Ups and Downs

After suffering through a pretty turbulent 2023, I made it clear to my team that my singular goal was to enter 2024 with a sense stability, and to sustain that consistently through May.  It wasn’t a terribly big goal, it didn’t seem like I was asking that much; I certainly believed it was possible. (love flexing the semicolon).

But clearly some God was offended by this quest, and set about to turn my life upside down - again, just like January 2023 - and turn my best laid plans into tiny pieces of confetti blowing in the wind.  Just like that, plans disintegrated one by one into nothingness.

And, a lot of the things that needed tending to weren’t even related, so the odds of them all going off the rails in tandem was unlikely, but however unlikely, it happened.  Like, it didn’t have to rain several times a week since September - that really takes all the fun out of it, and makes everyone’s work harder, and for some trades, difficult to do well.  It was unexpected that I couldn't motivate, cajole, threaten, bully, sweet-talk, bribe a trusted large subcontractor to improve their performance, and had to mid-stream change horses - not fun, stress-free or cheap.  I certainly didn’t see the need to restructure and rejigger the office staff, as two vital positions needed weeded, pruned and replanted.

I didn’t expect to sell 6 houses at the same time, either.  That may seem like a good thing, which is, but adds a whole new layer of complexity into our day as we onboard and acclimate our new client-partners.

In the end, it’s just as I’ve said before.  You gotta have endurance.  And you always gotta have some gas in the tank because you just can’t go around driving on empty when you never know when you might need to accelerate through a pressing problem.

So the brain is a funny thing and you can either let it auto-pilot its own path, or you can attempt to tell it where to go, and how to get there.  So I’m going to use the next 10 days of vacation to tell it where to go, at least in part by writing, deliberately, where I want it to go.

So I’m leaving for Costa Rica, a place I’m eager to check out.  Then to St Pete’s.  Will be gone for 11 days or so, so plenty of time to tame the brain.  I know in the past, with a concerted effort, it takes a few days for the iphone itch to decline, and the habit of waking early and directing business and operations traffic can and should be put aside if I’m going to do this right, and even screen time on the computer even if it is writing, would be nice to keep to a fair duration.

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I do believe why I’ve been ‘following my thoughts’ on the writing front, and I believe it has something to do with a book I just finished named Rings of Saturn, where the writer ambles on foot around northern England and writes about his thoughts, and his thoughts were weaving in and out of ancient England, recent past England, silkworms, castles, battles, tides, cliffs, aristocracy and a lot of completely other related but not really ideas and thoughts.  And the structure of the book was similar, with minimal paragraph breaks, few thoughts inside quotations even when they belonged there, and a few other structural oddities that carried you away with him.

I’m doing the same thing now.  Journaling.  Just need to follow my thoughts into the reservoir of knowledge I have to explore the caves and canals of my meandering and restless brain.

A lot of times I will read a book about the place I’m traveling too, which always struck my son as odd - ‘you are going there, why are you reading about it?’ he say.   I haven’t found anything on Costa Rica just yet and trying to decide on which of 2 books to bring - they are quite different, so the selection is important to the tenor and tone of the trip.  At the same time, the library work at the Pinchot Estate continues, and there are a lot of travel and ecology books that seem to be centered down around Costa Rica.  There doesn’t seem to be a canon of Costa Rica thought and literature to lean into, say like the richness of the African genre.

Well, it worked. Flood the zone with my brain power and accumulated experience and don't stop thinking until the answer appears. It's a distracting process, and probably not that healthy, but time after time when I focus, and I mean really focus, the path forward reveals itself.

This has always been true. The big difference now is that when I arrive at the answer, or decision, I know it's the right one to follow, whereas for the longest time I just had a general hunch. In terms of the my first-ever legal trial, one wrought and forged from principles and boundaries, the die is now cast.

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