Reality Laughs

Body: Seat 2C, above the planet.

Ears: Eric Hilton in the headphones.

Eyes: Twitter. (@saschachapin is right to liken it to smoking so you can hang out with the smokers).

Nothing feels real, except the urge to pee.

Awake every hour on the hour until 2 am. Then awake. At least I didn’t miss my 3 am alarm.

Get up. Coffee alone in the quiet, dark house. Write five minutes, then I will shower and . . . off we go.

The Liminal Life. That’s what I have to look forward to.

Trivial tasks (mostly “Be present at a specific location at a specific time”) become momentous. Routine events (“What shall I have for lunch?” or “How do I get to where I want to go?”) become novel explorations of the barely recognizable but sometimes wildly different.

Writing is done. Coffee is done. It is 3 am. Let’s go.

Should not be asked at night when tired, discouraged, etc.

Go to sleep. Tomorrow is a big day of travel.

Asked.

Answered: “Change.“

Start where I am with what I have at hand.

• At least don’t make the problem worse. New customers for the business are vetted and accepted correctly.

The two that are eager to hire but unwilling to spend? You know what to do.

After that? Demand clarity from yourself and others. Make it uncomfortable to stray from the path and hard to stay on the path—the kind of hard, for example, from pushing yourself on a run because you demand it of yourself. “I wonder what I can do? No. I will run hard until the finish line and not allow myself to walk it out.”

Write like a son of a bitch. And publish. Publish. Publish.

My calendar is awash with Zoom calls today.

Individually, each is “needed.” (Reaaaly?)

Collectively, these Zoom calls create a day of treading water, struggling against the surging current.

Fortunately, today is the last day like this for a while. Deliberately created change.

Individual calls can be canceled or change. The weekly team meetings. What are we doing here, and why? Individual 1:1s. What am I doing there, and why?

Customers. Of course. (But why me on the call and not someone else?) Prospects? Of course. (Remember how it was startling to me to hear that Dan did sales calls at this stage of his business? Why did he do that? Should I be doing most of the sales?)

Maybe if you want to talk to me, you will find me at a table at my regular cafe. Because the life I want to live is there. Coffee. People passing by. A friend to talk to. A light snack. It’s a sunny day and it’s enough.

When the treadmill aspects of work invade your dreams, night after night, you might have a problem.

Employees. Would I, on my last day on earth, want to be having one-on-ones with them, cajoling them to get done the tasks that they must get done? Would I want to be constantly feeding them tasks so they don’t just down-tools and do nothing? No. Self-evident.

Would I, on my last day on earth, want to work on the type of projects I worked on yesterday? Sure. Hyper-deep look at a blocker to a client’s forward motion — and that work yielded concrete direction for us to follow.

Would I, on my last day on earth, write what I’m writing in my giant self-assigned marketing project? Yes. But I did zero of that yesterday.

It’s time to change up work I am putting into The Business.

I have to save it here because otherwise it’s gone.

When most people look at their risk, they basically look at it from the inside out.

They look at it like a passenger on the Titanic.

They’re only worried about falling overboard.

Seldom do people look at it from the outside in.

The ship going down.

The higher order risk.

https://twitter.com/paulportesi/status/1625041291464826881?s=46&t=vaH1mvM_0eTL9UkcABDhow

To which the provocative reply is:

Invert. Imagined not viewing as the passenger. You’re the captain.

https://twitter.com/grantssc/status/1625042051963428865?s=46&t=vaH1mvM_0eTL9UkcABDhow

I often think of the systemic risk but am unable to see what I, a passenger on the S.S. Federal Reserve (for instance) can do to mitigate the systemic risk.

But I always saw myself as a passenger, therefore largely helpless. The best strategy I could imagine is to stand near the lifeboats and have a backpack of emergency supplies. Metaphorically speaking.

Better thinking is required. The reply changed my frame.

. . . somehow landed a little different today. Something must change, and it is changing, and I am changing, and everything around me is changing.

Directionally productive.

Productive implies an aim. True, and in this case the aim reveals itself as I walk toward it.

What needs to change? It’s not (necessarily) a baby/bathwater solution that’s called for.

Dreams last night were a loop of a work topic, never moving beyond the start of the loop. Ugh.

I’m in a different place this weekend. It’s the weekend. I’m doing non-work things here. Yet the brain is stuck in a loop. Even in dreams.

This means slow, steady change in other aspects of my life—not just work. Here is a trivial one. I can run up the miles on my car before returning it on the lease. Why not a big road trip? I’m only half facetious. Where could I go for a few weeks for a break?

The part I don’t particularly relish about this idea is the butt-in-driver’s seat time it takes to drive 2,000 miles. No road trip. Because really I don’t want to travel to (random place). I want to *be in* (random place). Better to cash in a few magic airline points to go somewhere and just be.

What this points to, though, is the need to make a more portable life for myself.

This morning I am doing what I want to be doing. The airport waits for me.

Now to make more of this happen. Or allow, perhaps. Because this is always here.

It’s like some particular topic of interest. Right now I’m hearing everyone (ok not everyone) around me talk about topics I’m interested in. I think it must be some new thing but, but no. It’s just new to me. There are books. Old books. And people wrote blog posts years ago.

It’s just new to me. It has been there all along.

The life I envision has been there all along, too. It was just waiting for me to notice it. Now I am gently pointed in that direction, and I see that it’s not that far. And yet so far when I don’t see it.

Remember the time when you saw the gossamer veils separating the universes, each person in his own universe? On Lake Avenue, of all places.

See-through yet there, as easy to pass through as smoke. Are these walls? Horizons? Or just illusions that separate me from you, my world from yours? Your possibilities from yourself and my possibilities from myself? Illusions that can be trivially exploded?

All of those universes are available and exist, except for those who see only their own universe and perceive the smoky veil as an end beyond which there is no more.

I’m passing through the smoke again and seeing what has always been there.