I’ve been working through a bunch of my past lists, trying to pull out various things that would make for good “bucket list” accomplishments over the next five years. I was looking at what I’m planning to do for exercise, and so I might as well group them all together.
6. Walking. I’m going to start off small for the first while, aiming to do 40 walks of 2K each over the five years. I’m also going to try to work up to 15 walks of 5K each. Shouldn’t be too hard, although a bit back-ended. And, near the end? Five walks of 10K each. Fingers crossed.
7. Workouts. I’ll be restarting my workouts shortly, and I want to complete 300 in 5 years. That’s not that big, only five per month. Hopefully, I’ll finish early.
8. Archery. I liked archery as a kid, did it a bit in high school too, and I have often thought of doing one of the archery leagues or courses through the RA Centre. And, since part of my goal is to find some activities that I can do with others and attempt to increase my social connections, archery seems like an okay option.
9. Golf. My back is not in great shape, and it may take me a while, but I’d like to go golfing five times, aka at least once a year. I’m tempted to make a commitment to five different courses, but I’m not sure how realistic that is, particularly if I end up going by myself. If I can impose on my father-in-law and son, we might be able to go do 2-3 courses around Peterborough and the cottage.
10. Axe throwing. I actually tried this when I was a teen, just out at the cottage. It was never safe enough to do it for real for any length of time, but it seemed fun. More hatchet throwing at the time, I guess. Anyway, I like the idea of trying it, and if I can find a way to make it a social outing, all the better.
11. Bowling. I hesitate to plan to join a league, although I could use the extra motivation for exercise. Jacob and Andrea don’t enjoy it enough to go regularly, so I’ll probably go by myself. I’ll put it down for 30 times in 5 years, which is still significant. I need to have my back in better shape than it is now, but I’ll get there.
I’ll likely add other exercise options. I’d love to commit to something more martial arts related, or yoga even. Or perhaps even more activities in groups. Darts, obstacle courses, something else. I don’t have any ideas that really resonate with me, but I’ll go with these ones for now. I only have about 30 out of the 60 pre-planned, although I haven’t done all my travel ones yet. Not exactly anyway. Onward!
By some amazing coincidence, my planning is towards age 60 and there are exactly 60 months in between! That presents an opportunity for some freakin’ awesome symmetry and ritual around the number 60. I have a laundry list of to-do items, old bucket list items to reconsider, and even a list from my sister for her 60 items at turning 60. Plus, my original 50×50 list can inspire me.
So let’s kick off the shenanigans for 60 things to do before I turn 60 (60×60).
[Editor’s note: I flipped the order of #1 and 2 in my tracker, so planning my life now comes before planning my death! hehehe]
1. Plan my life. I mentioned in a previous post that my current personal development model no longer works for me. I’m using it as my featured image for this post, but things have shifted around within the different colour energies for me. I should update that. A new framework, if you will. That isn’t just about the framework; it’s about ensuring I have the right mental platform to get the most out of my next 25 years.
2. Plan my death. Wait, what? No, that’s not a typo. If I had to guess, I’d say my life expectancy is around 80 years. So another 25 to go. And as I see others experiencing a decline in their final years, I find certain things unacceptable. Things that I don’t consider worth living through. Mental decline is at the top of the list. So I want to figure out what circumstances would add up to not only a DNR note on my medical file, but also likely something resembling MAID. While my faculties are still with me. It’s still theoretical, but not as theoretical as it once was. So, sometime in the next five years, I’m going to figure that out.
3. Plan my retirement. In a little over 1500 days, I’m going to retire from the public service. I won’t retire from the field, at least not in terms of my writing, as there is a bunch of stuff I still want to write about. But I want to not only have good plans to get me to that date with what I want to accomplish still in my career, but I also want detailed plans for post-retirement. In my previous post (5 more trips around the sun – part 2: An inventory, not a pity party), I mentioned the balance for friendships between casual friends, friends, close friends, besties and family. From some of my early reading about retirement, I know that many people dramatically miss the casual and regular friends that disappear when they leave a proximity-based social network. In short, you lose all the human interaction you had on a daily basis when you depart from work. Just as you might have felt loss from elementary school in the summer, or when graduating high school, college, university, previous jobs, etc. Your daily supply of “Hey, how’s it going? Okay. You? Staying out of trouble. You?” didn’t seem like it would matter, but you noticed its absence. Part of my planning for new activities in the next five years will be ensuring a network exists when the old work-based one disappears.
4. Read 300 books. That one is going to be a bit tough, but 5×60 seems like a good goal. First on the list? Crime and Punishment. Well, maybe second, since I just finished Mike Brown’s book about killing Pluto. Andrea and Jacob got me an updated Kindle for my birthday, although I’m not sure how old my first one is. According to Amazon, I registered it on January 13, 2011, but I’m not sure if that is the date I registered it with Amazon writ large, or just registered with Amazon Canada. It served me well for 12 years, but I really wanted backlighting and touchscreen options. Not enough to buy one and override the existing one, which was still functional, but I guess I talked about it enough that Andrea and Jacob wanted to shut me up. Anyway, the new reading goal is set. Let’s see how I do. There will be a LOT of series in there. I think I’m going to throw a wrinkle in, though — 20% or 60 of them have to be non-fiction. Gulp. I am looking forward to reading NF on a touchscreen, though, as it is WAY easier to take notes with highlighting, etc.
