On the bright side, I moved forward a deal that has a good chance to close this week. The company wants our help with key management so it’s a good test case for customizing our offering to more advanced computer users than we’ve served up to this point. On the darker side, yet another week passed in which I missed the majority of my deadlines.
My irritation with this pattern coinciding with the final week of my twenties, I took a couple steps back this weekend in pursuit of deeper perspective. The young hands club has provided the most external structure since my time in school. Upon dropping out of university and starting to work for the bank, it quickly became evident the school and my family didn’t provide much of a resourceful framework for managing myself on a wide variety of levels. I tried a wide variety of organizational approaches over the years and by my mid twenties had developed some decent habits in organizing myself, from scheduling to keeping my personal accounting to the penny.
In 2015 I found TMSR while living through Coinapult collapse from under me. I started to retreat into the shadows because it was clear I had a lot to learn. There was a long stretch of incongruence where I knew I ought to come out of the shadows and talk to the people I was reading and learning from, but didn’t. This incongruence spilled over into slacking on some of the positive habits I’d built for myself. By last summer, I couldn’t live with that incongruence any longer and finally got in the WoT, then finally overcame the hesitation to apply to be a young hand. From that point, things moved way faster and way more positive than I dared to let myself dream prior and I’ve taken on substantial responsibility since.
The visit to Vermont was a whirlwind both in entering emergency mode of living up to the TMSR OS responsibility and visiting both the positives and negatives of my childhood environment. January was a recovery and then sprint to catch up on both TMSR OS and JWRD activities. February has been a month of taking a deep breath, picking up the journaling pen, attempting to properly orient myself with my current situation and now building back the more comprehensive lifestyle of a sustainable and reliable behavior pattern.
Since as long as I can remember I’ve tended to put a lot of pressure on myself. At the same time, I typically have a keener eye for the negatives in situations and people, most of all in myself. While properly identifying negatives is important, creating positives is something I’m shifting to develop. For example, one journaling exercise I started working on this weekend is writing out an ideal day in as vividly as possible. I’d done this a couple years ago and found it helpful, but it fell to the wayside with the lack of congruence I was acting out. It’s been refreshing to revisit it now that I’ve established a stronger foundation for myself. Now the opportunity is to continue to refine it and, more importantly, live it out.
It’s been a lot, yes. And likely there’s more to come too.
You know, you still retreat – in the silence if not in the shadows, so perhaps a bit less far away, at least. But in either case, it’s still isolation and therefore best taken in smaller rather than larger doses and with some upfront preparation so it doesn’t pile up the silence & absence. Use it since it’s useful but like any tool, grab it by its handle not blindly by the sharp side of the blade, already.
When you retreat like that, do you at least take with you all the positives that people offered you otherwise? Because those positives are way more real and concrete than any imagined ideal – at least when coming from people who use words for their meaning not for the noise they make. And at least at times maybe take note and adjust down your own expectations when people ask/require of you *less* than you insist to heap on yourself at that very same moment. Perhaps it’s simply because they have some experience in the matter and aim for what is possible and therefore can be done as opposed to some ideal that would be great except it can’t happen and just ends up blocking everything with the very weight of its impossibility. Or perhaps you just got lucky and got therefore some extra time & space but either way what’s exactly wrong with using it as such?
Comment by Diana Coman — February 24, 2020 @ 11:24 am
Right.
I can start properly using the tools.
Part of the visualizing my ideal mode of being is appreciate the positives more and make more use of them.
This brought to mind that heaping more on myself than what I’m being asked to do by my betters undermines the hierarchy I’ve chosen to submit to. It’s one thing to do well what I’ve been asked to do and ask for more. It’s another thing to assign myself more and fail to deliver that which I’ve been assigned. I can use that take away to align myself more realistically.
Comment by Robinson Dorion — February 24, 2020 @ 8:52 pm