De-mining the gap between ambition and reality
In general, I don’t suffer from a lack of ambition - that is, if I’m honest enough to admit that to myself.
I’ve been accused of being in a hurry to get to places that I just found out existed, or even that I’ve created out of thin air.
Recognizing this doesn't necessarily make it easier to short-circuit that tendency - at least not as often as I’d like to. Sometimes I have the complete out-of-body experience, like I’m floating above myself and I can see that I’m doing it, but I can’t stop myself.
This is - objectively - what happened when I decided to write a book a couple of years ago.
I know I had been stewing on it for years - maybe decades - so that at least implies some level of contemplation, if not a longer arc of ambition. But, I know I skipped a million little, and very important, steps when I just decided to do it.
And…shocker (?), I haven’t done it; yet.
Now, in defence of my ambitious tendencies, sometimes that’s just what’s required to actually get something done, avoiding analysis paralysis in favour of decision-imprecision.
Like an old basketball coach of mine used to bark at us (he did, in fact, effectively bark his exhortations at/toward us, hence the indelible impression 35 years later): practice makes permanent.
My haste to ambition in certain things also brings with it a serious downside - when I discover the gap between the stated ambition, and reality, I can find it hard to close the gap.
Maybe sometimes the reason is because I refuse to even enter into the gap - finding it too mined with my own recriminations, anxieties and self-criticisms about having had the ambition in the first place - or maybe even just at the haste with which I expressed or embraced it.
I realize now that this is kind of what has happened to me with writing. If I want to find time and ways to do something I enjoy, something that brings me meaning and helps me understand things about myself and the world - as a friend once reminded me, quoting Arthur Miller - then I need to begin, again.
I need to begin the process of de-mining that gap.
I should write more, I think. I think this often. So often that it sits atop the heap of undone things and stares menacingly back at me. Then, I avoid the help of undone things so that I don’t have to see it staring back at me across that gap.
It’s sort of turns into gremlin food, then, for me. It feeds those you're not enough gremlins - the ones who I have more than a passing familiarity with.
I kind of feel like they're hungry right now, even, as I write this.
This feeds a sort of self-defeating cycle, resulting in lots of procrastinating, excuse-making and telling myself stories about why I shouldn’t write more…stories.
And, guess what = then I don’t write very often.
I try.
I scrawl out ideas, topics or even bits of writing thinking those will inspire me to come back and do it. But I don’t actually do it.
I’m not sure I’ll ever shake the enough Gremlins in my life - and maybe that’s not the point.
But I can de-mine that gap between ambition and reality.
A couple of recent inspirations:
(1) I listened to an episode of
hosting today, where he talks about Eugenia Leigh’s poem “How the Dung Beetle Finds its Way Home”. It’s lovely, and deep on many levels (you can listen to the podcast, and Padraig reading it - contemplating it - and talking about how he made different choices at a point in his life), and worth many, many re-listens. In it, he talks about the Volta within the poem.In the small and highly-interconnected world we live in, it made me think of how my older son(s) love to go out with their friends and play Volta - small-sided soccer in a fallow outdoor hockey rink - and how much energy it gives them.
Maybe the beginning of 2024 is a Volta, of sorts, for each of us in our own ways, without having to ‘resolve’ huge things or make life-altering changes.
(2) My friend
is hilarious, incisive and creative, in all the ways that count most. Her reflections in are bite-sized pearls of wisdom I’m sure you’ll enjoy as much as I do.