Kick-Starting Myself Out of the Doldrums

With my life moving neither backwards or forward, I struggle to find the right question I should be asking myself at this point. As always, it is the questions we ask ourselves rather than the answers we come up with that is most critical. The wrong question or the irrelevant question only serves to delay a resolution.

So I know I need to make some critical decisions and important changes in the way I live my life. Something needs to be done. A lovely word, something. The trick is to move from the indefinite something to the concrete notion of a specific plan of action.

What issues are holding me back? I start with a random list of the real issues confronting me right now. I have to distill that list into an understanding of the challenge that confronts me at the moment. And I need to prioritize so that I channel my efforts into dealing with the most important of these issues.

How should I proceed from here and now? I need to strategize. Lay out a game plan. I must make sure in my own mind that this has a chance of working... that is not just a wishful strategy that ill-fits the person that I am and the way I think and the way I function best.

I will need to unclutter my mind [and my life] and not allow myself to be distracted from the task at hand. And then I will have to take the first step. And then the next step. And stay focused until the momentum is carrying me towards a time when I have solved this set of problems and can now move on to the next set of problems, with a renewed confidence and resolve and a forward momentum that will allow me to keep moving forward again, instead of just marching in place or losing ground.

Before I initiate the plan, I have to ask one more question. What have I been doing that has caused me to shoot myself in the foot time after time? A brief moment of introspection is a good thing here. What habits do I have that prevent me from achieving success in what I try to do? Without devoting a huge amount of time to take a hard look at myself, I need to answer these questions and take a quick note of what I have rediscovered about myself. It will only help if I write my findings down and keep the observations in a place I can find them as I carry out my plans... to remind myself about where I don't want to go and what I don't want to do yet one more time.

Then it is time to do whatever I have to do.

Lost and Found

Drifting. I am drifting through my life at the moment, wherever the stream will take me. The rudder of my life seems to have a mind of its own. I find myself waiting for something to happen that gives me a clue as to what I should be doing next in my life. What exactly am I looking for? Something like an overhanging branch which I can grab and use to pull myself on the dry land at a place where I feel that I should be... where I feel I belong.

For the moment, I am lost and drifting. But I am keeping my eyes and ears... all my senses alert and aware of everything that is happening about me. I will find that something which I can grab onto... which will enable me to get my bearings once more. I desperately need to find that time and place. And I will, in time. That is something I must find for myself, because I am very tired of the fact that I am still drifting through my life.

On the Other Hand

I used to believe that I absolutely needed to be passionate about something in my life... a hobby, a cause, my writing... something. I based that belief on the logic that without that passion, there would be something missing in my life. I did not always reside in the real world and I sometimes neglected very important matters... but I felt vividly alive.

And then, as life sometimes happens, a series of eye-opening events brought me back down to earth. I was forced to rejoin the real world and to finally grow up. Suddenly, being passionate occasionally became something of a distraction. My thoughts began to be focused on making money and belatedly setting aside a nest egg for my retirement, which is just around the corner. I had to come to terms with the financial mess I had put myself into. So I had little time for my passions. I had become pragmatic and practical. As I had hoped would be the case, people began to see me as more solid and focused. I no longer felt that I had to justify my existence to other people and I was treated with the beginnings of respect. So my life was significantly better in that regard. But now there was something missing.

I found myself in the same position as Jack, in Jack and the Beanstalk. I was doing my best to escape the giant, as I was sliding down the beanstalk back to earth. Halfway down, I looked up and realized I would miss the danger and the excitement of that adventure. I looked down at my home and my family and I also realized that I missed what I had there. Somehow I wanted to exist in between the two poles of my existence. But I know that being able to find that balance in life is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to sustain.

For a time, I haven't written very much. I would not make the time to do that. I was in that mode of "...and miles to go before I sleep."

If you have read this blog and my other blog, insidemyworldhfireman.blogspot.com, you would know that I feel passionately that somehow part of my destiny is to be a writer, if only the writer of a weblog. I make a small difference in the world by being creative and sharing with the world my take on things. So I sense that it is important for me to set some time aside for writing.

