I celebrated Twelfth Night/Day this year even though I’m not a Christian.   I’ve been searching for ways to mark the various times of the year and while the religious observations don’t mean anything to me the fact that they’re linked with older, mostly pagan, traditions resonates deeply with me.  The older I become the more I’ve been seeking out ways to connect myself with older (or create new) traditions.   It gives us a great chance to reflect on not only our lives, but the lives of those that have come before us, throughout the year.   I’ve felt like my life has lost  meaning as I’ve gotten older and have become far too preoccupied with the minutiae of daily life and these things have helped center me and reconnect me to all that is around me.

This year, since it was really the first, I celebrated Twelfth Night by simply having some cake (a king cake) as well as some Glögg which had to fill in for the Wassail traditionally served on Twelfth Night.  I wanted something subdued and really just wanted to note the day with some traditional foods.

Today for Twelfth Day/Epiphany I had the same foods and went out for a walk.  The walk seemed an appropriate way to bring an end to the festivities of the Christmas season.  The air smelled wonderfully clean and at times scented with the smell of burning wood.  It put me in a thoughtful mood, which I think, was the point of marking the holiday.   It’s now time to put the old year behind me and start the new one with a fresh perspective.  I’ve made some major changes in my life to start the  year (new job) and will continue to make others throughout the year.

To any and all reading this I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and wish you peace and prosperity in the coming year!

Nature and all of it’s randomness is truly amazing. The infinite shapes of snowflakes. Infinite possibilities of sunsets. Infinite but ordered shapes of leaves. The list goes on and on and that boundless opportunity for discovery truly is a gift.

Happy Holidays!

I’m a very fortunate person and I try to count my blessings every day but I think it’s important to note them here on this Thanksgiving Day.  Thanks to people who find their way here and read the words I struggle to write.  I write this site for me but I hope you have found something worthwhile here as well.

Please take a bit of time and think of the things you have to be thankful for.  It’s such a small but important thing.

The good news is that I’ve been revising my view on how to get stuff done lately (not in the GTD sense…just in general). I’ve been undertaking projects at home a bit at a time. Get the kids in bed and work on something for 30 minutes to an hour. This way I’m moving things forward even if it isn’t at the breakneck pace I really want. Is this some huge revelation? For me it is. It is something that should be obvious, and maybe to others it has been, but for whatever reason it never has been for me.

Now I just need to apply this to projects like ‘basement renovation’

A recent conversation with a friend really tripped me up. It started out innocently enough basically as something to pass the time on the train ride to work. Political mattters sometimes are better left undiscussed but this was, from all appearances, a simple discussion over the economy. Given that my friend and I are really at opposing ends of the political spectrum the discussion became more heated than it should.

He simply could not understand that I didn’t agree with him. The conversation degenerated further in a series of emails traded back and forth over the rest of the day. This friend tends toward Libertarian, and in my opinion, pretty extreme views. Keyensian economic theory popped in to the conversation (as a joke I might add) at which point he essentially accused those who subscribe to the work of Keynes as Fascists and Communists and all of the other words that people generally tend to throw around these days to describe people with whom they don’t agree.

I’ve grown really weary of weak minds who latch on to these terms with little to no understanding of what they mean and wield them like sticks with which to beat people with whom they don’t agree. Main takeaway point here: if you don’t understand what something means don’t use it to label someone. You may think you’re being righteous but you just look ignorant at best, or stupid at worst.

So what does all of this have to do with my opening point? In a nutshell this: that conversation opened the floodgates in my mind as to just how much of the precious time in my life I’m wasting. Time I’m wasting on feelings of guilt, feelings of fear and worry, feelings of anger. Time I’m wasting lusting over things that are of little import (new gadgets, software, etc). So much time spent on things that really don’t matter and that when I look back on my life will mean nothing.

This isn’t some sort of religious conversion but as I get older I keep having these moments where I realize just how quickly time is passing and how I’m letting life slip by without doing any of the things I really want to accomplish. Whether those things are life changing events or small projects I want to do makes little difference. The size of the thing is irrelevant if I’m wasting all my time since absolutely nothing will get done.

So getting back to that conversation one more time: it really jarred me. It was one more conversation on a topic of which neither I nor the other party have any expertise in which to have a useful opinion yet it started to turn ugly. I’m tired of that direction of life. The honest truth is I have nothing to prove to anyone nor do I need to convince anyone of anything. What I *do* need to do is try to live my life to the best of my ability and make each minute count as much as possible. It all sounds so trite since so many people talk about these things on the Internet but it really is true. When do you reach the point of “enough is enough”? I think I’ve reached it this week. The question is: when do I do something about it?

On September 10th of this year Merlin wrote in a post titled “43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work”:

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

The first time I read this I laughed. After all Merlin Mann pioneered productivity porn. To hear him complaining about how many sites are now out there peddling the stuff of his making was laughable. At the same time the guy has a point. In that article he describes, quite correctly, the problems with the productivity blogosphere today. Too much noise and not enough signal and I found myself agreeing with him to the point that I cut all of it out of my life.

Well, that and a big chunk of other time-wasting material. I trimmed about 2/3rd of the subscriptions I had going in FeedDemon/NetNewWire. I’ve all but given up political blogs which have been my other, massive, black hole of time. I’ve got a lot to do and not enough time to do it all. The cognitive dissonance being created by all of that reading without any real purpose behind it was becoming deafening so no more.

And honestly the best part of his post was the discussion of “conversation” and “community” :

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

Right on. My blog hasn’t hit the popularity curve the same way 43 Folders has Not yet anyhow but this is my blog. I’ll say what I want, when I want to say it. If you have something to say to me email me but I got sick of tools like this on my own site. If you like what I have to say please keep reading. If you don’t keep reading or leave. The decision is yours but I’m not going to justify myself to anyone else let alone turds pretending to be people like I mentioned above.

Thanks for the whining Merlin. I feel a bit lighter now myself

I suppose in some ways that is similar to meditation and it was really damn hard.   My mind kept flitting all over the place.  I had to restrain myself from moving over to the computer to read something or send a friend an instant message.  I’ve been slowly weaning myself from various sources of information that have been nothing but time sinks.  Today was a quick plunge into the cold waters of single-tasking and boy…definitely not a simple thing.

A simple bit of advice (and something that should have been obvious to me): Think hard before making a life-changing decision.  Look at your current situation from as many viewpoints as possible before making any changes. Sometimes you’ll find that something you hadn’t even considered before is more important than the things you’re placing so much emphasis on now.