Never went to any of the cool Army schools. Like Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. I spent most of my military career honing my Excel conditional formatting skills. Useful, right up until people figure out that AI can do that for them. Or the lights go out and we’re back to finding food somewhere without a produce aisle. Guy I worked with told me once about how they deal with mistakes during the simulated prison camp phase.
Got outside this morning. Found my way out into the big room. Touched some grass. There’s a walking trail near where I was staying, just a short loop around a small lake. Other parts of the world it would a pond, still others a puddle. Nomenclature aside, makes for a pleasant space not far from suburban sprawl. In the creek, a heron. Or egret. Or something. Crane, maybe. Standing, as they do, completely still.
If comparison is the thief of joy, then jealousy is the underside of pride. Easier to be envious of what someone accomplished, than it is to be proud of them. And we save our pride for the big things, for the mountaintops, when what we all want to hear is pride in the small wins, the victories no one notices. That we got up this morning. Took care of ourselves today.
Will the bag fit in the overhead? Does that suit still fit? Is this job a good fit? Do we fit in? We’re always trying to solve someone’s puzzle. Sometimes our own. Mostly theirs. And that mostly never quit fits.
When the power’s on, the cables are intact, and the machines are running, connecting is easy. And it’s usually the middle part that’s the hardest. There’s a sender, a receiver, but no way to get the message there. It’s the connections that are easiest to make, hardest to maintain.
I finished a training program over the weekend. Nothing terribly exciting about that, except that I’m a starter, not a finisher. Or at least I have been. Still am. But yesterday, I officially joined the ranks of the finishers. Which, after years of picking up somewhat heavy things and putting them down again, both metaphorically and actually, and reinforcing those other voices that tell me I’ll never finish anything? Felt pretty good.
I’m at Staples a lot. Not buying anything. Returns. Amazon, mostly. Because not everything works out the first time. Or even the second. There’s an abundance of decisions, mostly. The next one doesn’t have to be the last one. So feel free to decide. Then re-decide. Or decide all over again.
That’s reality. The real world. Real talk. Because we value thing that are real. Authentic. Craving honesty above all else. Except our perceptions, our biases, our experiences differ. It’s impossible for us all to see the same thing.
The plane was late, but we’d made it. Connections for some would be tight, but doable. Cabin crew was ready to let us go. And then the jetway broke down. Four maintenance techs and 30 minutes later, the door opened. Once upon a time, it was about nails and horseshoes, but the issue is the same: most systems have a single point of failure. Could be a process, or a part.
I’d ordered the same burrito five times. Slight variations on the theme, but basically the same one every time. I liked it: the flavors, consistency, even the price. Patting myself on the back for supporting local burrito artisans right up until the moment I learned I was ordered from the dark kitchen of a large national chain. It happens to be a chain I like, but still. A conglomerate, a macro operator in the food space.
Gym this morning, sign on the wall said that the maximum occupancy of the building was 464 people. Safe? Yes. Useful? No. We always think we have more capacity: more time, more attention, space. But that’s our max, the most we can muster. It’s possible, sure, that there’s more of that. Less sure is that the remaining bandwidth we have is going to be effective. Pushing ourselves to the limit means there’s no room to expand.
“You know what your problem is?” They always have an answer ready, hoping that you won’t have a response. Because they’re not there for discovery, but dictation. Not even the military asks that question. An After Action Review has two parts: Sustain Improve Sure, that 2nd one gets at “the problem.” But it’s framed differently. Part 1 is what you do well. Part 2 is what you could do better.
While tomorrow’s plans can seem perfect, today often falls short, so we must embrace the present with grace despite imperfections.
John Mulaney tells the story of the time Mick Jagger hosted Saturday Night Live, and as a writer for SNL, Mulaney got to pitch sketch ideas to the ageless lead singer for the Rolling Stones. Jagger had a 2 word review for most of those ideas. “Not funny.” Unsaid was that it wasn’t funny to Jagger. Mulaney clearly thought otherwise, but it wasn’t about him, the writer. It was about Jagger, the performer.
“In thrust we trust.” Reportedly a Pratt & Whitney (a jet engine manufacturer) motto. Also a thing you’ll hear from kettlebell practitioners. Hips drive, arms guide. Whether you’re talking about standing an F-16 on its tail, cleaning a kettlebell into the rack, or finalizing a project at work: the principle is the same: what got you there in the first place? It’s not that last slide edit, or pulling the bell into place, or that list twitch of the joystick.
Genius is nothing more than a good memory. English professor told me that once. True of art. Business. Government. We invent nothing, we just package it differently. Energy cannot be created, or destroyed. Just re-formed, re-framed, re-made. Happy 4th.
There’s this old parable about a rabbit who goes to school. It starts off great. The teachers figure out pretty quickly that this rabbit can run. Like, really run. Fast, agile, built for it. Everyone agrees — this is clearly its strength. Then they get to the part of the curriculum where all the animals have to learn to swim. “Every student needs to be well-rounded,” they say. “Can’t have gaps.
Don’t hear what I didn’t say. First heard that from an autism advocate. Resonates, because so often my “no” means a paragraph. Apparently. Because despite the conventional wisdom that those of us on the spectrum can’t read people, the opposite is painfully true. We’ve spent our whole lives hoping for some kind of decoder ring that explains neurotypicals, some universal translator that would turn the words we said into the ones we meant.
The hard road is often the simplest one. It’s a simple thing to climb the mountain faster: take the shorter route. Simple, but not easy.
Don’t call it a journal. Or a blog. Even a newsletter. Don’t call it anything. Because it’s not about what it’s called, it’s about how it calls to you.