5. Write 5 books. I know, I know. Holy crap. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of me, I’m not sure what will. I know three of the titles, have basic outlines for them, and I have some ideas for about another 8 that will need to be prioritized. And for the wrinkle? One of them has to be fiction. Yep, that should get the juices flowing.
That’s a pretty impressive set of goals. Some were obvious, some not so much. But they resonate with me pretty strongly. So, let’s get this party started. And that’s only the first 5.
Before I get to part 2 of my plans for the future, I want to digress for a moment. I find it fascinating sometimes to see how an individual blog post progresses. Much of the time, before I go to start writing, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to say. I’ve thought about it; I know the major points I want to make; I have a rough mental outline.
But as I start to write, something odd happens. My neurons fire in a different way than I expected. I start writing A, B, C, and D, and it becomes more like A, B, C(2), E, H, and L. Or perhaps simply X, Y and Z. I end up somewhere I didn’t intend to go with the post.
Sometimes the reason is simple: I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. I thought I did, but it wasn’t fleshed out in my head enough. But other times, like with the previous post, it just went in a different direction because as I picked at a sub-aspect of the post, I found resonance of a different sort. Almost like I knew what I wanted to say but wasn’t entirely sure WHY I wanted to say it, and as I wrote, my intentions revealed themselves to me. As a result, I went with the flow, changing the direction of what I wanted to talk about.
As a reader, you might suspect it from time to time; other times, you won’t see it at all. For me, it is REAL easy to tell. First and foremost? The title of my post has to change. When I start writing, I put in a topic, but as I near the finish line for the post, I go back and read it in conjunction with the near-final text and realize my title has almost nothing to do with what I wrote. Secondly, it is almost always part 1 of a series of posts, not by intent but by the result…I finished the post and realized it was too long, so I cut it into smaller chunks, but in so doing, it often becomes clear that it is too long simply because something else was on my mind, hidden to my conscious side, and I ended up writing about something entirely different. A prologue that alters the context and direction of the post. Which leaves me calling it part 1 before I start writing about the original topic.
In my previous post, I talked about my mindset over the last 2 months or so. The mental struggle that I’ve been feeding, waiting for my birthday to arrive so I could kick off my new adventure in goal-setting, a symbolic and ritualistic endeavour. That struggle could have been one line, maybe two. Instead, I wrote a whole post about my mood, a previous pity party I threw that got me here, and my dark passenger / shadow self that hides inside and helps me endure, even embrace, isolation when my light-bearing side craves connection. It is and was a prologue to the “inventory” I mention below. The backstory for the hero within my personal story, if a hero can even be said to exist yet. Whether it’s the hero I need or the hero I deserve, that remains to be seen.
I had intended this “series” to be a short opening and then the grand “tadaaaa” reveal of my new goals. Instead, I started talking about dark passengers and now the foundational elements for composing the ritual and choosing my new goals. As I said in the previous post, much of what I base it on overlaps with self-help books, addiction groups, and even yoga mantras. I am not unique or original in that regard, alas. Join me as I review some of my key precepts.
A. Know the limits of my span of control
As much as I want to exert my will on the universe, and bring my resources to bear on the things that I CAN control, shit will still happen. We’ll end up with a housefire that leaves a thin layer of powder all over the first floor and part of the second floor that will linger for months, no matter what we do. Other people’s behaviour at work will interfere with my carefully laid plans and vision. I can’t control any of that. I can only control myself, and sometimes, not even that, as much as I try. I know that standing still is rarely a good option for me; I need to keep pushing myself forward or my dark passenger will make plans with the squirrels in my head, and I will backslide. It’s like a constant current pushing me out to sea; I need to keep swimming or drift.
Sometimes my dark passenger takes up more resident space in my brain and heart than I would like. I don’t usually give it a public license to roam, but I know it is still there. Sometimes it is even helpful. Like with the house fire. I didn’t have any hesitation. As soon as I saw it, I knew to get Andrea and Jacob out of the house and to have them call 911, while I assessed whether it was small enough to get completely out with the fire extinguisher while waiting for the fire department to arrive. My dark passenger removes fear or uncertainty and allows me to act when I need to, decisively even. Active energy to love and hate at the same time.
Sometimes it is beneficial to move forward assuming no limits, that I can control all things, and nothing will stop me (aka f*** the universe); other times, I need to recognize that there are limits and I will not be perfect, far from it. I hesitate to call it AA’s “day by day” approach or a reflection of the sports metaphor of playing “one game at a time”, but it’s a little like that. Plans help, but the universe doesn’t really care what I am planning. Heck, sometimes it feels like it is actively trying to block me. As long as I know man plans while the universe laughs, I know the end is not linear.
