planning

I just now wrote and sent this email to Marie.

My love, my sweet,

This morning when I wrote you about swimming I ended with "More on this theme later." In your most recent reply this evening you talked about me putting structures into my life. (Not nearly enough of them, I add ruefully!) Yes, well I've been thinking.

This week I was supposed to be deciding about [a professional continuing education class]. (At this point I think I'll do it, provided I still can. The deadline is Saturday but there's nowhere to register online, which means filling out a piece of paper, attaching a check, and mailing it. I emailed the coordinator this evening asking if she thinks a letter mailed from here on Friday will get to her there by Saturday. Of course it's only a 15-minute drive....) Anyway, then out of the blue somebody on the NextDoor social media site advertised this furniture. Picking up the sofa sounds like an obvious thing to do, but then I started looking at it more deeply.

The thing is, some time ago (I forget how long -- a year? two years? more?) I started visiting a local furniture store. They work with a company that makes custom furniture, so I got their information on making sleeper sofas. I looked at different styles and sizes, then came home and made a scale model of my living room (the one I texted you) and played with all kinds of variations. And in the end I never got the project finished. I never actually ordered the damned sofa. There were too many decisions and steps along the way, and I ran out of steam. Then this January I thought, "Well I have a good reason not to work on it now because maybe I'm going to move this year." Only that doesn't look very likely either.

Anyway, what this means is that buying a sofa from Donna across town is the same thing as admitting defeat in the larger project. And it's a well-earned defeat, to be sure! If after five years I still don't have a sofa in this place, that approach plainly wasn't working.

What this shows more generally -- one instance isn't enough to prove anything, but it illustrates it beautifully and I already know it's true -- is that I'm very weak at long-term planning and decision-making. I can make impulsive decisions. I can decide to go visit your family for the Fourth of July and book tickets the afternoon you formally invite me. I can make plans to take Son 2 to Peru when my cousin tells me I've got six months before she leaves the country. But something long-term, like researching, planning, and buying a custom sleeper sofa? Not so good.

I am not proud of this, but it's a fact.

Of course, at an intellectual level I know how to solve the problem ... or how I OUGHT to be able to solve the problem. It's the very same thing I was telling you about swimming: start by breaking the problem into the smallest pieces I can possibly imagine, and then just do The Very Next One with no thought to the larger task. If I think about the larger task, I'll quit; but if I just do one tiny piece at a time, then in principle I should make headway against any project which is finite in scope. (Clearly a Cantorian argument will show that I'm not going to make a lot of headway against infinite projects.)

The problem is keeping at it. The problem is accountability. What makes you go swimming when you'd rather sleep in? What makes you order a sofa when you'd rather go to the movies?

Well, I know that too. We all do. Having somebody check up on you, or somebody to answer to. This is why the world needs auditors.

I wish I were better at this kind of long-term task, and I suspect I've known what it takes to address it for a long time. The question is, who do I report to? This isn't the kind of role I want to ask a work colleague to take on for me, because it means exposing an awful lot of my own weaknesses and I'm not sure that's something I want to do to someone I know from work. The obvious answer would be someone close enough that I don't have to worry about maintaining a face in front of them, someone who already knows my weaknesses too well for that, someone more or less like a spouse -- but by the time I started to see and understand this stuff (and I truly don't remember when that was) there was no way I could have trusted Wife far enough. I never got far enough with D or Debbie to try it either. (It might have been possible with Debbie if we hadn't dropped out of touch, because she alluded to having had to do similar things at her end in the past to train herself how to make long-term plans. But in any event it didn't happen.)

You can probably see where this is going.

I'm not going to ask you to hold my hand while I buy furniture, though, because as noted I have already given up that battle. Time to pick something else that I've let dangle for too long.

One obvious thought would be [a writing project we've talked about recently], which certainly sounds fun and engaging. But I was actually thinking of something that is ... more tangible and in some senses easier, though not easy by a long shot. You remember when we were getting my living room ready to have my new neighbors over for dinner, that there were all these stacks of paper lying around that had to be moved? And if you open my filing cabinet it's almost impossible to squeeze anything else in because there's already too much. And in my storage unit there are boxes of old papers -- God knows what, really -- that I probably don't need, or most of them at any rate. One of the tasks I set myself on moving in was to set up a system for handling all this paper so I don't drown in it, and so I keep only what I want or need.

That was five years ago.

Would you be willing to hold me accountable to this? That doesn't mean putting off [the writing project] till it's over. Once I get my feet under me, maybe I can block out time in my week for writing as well. But what it would mean is this. Step one, due by the end of this weekend, is to write a plan for how to get it done. This means breaking it into tiny steps, absurdly small, the smallest I can imagine. Then it means committing to do at least ONE step every weekend. Remember, these steps are to be really tiny, so there should be no excuse for not getting at least one done each weekend. But if I do two steps one weekend, that does NOT allow me to do zero the next. At least one.

Progress this way will be very slow, of course. But consider: maybe I break the task down into 100 steps. At one step every weekend, that's two years ... but I've already spent five without doing anything. Getting it done in two years would be a huge improvement.

Note also that by planning to act only on the weekends, it means that in principle I can do other things during the week. Go to Sangha. Do my homework for the professional development class. Go to movies. Or maybe, ... you know, ... start writing. At least I don't rule it out. There is room into which it could be structured.

But without structure, it'll be like buying furniture, or any of the other things I want to get to Some Day.

It's a really unflattering picture, but then you already know plenty of my faults. What's a few more, at this point? So maybe the "warts and all" side of it won't exactly be a shock .... (faint smile)

Thoughts?

 

 

Know that I love you ever,
Your dilatory and unstructured (but ever-hopeful!) Hosea