It seems like everyone I know and almost everyone I encounter is Going Through It right now, as spring ramps up toward summer. There are too many reasons to count, big and small, personal and im. There’s a weariness and a wariness. There’s a feeling that we’re all trying very very hard to keep the wheels on the bus and the bus out of the ditch and the 56 kids on the bus safe, or at least safe enough that at none have gone missing when we do the headcount again at the other end of the day.
In my own life, there’s a feeling that there’s sand in the gears. Nothing is turning easily. Everything feels like it takes a lot of extra effort, that I have to use my full body weight to shove the wheels back into motion every day. There’s also what seems to be an inordinate amount of hurry-up-and-wait going on, flurries of intense activity toward some goal or other — the big one, these days, being keeping the freelance ball rolling so as to keep the lights on and such — where I get the thing done and then *crickets* as the next pieces of the process, the ones that don’t rest with me, take the time they will take.
In the meantime, the task is to not twist in the wind, which is hard. I like answers, I like direction, I like feeling like I have control over what’s happening next. I think we all do. Waiting is hard. Not knowing, or not being sure, is hard. It takes effort to let go of it enough so that you don’t force yourself into twisting in the wind more than absolutely necessary. Ironic, of course. Anyone who says they effortlessly relax into uncertainty is either some kind of Zen master or lying, I think. Or perhaps both.
Again I end up thinking about experiments. Some of them do not sound much like experiments on the surface, like when I tell myself “Ok, so what if we experiment with believing that the person who is on vacation right now is going to be a lot more likely to respond once they get back, and just not contributing to the enormous clog building up in their inbox while I know they’re away?”
Somehow it makes it easier if I think of it as an experiment, that there are other options and this is just the one we’re trialing right now.
Another experiment I like to do is the experiment where I see what happens if I state, for the record and as an expectation, that there will be forward motion today and that I am going to be just fine and everything is going to go okay. Because I am ridiculous, I do occasionally also have to say to myself “ok, so, what if I did an experiment where I didn’t move the goal, and I didn’t have an okay day but then beat myself up because I did not also magically solve every single problem I currently have?”
Sometimes these experiments work out better than others. They’re usually worth the experiment though. Experiments are good for not quitting. You’re still experimenting, after all. Can’t make the call until the returns are in.
Experiments, to me, are a hopeful thing. I don’t get a lot of mileage out of being told to find hope in the kinds of things visualization voiceovers and self-help influencers try to tell you to find hope in. You know, the laughter of children and sunrises and butterflies and stuff. Those are great things. But invoking them isn’t really what gets my hope gland going. (No shade: those things do the job for lots of people and I’m for what gets you through the night without harming others.) I did recently stumble across a list of “things that give me hope” that included “good editors” though — item 116 on this list. That one did give me hope.
And so does experimenting. An experiment means you don’t know but you would like to. It means that you don’t currently have a particular piece of information but you’re willing to make an effort to get it, or get closer to getting it. An experiment means you have questions and having questions means there’s something you want to know, and wanting to know means you haven’t given up wanting to know. It means you haven’t quit. Even with all the damn sand in the gears.
And I always figure that if I haven’t quit, with a little luck I might get to the end of the day with all the wheels still on the bus and the bus still between the ditches and the same 56 kids on the bus I started out with. From where I sit here in the front pew of what I like to call the First Church of the Good Enough Job, that’s not such a bad outcome.
