Primary

I’ve been having trouble with flow.

If I allow myself to feel too bad about it, I fear that I’ve run out of things to write about, that I’ve dried up, that this is the end of the road for my fledgling writing endeavour, and it’s over before I’ve reached 100 posts. I haven’t counted, but I don’t think I’m there yet. If I allow myself to feel frustrated about it, I start blaming. I blame school for having too much volume and taking up so much of my time, I blame my body for being in discomfort, I blame the dog for staring at me weird, I blame god for not existing, I blame video games for being so much fun, etc, etc.

The funny thing about blame, though, is that if you’re using it, it’s blame’s fault, and guess where that leads.

None of these issues will trigger the end of existence, nor will the fact that I have fallen behind a completely self-imposed schedule even matter that much in the grand scale of things. But I never concern myself with the grand scale of things because I can’t control it, because functionally, it doesn’t really even exist. All I could ever do is impotently react to “the news”, but my outrage doesn’t positively affect anything, and I refuse to be endlessly baited. So I concern myself with little things that I hold close to me, and that I have at least some measure of control over.

I believe that we add to the world only what we show through our behaviour, what we concentrate on, so I try to concentrate on what I love. I love my family, I love my girlfriend, I love writing, I love making, I love learning, and I love me. When my relationship with these relationships become fraught for some reason-which they all do-I love to work toward solutions.

What can be done right now to lead this situation into a more positive outcome? How do we achieve a win-win resolution to these challenges? How would the person that I want to be react to this clusterfuck?

The answers to these questions is almost never massive action, at least that’s not what it looks like from the outside, or, at least I don’t think it does. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s not my primary concern anyway, because that doesn’t answer even the smallest of questions.

I clearly remember the moment that I learned about the lowest common denominator of fractions. (It also never occurred to me until now how much plywood Dad used making the dividers that separated our home-school desks into little cubicles. That would be very cost prohibitive these days, considering how expensive plywood has become.) My math PACE (Packet of Accelerated Christian Education) was grey. The plywood dividers were Forest Green. I wanted to go outside, but I also wanted to reduce these fractions down to their lowest.possible.value. so that they could be put to the use of finding solutions.

I liked Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for the same reason, it’s reductionist. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” makes it sound like there are other people in the war, but it’s not so. You’re only ever left with yourself when it comes to how you prepare for, and react to, your challenges. My old boss, John Allen, used to say, among many, many other things, that “If you can be ten minutes late, you can be ten minutes early.” I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever heard at 8:15 in the morning, but he was right. It’s such a small matter of effort to be on time, to be consistent, to be self-respectful, to be honest, to exhibit virtue. It’s a small matter each time, but there are so many opportunities every day to choose your behaviour, that it’s probably impossible to get them all right. That’s what compassion is for, it’s for looking back on your last meeting, your last day, your messy past years and saying, “Huh, that could have been handled better.”, and working with that knowledge, and the small parts that that you couldn’t leave behind, to begin again.

I can keep up, but I’m excited to do more than that. If I’m going to be a fraction, I want to be one like this.