Author: Reality Laughs

Now I know what empty nest means. My son came home for spring break and I just dropped him off at the airport. The house is quiet again.

Only a few more of these spring break visits and that’s it. The kids will be self-propelled and this — just me, the wife, and the dog — will be the normal state of affairs.

Seasons.

I’m sad. I don’t know why. This is the way life works, I guess. You want your kids to grow up to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted, self-sufficient adults. And thank God this has happened. Yet I’m sad.

I miss them. I miss the happy chaos of having kids around. I miss being the dad, being the caretaker, the protector, the guide. (To the extent that they listened or paid attention of course. But that’s how I saw myself and my responsibilities).

They share their locations with me and that makes me happy to know where they are. It’s a tiny thread of connection.

When facing a hard decision it helps to keep doing the footwork. What is real? What is imagined? That is what I am doing. Clarity seeps in, and fear creeps out.

The downside is not as big as feared and the upside of being rid of a dilemma is energizing.

Still. I’m not clear about what to do and when, exactly. But the broad strokes are there. Now it’s time to sit quietly and think. That is what I will do today.

The open time in my calendar (well it is not open time so much as a release from a burden of managing a situation that was neither profitable nor thrilling) opens up a new possibility. I can try the idea I have always wanted to try but always stopped three feet from paydirt.

I will sketch that out today. Light up the website with carrd.co or similar just to age the site and start SEO. Then start.

I need to make a hard decision. There are only two possible choices: do or do not do. One is hard (do) and the other is easy (do not do).

The hard choice is the correct one, the easy choice is not. The hard choice is short term painful and long term uncertain in its result. The easy choice just feels like malaise, like kicking the can down the road, like avoiding the inevitable.

It is impossible to predict what will happen in the future because of so many variables. Life in general adds so many different possibilities that I can’t adequately predict outcomes.

The “do” choice has a visible, concrete short term (and perhaps permanent) negative consequence that I fear. It has invisible consequences (what other people think about me) that I fear. It means short-term stress because one of the load-bearing walls has been removed from the building, metaphorically speaking.

Long term the “do” choice opens up time in which other long-term opportunities (possibly higher value) can be pursued because this lower-value activity has been eliminated.

Today I am going to email someone to get a fact. And call another person to get a different fact—someone who didn’t answer my email yet.

I have a week to make the decision. I favor the hard choice.

4.5 hours later . . .

Is when I woke up. Proximate case: internal. Solution tested: Tums. Let’s see if I can get back to sleep.

I need to eat well before bed time.

And I can’t mark off the daily task accomplished yet — LRS still thinks it is yesterday. So I will have to remember and check in later this morning.

No. The decisions are obvious and easy to make. I fear taking the necessary actions.

Awake for an hour already.

Not the place to be, but what are you going to do about it? The short answer is:

• Write for five minutes to keep the string going: then
• Go to the kitchen and have a few strawberries.

It’s surprising (or not) that the solution to angst is simple and instinctive; yummy fruit.

The angst is work-related as always and I’m slowly realizing that this is a hand-to-hand combat with self. What drives me forward and why do I seem to hit the same walls again and again?

Or are they the same walls? Am I repeating behavior and getting the same results or am I subtly changing and getting subtly different results over time?

This is not an introspective piece.

I scoped put a project that is too big to do. I describes what I want to achieve but has five years of work in it. So it will fail.

What will work, however, is a series of smaller projects based on the sub-components of the large blobby impossible project.

There are two items: consolidate position, then launch.

Within each there are many tasks, sub-projects.

Let’s start with “consolidate position.” I have a website that is imperfect, and a newsletter process that is imperfect. Let’s make both work better.

It is telling that I don’t even want to look at my own website. And I know from experience that it’s hard dealing with the software for the newsletter.

So first we are going to optimize for speed for both items.

And I am going to do the proper planning for each project to make it happen.

Another morning, awake before dawn.

Looking forward to the day: fairly open. It’s a rest day between runs. The only Zoom of the day is cancelled. Only a routine dental appointment sits on my calendar.

What to do with that open space? Let’s try the One Thing Theory. One project done to the maximum extent possible.

And Excellence. Put a bit of time into Excellence today. Rewatch the beginning of the video and grab the checklist. Set up a war room on the computer for the project I want for myself, and work through the steps.

I think it is the “agree on the objective” stage. There are people who want to help but I need clarity there, first.

This is an open day. The first of what I have been aiming at. There is an avalanche of stuff waiting for me, sure. But I have an opening, an aim, and some guidance (virtual mentorship, sure) on the next step.

This is what I’m looking for. The beginning of a change.

Yeah, there is that song by Kris Kristofferson. Made famous by Johnny Cash, sure, but the definitive versions are those sung by Kris Kristofferson.

Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Listen if you want to be depressed—the man knows that world first-hand. I once lived in that world, too. I do not wish to return.

I like that version, though there is a live Kris Kristofferson version of the song I acquired from the internet long ago (and can’t find now) that punched me in the gut.

I am now decades away from that life. Thank God, because it wasn’t me who made that happen. The Big Guy put an unseen hand on my shoulder and said “Sit down here for a while and have a cup of coffee” and I was too beaten to say no.

So I stayed. That is all I did. I wished to stay, because a room full of strangers and bad coffee was better than what I had going for me. So I stayed.

And that made all the difference.

Stay.

Postscript. Ahhh. Here is the version I love, performed by Kris Kristofferson and Steve Earle. Both lived that Sunday morning lifestyle and felt the big hand on their shoulder, too.

Slept in and awoke after dawn.

What is my quest for today?

Write in the morning. Use the best hours for the most important task. Light exercise at lunchtime. Then project management in the afternoon.

Slow-paced, no time pressure, just organize and re-organize thoughts and documents — this is the way the path reveals itself to me.

Tools are unimportant. Word is fine. Make, move, delete folders of documents on my laptop? Is fine. (Remember that, because you had a blinding flash of “Airtable would be good for this.”).

No. As soon as a tool becomes the thing, I’m optimizing for the tool, not for the task. Optimize for thinking. Perversely, simple text files introduce — rather than eliminate — thinking friction. Or maybe they reduce so much friction that my brain doesn’t have enough time to cogitate the permutations.

Anyway. Happy Saturday. It will include a hamburger mid-day because I want one. No running today, because today is a rest day. Some bodyweight stuff (squats, pushups etc.) will be fine.

Nice day.

Dear Diary. 🙃

That note above (“Dear Diary”) is me expressing exasperation at the shallowness of what I write in five minutes. Let’s allow shallow to exist and see what 10,000 shallow blog posts/diary entries/whatever these are can do to drain the shallow out of me and get to the real.