Poker Woes

I must say poker isn't nearly as fun to play when one spends a good portion of the night losing. Between the cards, the cards and the cards, I didn't stand a chance. It's almost worse than losing as a result of my own poor judgment. I didn't even get the satisfaction of beating up on myself.
It's amazing how little it helps to remind oneself that it's just a game. As the others' laughter gets louder and their conversation more animated, I can feel myself slumping inwardly (and probably outwardly), unable to share in the joy. My eyes focus in on the cards in my hand as if by staring with enough intensity they will switch suits or my missing fourth deuce will suddenly turn up.
I manage a smile and a few salutary words of congratulations. I'm a big boy now and rise to such occasions. And besides, I'm supremely confident that next time the outcomes will be very different. I can't wait.

Trouble Lurks

Trouble lurks beneath the surface. Few dare to mention it aloud. Our refined social veneers are but complicit enablers. Many a relationship has capsized nurturing a precious denial about such fundamental realities.
Blessing also hides in the deep places. But its access is overlooked when all one's energy is directed toward keeping the house of card from falling. Human richness exists alongside human brokenness, inextricably intertwined for good and ill.
Growing in comfort with grief's odd pairing with joy is our challenge and hope. To brush up against love without minimizing innocence's absence is to taste fulness. To search for love without loss is to experience futility.

No Excuses

Fundamentally my success in life depends on adhering to the maxim, "no excuses." Yes, all people and most circumstances are outside of my control. So many factors and dynamics influencing and impacting each contour in the path I tread. Nevertheless, however complicated my next step may be, it is I who must take it.
"I wish I could have taken this other route that someone else took, or made such and such a choice that was available last year, or faced fewer obstacles or had less clowns working around me or ogres above me." Wishful thinking. Uncontestably and unverifiably true on the one hand, but in simple denial of the facts and the realities of the choices not being made on the other.
When it comes right down to it, I have no excuses. I am responsible for what I can do and must do it, whether easy or difficult, straightforward or complicated, delightful or painful, energizing or draining. No excuses.

Conceit or Confidence

The Olympic spirit seems to have few admirers in the media. The inwardly focused athlete is deemed unfriendly and self-absorbed for not giving chatty interviews, smiling enough or waving appreciatively. Anyone who doesn't show up for practice is labeled arrogant and probably doomed to the fate they deserve (which generally is assumed not to include the medal podium.)
This morning I read one reporter wonder aloud whether such behaviors were conceit or confidence. To those of us on the sidelines, I think the question is a speculative, useless and even meaningless line of inquiry. To the competing athlete, though, I imagine its significance lies in how grounded in reality his or her perception of him or herself is.
To know with some accuracy what one needs to do to perform at the top of one's game and to proceed to do just that, however it makes the rest of us feel, is to be admired in my book. On the other hand, an inaccurately too lofty or too low ability assessment is a recipe for trouble. Not for its moral implications in the eyes of others, but simply because the decisions being made concerning focus or practice or late night parties are not grounded in the facts. When it comes to performance competition, it's the facts that get tested.

Life at Cliff's Edge

Wrestling with God at cliff's edge. Dangerous on many counts, but I will not countenance the alternative. I'd rather fall to my death striving for life than endure a living death, compliantly pleasing and tame. And so as the dust fills my nostrils and the stone scrapes the flesh away, every thrashing effort to dominate merely enlivens the spirit with the bracing reality that God will not retreat from this relationship.

Soul Etchings

Some moments are etched deep within. Their ongoing impact out of proportion with their actual power.
The scars need not be disfiguring or incapacitating, though. How we take our traumas forward—both the good ones and the bad—is a choice. Not an easy choice, but a choice nonetheless. While forever changed, no verdict but our own will determine to what extent the change enriched or damaged.

Idea Assault

Assaulted by my own imagination. No protection. No reprieve. Ideas tumble and well and sprout and burst. Without sequence or priority. Without a map. Stories, images, principles, facts, emotions, conversations, faces, words, possibilities, memories, jokes, expletives, textures, intuitions, fragments, worries, promises, whole new worlds no words can describe. Out of control.

Conversation of One

Conversations in motion. Undulating landscapes manipulate without polarity or dimension. Mornings are but rumors that assault clearer visions by reducing them to words. One can only be reduced so many times a week before it takes a toll. Systematically penalized for being other than the hero of the community fairy tale. So is rolling out of bed a cowardly sell out or a defiant act of courage? How to even cope with the suspicion that one is living a different story line than everyone else. Reality in flux. A new conversation. Sadly still a conversation of one.