B. Everything starts with an inventory, not a pity party
Various programs often start with doing a “moral inventory” of your life. It is more like turning my analytical talents inward with an almost viciousness or ruthlessness to ensure no falsehoods remain, only truth. To burn off any lies that I might tell myself to protect my Id or Ego. That would have to include looking at the events of the last two months, some of which were chosen by me and some by the universe. It is akin to doing an x-ray of my raw psyche. Who I am and what I choose to do. No illusions. I’m checking the state of all the different energies and how to rebalance them.
But I am really struggling with this post. I have written the next section 3 times from scratch, with 3 attempts in between to just rewrite and edit it more towards what I want to say. Each time, it has looked like I was saying “I have no friends, wah wah wah” or “all my friends suck”, neither of which is true nor what I’m trying to say. The nuances are important, and I haven’t been able to find them.
Let’s back up a minute. I know that I am a cool blue analytical introvert by nature, meaning that I live inside my head more than on the cutting edge of spontaneity. I am not social by nature, and if I’m in a large group, I feel like I’m surrounded by yellow-energy vampires, sucking me dry with each passing moment. Yet what has been triggering me of late is a lack of social connectedness to others, and I’ve been trying to piece together a way to explain how it is “different” from previous points in my life.
I’ll invent a metaphor for the post, although I’m not totally sure it holds together. I’ll start by classifying social “interlocutors” as falling into one of five categories:
Casual friends — regular interaction, no real closeness;
Friends — often location-based (work, school), these are the people you hang out with regularly in those locations aka your peeps;
Close friends — those that have transcended a boundary like work or school to be people you hang out or bond with after the proximity transactions;
Best friends — relatively obvious, the ones that you can open your soul to and discuss whatever is going on; and,
Family/love.
Lots of people blend those categories or collapse them into one level. Everyone in the world is their best friend! Yeah, not me.
When I was in elementary school, I had probably a 20 / 30 / 10 / 10 / 30% split. Family dominated, one best friend, two close friends, not much in the others except at school, but I was far from the life of the party.
When I went into high school, that mix probably shifted to a 10 / 30 / 20 / 20 / 20% mix. Few simple interactions, some key friends at school, 1 friend outside school, a best friend in and out, and my family down a bit.
When I went to Trent, the ratio was probably 5 / 20 / 20 / 0 / 75%. I had a serious girlfriend who was initially my best friend and then was just family/love. Most of my time went to the long-distance relationship.
At UVic, something shifted. I knew going in that I was likely to be fairly homesick as I’m not good at making friends, and I didn’t know anyone there. Out of desperation, I corralled a small posse of misfit toys who like me tended not to have a huge entourage. Two were really close, but I’d hesitate to quite call them besties. Meanwhile, my family’s stuff waned with the distance. The ratio doesn’t fit as well, but I’d say 10 / 40 / 40 / 0 / 10% would be close. High on friends, low on anything else. Yet when I left UVic, they faded away, as they had from elementary school, high school and Trent. They were primarily location-based friendships.
In my late 20s and early 30s, something odd happened. I got 3 best friends. One male, two females. With the one male, we went out for dinner regularly, and went to hockey games, a true buddy. We talked about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the price of tickets for 67s games. One of the women was a work-friend initially, but there was a resonance of spirit that we both felt, and we would have really long conversations, including one overnight sitting in her car after coffee shops and restaurants had closed. One of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, and I doubt I remember any of the topics, just the experience. It wasn’t romantic, it was just pure utter friendship. A third was with another woman, and over time, it changed. We had long conversations too, and at one point, there was romantic interest on my part, with none on hers. Only one of those friendships really continues today, and while we will always be close, that bestie status would likely never repeat.
Yet even within that period, I had another 5-6 close friends that transcended the location-based friendships. The mix was probably 10 / 10 / 30 / 40 / 10. A very different look and feel to my life.
Fast-forward to now? It’s probably a somewhat diminished 10 / 20 / 10 / 0 / 60 ratio. An imbalance that is as much about choice, and spending time with Andrea and Jacob, as it is about a limit of social energy to devote beyond the basics.
I have close friends, some from long ago, some from now, and I could pick up the phone and call one, ask them to join me for a drink or something if I needed someone to talk to, and they would come. But it would be, umm, out of the ordinary to do that. We don’t really have that kind of relationship. We get together every now and then, someone’s in the area, there’s an event, something. But no regular interaction. Some close friends have dropped a bit to regular friends perhaps, and I have no real “bestie” contender. No one to just talk about my life with in passing, at least not outside of proximity situations. Some of that is the nature of adult friendships and life intervening, some of that is just the type of blue introvert that I am.
