Inexpert Attempts

This post is in part a summary. Part of the summary is for you to see where we've been and part of the summary is for me so that I can effect some change.

Most of my posts heretofore, especially the lifestyle posts, have been about my pet idea from last year. It is an idea that I nurtured in my classes and then sprung out to invade the rest of my thinking throughout the rest of the year. I want to write this down for you now in this format because I think it needs to be written as a general idea statement and not always as the impulse behind specific incarnations.

Try.

That is quite simply all I have been saying. I've been saying it a lot of different ways because it is too easy too gloss over, too easy to say 'yes, i know that' and then forget about it. So instead I have given it to you as specific ideas that are attempts, just that, attempts at articulating and advancing and learning. All of them have been about being imperfect and being okay with imperfection. And that's another thing that is hard to learn and hard to accept as anything but banal truth.

The world we live in does not allow mastery. It never has, it never will. There has never been a complete picture and there won't be. That is lesson one. What is more important, however, is lesson two: Try anyways.

Just because there is no completion (under my sickly world view, maybe not yours) does not mean that there is no progress. It is too easy to say there is nothing and then collapse of ennui. Just because there is progress tho' doesn't mean you will know there is, or even the progress you think you are seeing is actually not at all progress.

The real tool to learn is flexibility. Too often people head down a path and deadend and give up. Or head down a path and make subtle concession until the path is entirely wrong and keep marching on blindly anyways. Implicit in 'try' is failure, is reevaluation, is the acknowledgment that you can be wrong and that when you are wrong you have to start anew from there.

All of this is terrible hard. None of this may get you anywhere. You may not even hear it. That is why I like to instantiate it in little things that can make the impulse and drive behind it gleanable.

But I wanted to say this. And I want it to be repeated. A lot. But for now, I'd also like to leave it hear, said as it was, and see what other green pastures of ideas lie ahead.