Lop-Sided Belonging

Belonging involves compromise. The terms of belonging, though, are weighted in the hands of any group's existing insiders. Most, if not all, of the work of compromise is consequently borne by the newcomer—the one in the least secure position in the new relationship. A problematic situation at best.
We even have vocabulary to describe the difficulty of "breaking in" to a new community. As if walls without doorways encircled and protected these clusters.
A few do manage to succeed in the double responsibility of breaking in and compromising, but at what cost? Not only does the group fallaciously interpret these exceptions as evidence of their generous openness, and proceed to harden in their unyielding standards of acceptance; but new members are immediately diminished by the lop-sided give-without-take concessions wrung from their greater need to belong.
The mutuality inherent in relationship and compromise needs courageous advocates within organizations, communities and cliques to risk the changes required to facilitate both. Every new member changes a group completely.

Refusing to Belong

There's an element of belonging that cedes power to those who may exclude. Some skirt the margins, happier to avoid the risk of rejection. Some, though, choose to avoid the indignity of even allowing the vote. Different motivations for a similar isolation.
I sense a glimmer of positive in the latter assertion of power. A inviolable sense of self that will not cooperate with the group's capacity to judge fit. Though its outworking has the ironic effect of cementing one's isolation, it has the soundness of an internal discernment against potential group abuse.

Taking But a Step

Step by step rather than all at once. Each step having its own value without the whole being at stake. When it's all or nothing, even the smallest action holds enormous risk. It's like accepting ultimate responsibility all of the time just by agreeing to get out of bed in the morning. So much cannot stand or fall with one.
Step by step is something at once, even if not everything. Whereas all at once is nothing until the whole is achieved.
Step by step provides not only progress with each step but learning. The whole becomes better informed and more wisely designed in the process itself.
Step by step. Courage for the next step.

Simple Complexity

Simple insights into complex issues. Not simplifying what is complex, which is a form of denial and avoidance. But approaching what is multi-faceted slowly, thoughtfully, methodically. Layer by layer. Perspective by perspective. Acting while gaining understanding, and not postponing action until achieving understanding. Not needing to master before engaging. May feel slower, but actually one is making progress from the get go.
We hesitate and delay, convincing ourselves we need more and better information before we can make a decision. But there is no way to get complete information and there are no such things as perfect decisions.
We need to make as wise a decision as is possible as early as is possible. Not an easily identifiable benchmark, but a surer route to making progress.

Work Space

I look around me and see nothing but distractions. A thousand shoulds and coulds jostling for attention. I need to pay some attention to what helps me pay attention. Creating a productive work environment has been a challenge. What little space I have is cluttered. Desk space. Schedule space. Creative space. It all belongs to someone else. I want to work how and when and where I function best but not affect anyone else in the process. As if it were a crime to ask anyone to make an adjustment in order to help me.

New Habits

I want to be different. Change some things. It probably has to do with forming some new habits. New ways of being that serve me better. Choices in what I do and when I do it that contribute rather than detract, build instead of chip away at, facilitate focus rather than magnify neglect.
My perennial problem with new habits is the built-in resistance to change that I seemed to have mastered. Or maybe it's wanting something bad enough. Or conversely maybe there's not enough pain and down side to my current practices to motivate me toward something better.
Something needs to change. I need to take a first step now.

Decisions in Motion

Decisions that result in action. Concrete and measurable. The advantage of which is not to pass judgment and move on, but to evaluate efficacy, learn and make the next decision.

Answers vs. Actions

Whether or not an answer is available is always secondary. In order to live, one must continue to choose one's next actions.
I am intrigued by the tendency to look for answers when circumstances don't go as planned. We hear people ranting, "Why did such and such happen? I want answers!" As if knowing this information will do something helpful. All this line of inquiry accomplishes is to take our attention away from where it is especially needed at the moment—on what decision needs to be made next.
Granted, much can be learned from what goes wrong, mistakes, unanticipated turns of events. In such a case, the same criteria applies: we need to identify the decision such information will helpfully inform. If we cannot identify what decision(s) we are trying to make, such inquiries more likely will provide little more than self-satisfying therapeutic indulgences.
I've had much more success when I can keep my focus on making decision and taking action, than in conducting investigations in the search for answers.