While Andrea and Jacob will always be my bestest of friends by a factor of 10, that’s not really what I’m talking about. If I sat on my butt, did absolutely nothing, tried to arrange nothing, just drifted along on Facebook etc., maybe the occasional blog, generally be passive / responsive only, my level of interaction would be pretty minimal. I’m not at the top of anyone’s speed dial to do something, particularly as I prefer 1:1 stuff rather than large groups.
This isn’t exactly new, though. Outside of my late 20s, when I had the windfall of close friendships, I’ve always been the instigator. During previous “inventories”, one thing I recognized was that I didn’t really have much in the way of guy friends. So I made a concerted effort on and off for about 5-8 years (depending on how you count them) to organize more outings with guys. I tried to organize what I called MMMMMM. Mid-Month Movie Madness for Men who like Meat. I tried to get a bunch of guy friends to go out for wings and a movie. Or drinks and a movie. Or dinner and a movie. Rarely could I get more than a couple to even nibble, and often no one would show. I tried various forms of that outing, maybe a bit more variety, a monthly dinner or something, no movie. Added women to see if couples would come. I could never get any sort of traction or critical mass. Eventually, I listened to my dark passenger’s advice and took the hint. I stopped trying. Every once in a while, I get this idea of doing a wing night at the house to try different Epicure sauces, get a bunch of guys together to hang out on the deck, nosh and natter, joke around. Maybe it’s a longing for the carefree days of my youth, where a bunch of friends and I would joke around at the house. Or hanging out at UVic. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. My dark passenger likes to point out it’s hard to be nostalgic for something you never really had, but I can delude myself occasionally. I wonder without resolution if I truly want that group of male friends or if I want to be the type of guy who has that group.
I feel compelled to say again that this is not a pity party. This is not “woe is me”; it’s just the reality of the connections I do or do not have. It’s not a slap at my friends; I’m not singing “Call Me, Maybe”. While the phrase “it is what it is” may be annoying, it’s also relatively accurate.
Where I go from there is part of the long-term planning. I could reach out to those close friends I have now, try to convert them into a bestie, find more time for them and ask for more time, try to expand one of them into the type of relationship I mean, but that’s not really quite right either.
I hate to rely on the outdated wisdom of Dale Carnegie or the simplistic psycho-babble of the Nike approach to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) of “Just Do It”, but the common wisdom out there is relatively linear and mathematical.
More interactions with people = more potential to find people with common interests.
More people with common interests = more potential to find friends
More friends = more potential to find close friends
More close friends = more chances to find a bestie
More chances at besties = more chance to make the connection I crave.
It’s a popular if simplistic model. Not quite “if you build it, he will come”, but a similar philosophy. And I tried it somewhat with astronomy. I joined RASC Ottawa. Attended meetings in person, volunteered to be the Star Party Coordinator, attended executive meetings, joined national committee, remain as the auditor for the financials, etc. In short, I got involved. And I got to level 3 of the math equation. I made some friends. Not any real close friends, but some good ones. I am not sure that I really have the personality that attracts people beyond that, I never have. It’s one of the limits of the model. If you go back to the Dale Carnegie method that looks like a used car salesman, I can find opportunities, but I can’t convert them into full sales. Astronomy might not have been the best choice, though — you tend to do a lot of it alone in the dark, it’s not truly a “group” event, although some others have made lifelong friends through the hobby. Others, not me.
Yet maybe I don’t need to. Maybe if I shift the current model from 10 / 20 / 10 / 0 / 60 to simply 15 / 25 / 20 / 0 / 40, that’s a better balance than I have now. I don’t really need to convert them to a bestie; maybe I just need more diversity in my interactions than I have now…more interactions, a few more regular location-based friends, a bit more time with close friends, and more freedom for Andrea and Jacob from their energy vampire. I can’t control if I make more close friends, but I can control making a better targeted effort.
One thing that I can watch out for though is that the activities that generate those interactions with others should probably be “ends” in and of themselves. In other words, going back to astronomy, I will do it because I like astronomy, and that’s enough. If I get more friendships out of it, that’s a bonus. I probably won’t end up with people regularly going for wings and beer to hang out, but that’s okay.
I just have to make sure I see the glass as half-full, not half-empty.
For the blue energy (analytical, introvert), I have more than my share of hobbies to focus on.
For green energy (intuitive, introvert), I think I need to siphon a bit of yellow-green energy over to the green a bit.
For red energy (analytical, extrovert), I’m going to siphon off a bit of yellow-red energy to get myself going, but it might take longer.
For the yellow energy (intuitive, extrovert), the current model really doesn’t work for me. I have to push more of the “creativity side”, I think.
I’m not sure this is the post I originally intended, but it is the one I ended up with when all was said and done. I am not sure yet why, though. It just is.
This week was my birthday. 55 trips around the sun. I’d like to say that I’m full of joy and mirth, but that would likely be more apt to be full of something else. I haven’t been rocking the hopeful vibe the last few months, but that’s life. I do, however, like ritual, symmetry, and symbolism, all of which can generate ideas that resonate with me. I’ve been blah for a while now as I waited for my birthday to symbolize the start of another attempt at changing my life trajectory into a slightly more elongated or off-axis orbit than it’s current flat spin.