In my journey, I am at that point at which I am figuring out a little better how life works and understanding what usually does not work well in the end. I also know very well that just knowing what choices I should be making will not guarantee that I make the right choices or the best choices for me.

I will have to pick and choose carefully how I fill out each day. Some days I will have to be more of the solid, practical soul. Other days I will have the luxury of giving into my whims and passions. Hopefully, I will have acquired the wisdom to know best when to do one thing or the other... to find that elusive balance in our lives that all of us should be striving to find.

One thing is certainly true. There is nothing we will ever choose to do or say that will not impact someone else. We will continually be impacted by what other people do. So it would seem that striking a balance in our days is important not just to us but to the larger world beyond that of our individual lives.

Living on the edge and living dangerously and passionately feels amazing... thrilling... exhilarating. One should remember, however, that living on the edge is much akin to falling in love. In both cases, one lives through the equivalent of a self-induced high. And when "the honeymoon period" ends, we turn back into the person we were before our escape from reality. That can be an awful moment or a moment like any other. How it does turn out will all depend on how well we have been able to keep things in context, never losing sight of what we practically need to be doing to keep life on an even keel.

Thankfully, I am doing just that now. My head is clear. I am using this window of opportunity to indulge myself and do some writing. My life is still good. I am pleased that you were here to share this moment with me.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman

State of Mind - May 7, 2007

First Random Thought

Anymore, I just don't have much time to veg out watching television. There are too many things I have to do or that I really want to do. So I don't see much point to wasting my time in front of the boob tube. And I definitely have no need for a 52" big screen tv set.

Another Random Thought

Marilyn and I were at the art museum yesterday. In the gift shop, we saw a lot of really neat stuff and some really beautiful objects. Cleverly designed notebooks or nightlights that revealed beautiful works of art when plugged in. And Marilyn found the jewelry section, with all sorts of tempting necklaces and earrings. But we didn't buy anything.

There is only a finite amount of space in our small apartment and we know we couldn't cram one more thing in, even if we wanted to.

Making A Space in My Life for Being Able to Think Clearly

Over the last five or six months, my life has changed dramatically. I have made one of those paradigm shifts and when one does that, everything changes.

For us humans, a paradigm is the model we build in our heads of how the world is supposed to work. Whenever we have to make a decision or we have to choose how we are going to handle a situation, we use our own particular paradigm to guide our actions and choices. A paradigm shift occurs when we have experiences which cause us to reevaluate how we see things and we revise our paradigm, our model of the world.

Towards the end of my time at my last job, what I was doing had ceased to be much fun and even before the office closed, I knew deep down that it was time to move on to something different.

When my life as a tech support person with an internet provider came to an end in mid-December last year, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. For a brief period, I had the luxury of having the time to think about my life and about what I wanted to do now that I needed to find another job.

In a way, the time between jobs was a really lovely time. I could slow the pace of my life. It was momentarily no longer necessary to run from one obligation or commitment to the next. I could stand on the sidelines and watch everyone else race about like semi-crazy people, functioning mindlessly on autopilot. I could clear my head and try to think clearly not just about where I wanted to work next, but also where I wanted to take my life, in general.

I found some work sooner than I might have wished to do that. But when the money shortfall became critical, I did not have much of a choice. So I was back in the grind and as I took on more and more responsibility at work, I found myself back into that world of get up in the morning, go to work, come home, make dinner, clean the kitchen, check the bills and if I was very lucky to catch a little television. Suddenly, once again, there are just not enough hours in the day to get to everything which I needed to take care of. Most evenings now, I have just enough time to put out the biggest fires and then to crash to catch 5 or 6 hours of sleep if I am lucky.

While I worked in internet tech support, I worked the 3 to 11 shift. So even then, I had started to stay up late at night when it was very quiet and the television set had been turned off. Only then could I truly hear myself think. Only then could I begin to make sense of what was happening to me and of the options from which I could choose.

Now, I really cannot do the late night thing. The morning comes much too soon and it only takes one or two nights of staying up until one or two AM to make me become something of a zombie during the day. And being really tired and fuzzy-brained is not something I can afford to be as an administrative assistant. I have to be sharp and wide awake. Returning back to the normal office hours has forced me to make some major adjustments in the way I live each day.

