5 – Lines and Circles – A Well-Lit Path

I do see how straight-ahead thinking gets you there, faster. I’m not convinced, however, that the destination to which the don’t-look-back, no-holds-barred train is heading is a place I really want to be.

So, no – lest you ask – I haven’t published my novel, because I haven’t written it (yet), and I haven’t pressed a CD because I haven’t filled one (yet), and I haven’t built my house in my dream property because the dream hasn’t ended, and I haven’t stopped spinning because there are too many jaw-droppingly incredible places to visit and languages to learn and people to embrace…

“Lines” by I. T. Hammar @ www.ithammar.com

On a more experiential note: I had always pushed one project ahead while keeping my eye on the other open items, but when I became a chef and co-manager at a small Minneapolis restaurant, then my friends, the capacity – nay: survival skill – of watching this soup and that bread, and prepping the lunch line, and oh we are out of tea after all, pushed the non-linear to the extreme. You can’t just show up with you One Great Thing. You have to show up with all of it, or the meal’s incomplete. You have to show up with a sense of humor, or tomorrow you’ll quit. And you have to show up at an even pace with your colleagues, or you’ll create strife.

The Odonata Community, which was active for nine solid years, never bought land as a group, yet what we built in social structure and mutual care was more durable and I would say more important than the roofbeams we may have raised. We learned how to begin with a seed of disagreement and, with careful listening and honest acceptance of each of the aggrieved parties, arrive at a closer relationship and a deeper understanding of ourselves, our circle, and (without going out on any limbs whatsoever) human society. Amazing.

I do hope to get back to a circle of collaborators. If you know how to coexist and how to resolve differences, you stand to save thousands and thousands of dollars simply with your skill for sharing. You enrich your life in so many directions you can’t count them, just turn in a circle welcoming the benefits. That includes learning how to tame your aggressions and fears, which may be the greatest single gain of all.

I discovered in practice what I already knew in principle: it is so much better to arrive anywhere in good company, that your destination hardly matters; and that if you value your destination more highly than how you get there, you will almost invariably be isolated, disappointed, and in the end ignorant of why you feel that way. Give me comrades in the rain above a lonely penthouse office any day.

How does that all apply to my dense little Present? Well, I frankly can’t believe the many facets of my many projects are arriving to completion, together. The list to include family, pets, plants, belongings, shipping, work, sales, car repair, accident repair, bicycle repair, housecleaning, cooking for myself, banking, journaling, dancing a tiny tiny bit… augh! Stop the list! Stop!

Stopped.

I leave on Monday evening, five days from today, and the eddies in the river that’s been raging through my body will simply spin away. Somehow, we have all – the eddies and me, the river that is us – have arrived together, without too much flood or drought.