The last few weeks, maybe even months
If you read my post earlier this week (Pushing through or squirming out from under), it may have seemed like a bit of a pity party. Don’t worry, it wasn’t. I know what that looks like, as I threw one about a month ago when I was struggling with my ongoing leg issues. The bathroom reno was done and I was attempting to enjoy a good tub soak.
For a picture none of you really want or need in your head, let’s start with the fact that I’m a big guy. In a normal-sized/normal-depth tub, like we had, it’s not exactly the best of experiences to take a bath. It’s more like wallowing than fully submerging, like in TV shows and movies. We had tried to find a good option with a deeper tub that was also a shelf/alcove style, not a stand-alone, and we did the best we could with what we had and what Andrea wanted it to look like too. So I gave the new tub a go, and well, to be honest, it kicked the crap out of my self-esteem, confidence, self-image, etc. I was not mentally prepared for it, I guess. I basically thought of it as, “well, we’ll see what’s it like, no big deal, just see if I like it”. I didn’t think of it in advance as something that might not “go well”.
At the time, my leg was giving me trouble with my shins. With past problems and my ongoing diabetes, I have wound care issues every time I get a scratch on my leg, which is easy to do. Compression socks help but don’t solve the problem; they can aggravate the issue…I might get away with a simple bandaid or something, but the compression socks can shift or rub during the day, and I can’t have it scratching at the surrounding tissue. It’ll just rub the skin clean off over time. So, I need some sort of barrier in between. The potential for having to do this will generally be with me for life, yay me. Anyway, it was looking like there was a potential for infection earlier in the week, I had gauze on it, but it and the bandages were “stuck” to the wound. I thought I would let the soak help loosen it, it didn’t work completely, but I managed to get it off, even if it took some new skin with it. I am still dealing with it several weeks later and likely will be until the fall; I’ll be doing wound care again with bandages, gauze, tape, etc., every few days.
Unfortunately, because of the location on my leg, I tend to need Andrea’s help to adjust/cover it effectively and efficiently. I confess that I hate that I need help with it, or rather, that I need Andrea’s help. She’s 46; she shouldn’t be reduced to wound-care nurse for an aging husband. She has her own stuff going on. For better or for worse, I know; but when you’re the cause of the worse, not that great a feeling.
Soooo, I needed her to help me that night with the wet-but-mostly-removed bandages, except I was in the bath. Not the most flattering of appearances or experiences, honestly. The only thing that I would have found more mortifying would likely have been if I’d soiled myself or something. Yeah, yeah, I know, it all happens. That doesn’t mean I want my wife to see me being an invalid. Then after that shame and she’d left, I tried to get out of the tub, and with my back bothering me, plus my weight plus a lack of handholds, it was…umm…challenging. Yeah, let’s go with that term. I felt like a giant pig wallowing in the mud who couldn’t get out. Pretty raw for the emotions. I got dried off, climbed into bed and asked Andrea to go elsewhere in the house for a while so I could basically lie there crying into my pillow for an hour. That was my pity party. It was a mental and emotional release, and maybe I needed that, but it has also been a mental yoke to haul around for the last few weeks. Letting my brain adjust to the new normal, at least my normal for now.
Best practices in managing my squirreldom
I feel like things have been piling up, as my squirrels have run around focusing on many negative things. I know what I’m experiencing, as I have been here before. And to tweak the old joke included on the West Wing at one point, I may be in a hole, but I’ve been here before, and I know the way out.
My exit door moves from time to time, and often the only way to find it is to shine a light into deep dark corners of my brain and soul to see what’s bothering me. Even if I can’t see the door, I know where it is hiding. It’s always, in a sense, near a recurring landmark. It’s right behind wherever my so-called dark passenger is standing.
If you’ve read the Dexter series of books about him being a vigilante serial killer of serial killers or watched the TV series, he basically uses the term dark passenger to refer to his dark inner demon. Don’t worry, I am not a serial killer. I just like the term dark passenger better than Carl Jung’s “Shadow”. But it is a combination of the parts of me that I choose to reject or repress. (How very Skin of Evil of me, for the STTNG crowd).
Over the last 2 months, my dark passenger has been eating away at my sense of self. My size. The experience with the bathtub. My leg and back problems. Feelings of isolation building off the inertia and domestic entropy of the last four years. Lack of close friends. Not comfortable doing stuff alone as much. It makes me irritable, quieter, and sometimes passive. It tells me to sit on the couch and binge-watch shows like Dexter. Castle. Blue Bloods. White Collar. And about another 15 to 20 that I nibble away at, even some that I’ve binged before. My dark passenger wants me alone and on my own, as it knows that the more isolated I become, the more I have to rely on it to get me through the day. A dark energy that can keep my feet moving forward, even if the light doesn’t enter as much.
