tangentalizingly delicious

Thursday June 19, 2008

Round about last August things got simple. I’d started that sentence with the intent of writing “complicated”, but the truth is exactly the opposite.

I left my previous job in the middle of July, 2007. I was unhappy, unfulfilled and now that almost a year has gone by, I can say with some amount of confidence, petulant. The transition from employment, through unemployment, to employment did not go as planned. I ended up being without income until the end of October.

The good points are that I got to spend a lot of time with Jen and Harvey, which is just about my favorite thing in the world to do. I got to talk to a lot of companies to find out what most places in town are doing and what kind of people they’re looking for, and I got to realize that I am generally speaking not that kind of person.

I go through long periods of my life where I coast. Arguably, I’ve been doing it for my entire life, with occasional bursts of exertion to get ahead so I can coast a little longer. I had to figure out how to break that mold and what I decided on was patience.

I have spent a long time envisioning some magic day when someone announces to me that I have all the money I could ever want. Or, in my attempts at moderation, that I have all the money I could ever want for the next year. And unintentionally, and not consciously I had gotten myself into a waiting pattern until that happened.

That waiting pattern is a common thing for me. I decide that my weight will magically some day in the future be ok, and some day in the future I’ll know how to manage the things I eat and the things I do to my body to maintain it and keep it, you know, alive and so I don’t have to worry about the bag of chips I’m eating today because Future Rob will take care of it all.

I put effort off because it is hard to see the results, and it’s impossible to know when they will come. I know better, I know that things don’t magically appear and change in one fell swoop, but it’s a nice cozy fantasy.

I made a decision to learn to make decisions properly. I decided to make the choices that the person I wanted to be would make. As it turns out I’m actually not very good at it, but that’s the point of patience.

At various points in my life, I have been smart enough, lucky enough or exposed to enough related knowledge that when I would try something, occasionally I would be pretty good at it. And to get through life, being pretty good at something is often enough. The problem with it is that the things that you try and you aren’t pretty good at? It’s easier just to drop them and try something else because you’ll probably be pretty good at that thing, and being pretty good at something is pretty satisfying.

What I’m experimenting with now is learning how to be patient enough to get really good at things. Patience.