However, only now am I coming to terms with the most important adjustment I have had to make. For me to keep my psychological balance... for me to be able to have some sense of where I have been, where I am now and where I am headed, I need time every day to take stock of the day. I need that time to make the small mid-course corrections that enable me to stay on course. But staying up late into the night is obviously no longer a viable option.

So here I sit, before my computer, trying to figure out how I am going to handle this problem. How am I going to carve out a block of time each day to do this, when I don't even have time enough for all the other things on my list of things to do? Honestly, I don't know yet. As has been my habit in the past, it is late at night, almost midnight. I am stealing time from my sleep because for the moment I don't know what else to do.

But, my gracious readers, stay tuned. I will work out this critical matter. I will have to give up something else, to create this island in time so that I will have my time to reflect on things. I suspect that I am not the only person on this planet who has this problem. Hopefully, whatever strategy I work out may be something that you can use in one form or another. When I have worked out a solution I will get back with you.

Taking A "Snow Day"

Today I declared this to be a "Snow Day." I live in Houston, Texas and it almost never snows here. So how could I do that? Let me explain it to you.

In our northern states like Ohio, New York and Wisconsin, sometimes the snowfall is so heavy that the powers that be close the school because it is nearly impossible to get children to school. So the kids have the day off from school. Our equivalent down here in Houston would be a cold day with ice on the roads or when we are in the middle of a really bad rain storm... the latter could be called a "flood day."

Anyway, I felt the need to escape from the grind for a day. I had been inundated by so many issues personal and otherwise, that I no longer had the strength or the inclination to slog through it. So since all the various things that I had to do had simply come at me too fast and too furiously, I was drowning in my responsibilities, I took a cue from my fellow Americans from the north. I declared today a snow day and I stayed home and just sort of chilled out [pun unintended.] I just needed to recharge my batteries for 24 hours and that is exactly what I did.

Well I have and now I am ready to head back into the grind once again. Taking a snow day is not something I can or should do very often. But every so often it is just what the doctor ordered and we need to give ourselves just a bit of time just to live unencumbered by the stuff that normally clutters our days and sucks up our time.

Take my word for it. Snow Days are good for the soul. You ought to try it sometime.

Remembering to Leave Some Space in My Life for Dreams and for Aspirations

I have finally moved on in my life to that stage that has to do with being practical and with making the necessary compromises to survive in this life. Even if it took me almost 60 years to get to this point, I did. And, I guess, that is what really matters, isn't it? I want to say that getting to where I am today, is supposed to be what growing up is supposed to be all about. But you know what? Now I sometimes have this terribly empty feeling that now something terribly important is missing from my life. Until now, I wasn't exactly sure what that something was.

Stephen Sondheim, in the first scene of Merrily We Roll Along, gives us a wonderfully clear picture of what it means to be where I am and where a lot of you already are, as well. In this scene, Franklin Shepherd, a famous songwriter and producer, has been invited to be the main speaker at the graduation at the high school from which he graduated twenty-five years earlier. At his own graduation, he declared, "My final thought is a simple but mighty thought. It is the obligation we have been given. It is to not turn out the same. It is to grow, to accomplish, to change the world."

In the first scene of the play, the man we are seeing and hearing is the man he turned out to be. This play looks at Mr. Shepherd in a unique way. It starts in the present and moves one step at a time into the past, all the way back to that moment he spoke as his class's valedictorian. For the moment, you and I are only concerned with how he turned out and his own take on life as a grownup. What follows is an excerpt from lines from that scene.

"...[W]ould I be hanged if I told you innocents a few realities. I can save you guys so much pain and hurt if I can make you understand today that life isn't about doing the best; it'd about doing the best you can.

A goal is something you aim for more than something you achieve.

I'm thinking you better start by hearing the word 'practical' right here, right now. today.
Some day I guarantee you'll know 'practical' very well. Fate has a way of introducing 'practical' eventually.

