Here’s a thing that’s gonna happen – you’re gonna tidy up. ‘Cause you’re not gonna know what the hell else to do.
I guess it’s natural. The brain wants to take action. But I can’t go out and just get a new job this afternoon. And that’s not arguing for my limitations or defining a negative reality, that’s just the way it is. It don’t work that way. But the urge is there.
My God! They’re letting me go! I have to … have to… DO SOMETHING!
And so I sit in my office which was so cozy just a couple of weeks ago and now has to become some kind of NEW LIFE CREATION COMMAND AND CONTROL CENTER and I see all the little things that were cute before and now are just clutter.
And I see the coffee stains on my desk, underneath a thick layer of dust that I always look at, and I see that there’s really nothing else I can do, and so I grab the duster and clean that up. I take a bunch of stuff and throw it in a box.
I mean. There’s any number of things I could be doing. But eliminating surrounding clutter – straightening up, a neutral activity that has nothing whatsoever to do, directly, with anything I have to do – seems to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. It’s one less thing I can procrastinate with, but it’s more than that. It’s control, and for me that’s huge.
See, I took control of my life and ceded it to someone else. Someone I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, except as a mark on a ledger and an expensive mark at that, that may or may not have been a key contributor, but at any rate, was nothing you couldn’t get somewhat cheaper offshore and so hey, here I am writing blog entries that are just about as useful, at this point, as dusting my desk. But they’re mine.
Cleaning my office – and, as the weather warms up, doing work outside in the yard, and watching what I eat, and going to the gym, and all the other things, these are myself exercising control, and returning control of my life, at least perceptually, to the inside, where it belongs.
I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next few months. I don’t know if I’ll get a full-time position or whether I’ll be stuck in one of these long slogs that last years and make you question the entire nature of the universe and reality. Actually what I do know is that whatever will happen will be something I didn’t expect but will seem perfectly natural in retrospect as I rationalize it (more on that in another entry).
But whatever I end up doing, I Kurt Kober, author of Vectroblog, and one time Emerging Leader, Key Contributor, and Service Owner, and now, discarded human asset, will never count 100% on any one thing again, even if that’s all I have at any given time. I put all my eggs in one basket and some dude I never met before tipped it over because I gave him permission to without thinking it through.
Filling a lot more baskets this time around.