At different times in my life, I’ve considered fully embracing that dark passenger. Sometimes because I didn’t feel like I had another option, other times because that dark passenger feels less deeply than my normal psyche does. Without diving too deep into the Jungian side of things, lots of people do it. You can see it in some of their comments or slogans — “I speak the truth, and some people can’t handle it”; “Well, this is the real me, and if you don’t like it, too bad.” There are a dozen other common ones where people basically say, “I’m going to let my dark passenger be an asshole to others before they can be an asshole to me!”. It offers strength, which is why many choose to lean on it like a crutch. But, if you know yourself, you can ultimately see that it’s a choice, not a default.
It’s not a choice I like, which is why I try actively to avoid it. Yet the last four years, combined with my own internal issues, produced a fairly isolated existence outside of my immediate family. For the last couple of months, I’ve let my dark passenger tire himself out, binging TV shows while my inner squirrels run around unchecked until they need a nap.
Like everyone else on the planet, though, I want more. And if I want it, I need to go find it. I always have to shove my dark passenger to the side and stop obsessing about stupid things at work, home, or wherever. Setbacks that really don’t matter. If my only way out is through, the door handle tends to be made up of my goals in life. Something tangible that I can grab onto and pull myself through and back into the light.
Yet as I reach for them, trying to find handholds and pick up some common themes, the foundation I stand on is generally made up of common principles from self-help books, control issues, various alcoholics anonymous-like programs, etc. I don’t go for the “give yourself over to God” approach, which is not really my style. But there are elements that resonate with me. Ritual, symmetry and symbolism are all ways to reinforce the new mindset, hence why I target big dates like birthdays or New Year’s Day to trigger new beginnings.
I’ll talk about some of them tomorrow, before getting on to my actual goals for the next five years.
As most people who have read this blog from time to time already know, I’m big on time management techniques, various options for to-do lists and tracking tasks. I like to set ambitious annual goals, and then monitor them throughout the year. Some years turn out better than others. Whereas many people set resolutions and do nothing about them after the first day, I’m pretty committed to most of mine, even if other things get in the way. Having a to-do list is no substitute for having a life, so I try not to remain a slave to the process.
But I do see certain patterns in my successes and failures. Sometimes it is that I am being way too ambitious with my yearly goals. Or that I wasn’t narrowing it down from my master list to just what I should focus on in shorter bursts. Or that larger projects made it seem like there was no progress when, in fact, I was still whittling away at the sub-elements.
Or, as was more often the case, I was being way too harsh on my lack of large-scale progress and not celebrating the wins enough before moving on to what was left on the list.
Yet one pattern is not only obvious as an obstacle in implementation, it also affects my morale and motivation.
I call it my domino problem
On a grand scale, it initially looks no different than a large project with many small moving parts. Some of them you have to do before you do the rest. A GANTT chart can help show interdependencies on a project, and for simple projects in a company, for example, it makes it clear that you need input from the designers before you can do marketing, and you have to finalize the design before moving on to implementation. But the real trick is not only to see the obvious progression from A to B to C to D, but also to realize that D needs C to finish before it can start, which might require B and A to finish even earlier. It’s working backward from something big to identify what has to be done before the other pieces can move forward.
For me, I’ll walk you through the mechanics of a recent challenge, but it is the type of challenge I see regularly.
It was simple, I wanted to clean up the garage. If we look at some of the sub-pieces, we start to see the interdependency with other stuff.
We have bicycles and scooters. In the past, I would mount them on the wall in the winter, and had a shelving and bracket system setup to hold them. Now, they go to the shed. This means that in the fall, I have to take everything out of the shed to get the snowblower out, preferably at the same time that I’m swapping winter tires so the summer ones can be stored there too. And then put the bikes in last. But that also means I have to have the snow tires swapped over to “finalize the storage” — not just move them around but to actually schedule the tire swap. Plus, there are a few other things from the backyard that get put in the same shed for the winter. Relatively normal, right?
Except I also have a bunch of tools that weren’t very well sorted in the garage. And the crappy DIY shelving I had up for the bikes was not what I needed for storing stuff when the bikes were gone. A couple of years ago, we bought some simple metal shelving to go in the same space instead. Which meant ripping all the old stuff out and getting rid of it. Some of it through buy nothing sites, some through the garbage. Some of it went to a friend who does a bunch of woodworking and carpentry projects (I’m sure his wife was THRILLED to have a load of wood to add to their house, although he has a full separate shed and working garage area to keep it in).
Sorting the tools also meant finding loose collections around the house where I had an extra screwdriver or two upstairs or downstairs and moving them all together into the garage.
I also have my telescope storage cabinet. With a lot of the smaller stuff stored temporarily in the basement so I could sort through accessories as part of 2 or 3 other small projects. But if I was cleaning up the garage, I had to find a good spot for the cabinet AND whether there were any “overflow” requirements for it. What did I have room for or not?
