COIN FLIPS, INCOMING SNOWBALLS and PUNCTUATED MOMENTS
Friday, April 2, 2021 - daily column #6716
Gazing out hopefully at anyone’s futures, or amplified panorama, or peering down into the proverbial wretched abyss, eventually becomes less of a crystal-ball gaze and more like rewinding past misadventures punctuated with joyous moments.
My sense is that most of us don’t venture or adventure very far from where we’ve been or who we’ve been all our lives. Circumstances can change the frequency and locale of those forks in our roadshow, but I don’t believe the timing or location has much to do with how we make our choices when we reach those forks because we react based on urgency or lack of it, old habits – both healthy and unhealthy and adrenaline.
If we pile our problems like cord-wood, we could build a snow fort, the kind kids build, our place to hide out and shield themselves from incoming snowballs. And while seeing problems as that pile, we don’t address them one by one as tasks/problems to solve, but more as a pile of difficulties defined more by the size of the pile (or deficit, or shortfall) than to dig deep into each element. A single visible solvable problem is easy to see, address, or trip over.
On the other hand, a large pile always seems too daunting to tackle today. It can wait. I don’t think it makes much difference what the problems are, but the size/age of the pile might be; it’s the underlying accumulated troubles to wrestle. And every distraction, important or trivial, is easily rationalized as too necessary to ignore, and ‘must be done now,’ not so much because that one thing is so important, but because it is so convenient to avoid the pile …
Every day we can alternatively choose to see every large volume of anything as an opportunity pile from which we can launch our next failed enterprise, our next failed idea, our next failed nightmare …
But aren’t these views of failings and opportunities like the heads/tails of every coin?
The mistakes I make most, I believe, are when I give up trying.
Each year this time used to be ‘another religion-focused long weekend to ignore;’ Passover and Easter have never mattered to me much. I like food, I like holidays …
But sometimes holiday weekends are great for project work, whether it’s digging out of a problem or launching some daring-do, it’s also a great time for remembering my friend Barry who died two years ago – well remembered and still profoundly missed.