend our lives doing stuff, and shape our experience of the world.
The world goes on doing its thing regardless of what we’re doing. The elephants will dance while we mice hope we can avoid being stepped on. And one day we realize that the dancing changed the shape of the world around us. There are still mice in the world though even after the elephants have trampled everything flat.
And mice gotta eat, so stack some food. Stack the means to get more. Stack dancing shoes, if you think that will help. Stack books on living with elephants while avoiding their big stompy feet. And get ready to get through the NEXT disaster.
nick