So I cleaned up all my telescope accessories. Which, of course, were in the basement with a bunch of other stuff I’ve been working on sorting to clean up the basement. And, of course, as I’m sorting through that stuff, it doesn’t make any sense to just move the extra stuff around when what I really want is to touch-and-decide-once. So I started the larger sort of electronic stuff that I was planning to weed this winter. A bunch of e-waste, much of which Andrea is offering for free on FB groups. Always a bit warming to see something go to someone else who might have a use for it, rather than it going to the landfill or melt-down recyclers.
The basement deadline
For the basement, I gave myself a deadline of sorts. It wasn’t a “date” per se, but rather that I couldn’t play with my new 3D printer until the basement was sorted and purged. Yet there are other dominoes in that too.
I have a TV in the basement, although I haven’t been running it for the last 2y, just using the one upstairs. I have a stand for it to sit on, that Andrea and Jacob assembled for me last winter, and I’ll be putting 2-3 old video game systems into the setup, along with a VCR (temporarily so I can copy over some personal videos) and a Blu-Ray DVD player (because I have a crapload of DVDs, already sorted btw).
I’ve sorted the various video game systems into different bins, but I know I have too many video cables left over from purchases, and I can easily purge most of it. Except I don’t know which ones until I get everything set up at the same time. As I’ve been doing the purge of the first round of e-waste, I already struggled with keyboards and dongles and mice, oh my, where I would say, “Okay, let’s get rid of that!” only to figure out a day or even an hour later that I needed the part to see if something else worked. That problem has been working overtime on video game stuff.
For the general e-purge, I had five or six extra plugs for PCs and monitors. Why? Cuz I probably ditched the old ones but didn’t discard the plugs since they are relatively interchangeable. Okay, so this time, I’ll keep a spare and ditch the other ones. Great. Decision made.
Then I go to move the TV from the stand and realize that the plug for it is NOT with it. And, oh look, it’s the same type I just purged. So I can use the simple backup one that I kept, and then have no backup, or go back and pull another one out of the recycle pile. Which is what I’ll do. But I want to get RID of the e-waste stuff already in my garage. Not so easy to do when you know that there are some things in there that you MIGHT need to pull back in the next couple of weeks. Note that I am not talking about a continued hoarding problem, I mean that I decided to keep the TV, but accidentally purged a plug. Oops. When I’m fully done, everything not connected can GO GO GO, but for now, it has to accumulate in the garage.
In the same area of e-waste, I came across an accessory called a ZIP drive. Before there were easy USB drives and sticks, there was this drive called a ZIP drive that takes what are essentially rewritable large-capacity floppy disks. Well, they’re not floppy like the original 5.25″ ones, more like the 3.5″ harder plastic, but you get the idea. I have a bunch. With data on them from almost 25 years ago. Do I need the drive? No. But I would like to pull the data off before I ditch the hardware and disks. What’s the problem? The port on it is a parallel port. Which of course my main PC and none of my laptops have. Nor any other active PC in the house. Sooooo, guess what I threw out in the e-waste pile in the garage? A parallel-to-USB converter which, of course, I decided that I would NEVER need, right? RIGHT? I got rid of my old parallel printer so why would I ever need the converter again? Oh, right. Cuz of the damn domino problem.
If I had done these dominoes first, I would have seen that I need that cable still. I can now go back to the boxes and try to flip through and hope the converter cable stands out from all other cables in the box that I’m getting rid of, or as it turns out, I might be able to use an old PC that I had given to Jacob long before his current laptops. It seems to have an active parallel printer port on the back. Maybe I can install the ZIP drive on it and get it working long enough to pull off the data? Which means connecting the PC to some sort of monitor, which I was ALREADY PLANNING TO PURGE, damn it.
Or I can just say, “Chances are, I have what I need, nothing to lose there, ditch it.” Not a very satisfying conclusion. I don’t like just deleting data without knowing what I’m deleting, I confess. I’ve spent hours reviewing a hard drive, thinking that I could just delete it all, only to find something that I wrote 10 years ago that isn’t backed up anywhere else that I want to keep. The proof that my instinct to review is often worth it to me. Do I need that old musing? Probably not. But I feel validated to have reviewed before purging, even in the end, the pickings are slim.
For my various laptops, I went through a whole bunch of plugins for the laptops as chargers. I know that I have ditched old laptops and NOT tossed the cables with it, so I wasn’t surprised to find extras. I was surprised to find one where NOTHING seems to fit it? And it’s a more recent laptop? Not sure what I did there to cause that SNAFU, unless there’s another box to go through that I haven’t tripped over yet.
But I paired the other chargers with other laptops, all good, good to go, ready to purge what remained. Until I realized that buried in one of the piles of chargers was one that actually fits a video game system. Over in the other bins in the back room of the basement. That I hadn’t sorted through yet in detail.
Cables that I need if I’m going to charge those other pieces.
Is EVERYTHING a damn domino? Or just a delay?