And it's the same with 'compromise.' Compromise is how you survive. Compromise is the bottom line, let me tell you.

If you know now that what you're intending to happen ain't gonna happen the way you think it's gonna happen, because life has some ideas about your intentions.

Hey kids! Listen to us 'old guys' if you can. I know you don't see it, but some day you're going to be us."

That is a pretty sobering bit of "wisdom." As I was growing up, I harbored nearly impossible dreams and ambitions for myself. I, for one, did not want to hear the words "practical" and "compromise" and I knew for a fact that when I hit my stride I was going to conquer the world as a writer or something. I was going to change the world in a big way. So how did it turn out for me? I did not realize these goals. As you have already figured out, it took me a very long time to come to terms with the realities of life and to become a practical person. My wife is very relieved that I finally did that.

And understanding the notion of compromise... well, for too long, I had a very hard time reconciling that the way things should be done, honestly and ethically, was most not the way that things in life happened. People were as often as not less than kind and considerate of other people. The playing field was and is still anything but even in most endeavors. Politicians are... well, it suffices to say that they are politicians. I will leave it at that. The United Nations as an organization is something less than united. The world is not a perfect place. In fact, it is a fair statement to say the world is a certifiable mess and always has been, with humans at the helm.

Let's get really basic here. Eventually I figured out that I wasn't going to save the world any more than I was going to save even a single person from making some dreadful mistakes. Hell! I was so worried about saving the world that I wasn't paying attention to my own personal affairs. Bills did not get paid. I had problems at work, because of my notion that certain practices and situations shouldn't be allowed. I learned that workplaces are not perfect models of human dynamics either. In my own personal relationships, I made mistakes, in large measure because I was focusing on how I was going to make a large place for myself in the world. I didn't always think about what was happening right around me and about the people who were near and close.I did not think about the impact of my actions on the people about whom I cared the most. I shot myself in the foot a lot and kept on doing it over and over again.

Then one day, late in the game, I got practical. I made compromises. I have become a modestly functional human being. I took my dreams, my hopes for my life... my aspirations and I put them into a shoe box and put them on the top shelf in my closet. Out of sight and out of mind. These days, I am feeling pretty chipper. Yesterday, I even enjoyed one of the rare moments of survival in the face of adversity and of modest success.

But in the quiet moments, I feel a sense of loss. Sometimes I will take down that shoe box and take out each of the individual items stored there. I now understand that when we are young, we dream large and we do not fully understand the sometimes terrible price we will have to pay to realize our aspirations. So we chase after our dreams only to discover after it is too late to turn back the clock that what we were chasing was a nightmare in disguise. It wasn't exactly what we thought it was at first.

Now I know that a life characterized by simplicity is something to be desired and treasured. And yet, I have this craving, almost like the craving in an addiction, to go out and seek one last "hit" of aspiration and of chasing what is probably an impractical dream.

In my early fifties, I did just that. For three glorious, exciting, enthralling, emotionally devastating and totally disastrous years I lived on the edge and I felt alive, like I have never felt alive, before or since that time. And, wow, did I ever crash and burn at the end of the adventure. And you know what? I wouldn't do that again for a million dollars. But I have absolutely no regrets that I gave chasing my dream my best shot. At least I tried to get there. It was the only time in my entire life that I gave any effort my all. That felt good.

Then I accepted the fact I had to make compromises and to become practical. I was finally ready to accept that reality and to make the decision to become a more centered and practical sort of fellow. I have become Franklin Shepherd, at least in terms of buying into part of his philosophy about life. G'd help me. This is not necessarily the person I wanted to become. But reality is a hard task master and also, life goes a lot smoother for me these days.

Even so, I have those moments when I dream my dreams and still have visions of grand things I could do with my life. Somehow I feel the need to squeeze in a few moments like those into my days. Don't get me wrong. I love my life just as it is now. I love the people who are in my life now. I love being finally able to take care of them, to take care of myself and to be able to stand on my own two feet. That is a good thing. Most of the time. However, sometimes I have to escape from this safe existence, even if only in my own mind, to live that other life I could have lived, if things had turned out differently.