I also had a bunch of things to go on walls, which I already blogged about this month. That one was relatively “contained” in that we could blast through everything in the house that needed to be hung, decide what to keep and what to purge, and hire someone to hang everything. There weren’t many sub-dominoes, but we did have to go and buy a bunch of new frames so that everything COULD be hung. Plus a bulletin board and a whiteboard. Okay, a few little dominoes.
In my basement, in addition to having the TV set up with the older video game systems, I also want to have a crafting table with my 3D printer on it. I repurposed a desk, put the whiteboard above it, put the 3D printer on it so far, all good to go.
Except.
Well, okay. There’s a hole in my basement ceiling. We had the AC unit upgraded/fixed a few years ago, and in order to do that, they had to take out the old AC fluid line from inside the house to the outside. It has to be done or you can do some sort of environmental thing instead, which was more costly and more problematic. Okay, take out the hose, we said. Except the hose was a bit trapped in the ceiling that was put in when we had the basement finished. The young gun who was doing the AC had NO idea what he was doing on the ceiling, and didn’t want to risk cutting anywhere close to the line (a good plan), so he cut a hole in my ceiling about 6″ wide and about 15′ long. Right along a small ceiling bulkhead made of drywall. It looks like crap, but I’m the only one in the basement, so do I care?
Not really. I find I get a bit more dust from the laundry room (the other side of the nearby walls and visible through the gap in the ceiling), and it is probably a bit colder than it should be, although the hole is at the top of the wall where the heat rises. But it needs to get fixed. The same general contractor who hung all our pictures and paintings gave us a relatively inexpensive quote to fix it all, he thinks he can do it with one sheet of drywall, and it’ll take probably two mornings (one to remove and put up some options and a second the next day after some of the day 1 stuff dries).
Could I wait to do it? Well, it IS right above where the TV goes. And if I’m going to set all that stuff up, there’s not much point in then turning around and having to disconnect it all to get the work above it done. And my crafting table is near the end of it, it could possibly have stayed where it was, but I don’t relish the idea of drywall falling on my 3D printer. He’s going to seal the work area in plastic to try and keep all of the dust contained, but I don’t really want extra dust on those components either.
So I had to move everything away from the walls, move stuff around, push it to the other side of the room, etc. in order for him to do the work this past week. Then the weather hit and he couldn’t come. So he’s coming next week. Which is totally fine for that project, BUT under the heading of dominoes, it meant I couldn’t work on any of my other sorting and purging as I’ve taken up the sorting space with furniture. Temporarily, sure, but still in the way.
And I realized that before I finalize a whole bunch of other e-waste, I need the ceiling done so I can put my TV back where it should be, hook up all the video game systems to make sure I haven’t accidentally thrown away some cables I need, blah blah blah.
I’m trying REALLY hard not to think about whether I need a new TV downstairs. The one I have now is pretty small for the distance from the couch. I could replace it, it would be less than $1000, easy to do, and I could probably sell off the old one for a few dollars. There’s nothing wrong with it, it would work great as a wall-mount option for someone in a bedroom or den. Except. I realized too that if I was thinking of doing that, I would be perfectly fine with the TV from the living room which doesn’t always play nice with our Apple TV, XBox, VMedia, and DVD player for simple viewing (they all like slightly different dimensions). So should I replace THAT one instead of the basement one? On the positive side, I’ve mostly convinced myself that the TV size / replacement question is not a domino. I can replace that ANY time, there’s no particular sequencing required.
Motivation, momentum and morale
The real problem is with my motivation and momentum, and derived from that, my morale. It is REALLY hard to stay on task when you see somewhere between 50-60 moving pieces with a ton of little projects. If I’m honest with myself, it’s not a bunch of little projects, it’s one GIGANTIC one called GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER and be organized for once, and with the number of shelving units I have at the moment, there’s no reason for me not to be better organized.
I wish when I was done with the basement, I was actually done. There is a crafting closet upstairs, and it’s a relative disaster area. Jacob and I want to get into some game design this year, or rather we both want to do it, and I am deciding to move forward this year. Plus some other DIY projects, including getting the 3D printer involved in board game design.
Yet with all of the sub-elements of this big project, I’ve been working on it since last winter about this time. I thought I would be done in the summer, and then it pushed to the fall, and then into the winter. It’s so big and so many interconnected pieces, those f’ing dominoes, it’s hard to feel a sense of progress until it’s all done.
I started with cleaning up the garage, and it led to us putting decorations all over the house AND having my basement ceiling repaired. Just so I could complete the line of dominoes and make sure they’re all going to fall the way they need to for the last one to fall into place. This past week, life intervened for three different projects / events, and all of them threw the todo list and the schedule right out the window.
I feel like I’m twiddling my thumbs just when I’m ready to finish stuff off. I know that I’m close to 80% done, maybe more. That’s huge, right? But right now, all I can see are little piles of sorted dominoes that I don’t know where they go or which order they have to be done in yet. It’ll come, but it is really hard to stay focused or excited.
