I tend to play for keeps
So I lose a lot of me.
When I am focused in the flow
I forget about everybody.
Even if I happen to win,
The cost is too much,
My victory thin.
If you want to play
Tell me so.
I take my fun seriously
And my awareness is slow.
I notice unimportant things
And don't see the nose on my face.
My eyes strain in the distance
Though nearsighted in time & place.
The future was far
But you were right here.
I worried about the unknown
And in the present you disappeared.
In glancing at my rearview
I see where you were past.
When I put myself first
I left you waiting in last.
It does not do to mourn.
You deserved better than what you got.
It is an expensive lesson for us to learn.
How what didn't happen could have been a lot.
Choices are made
I accept my blame.
The price was paid.
And we've both received change.
Where I am is different than I expected.
And I am sorry I didn't "ride or die" for you
With my free will, you were not chosen as elected.
I am not bitter at others
For the way I behaved.
I hope you have better friends
Who know your value & have you saved.
As a contact I wish I had kept in touch.
Without an honest view of relationships
I've stumbled through roads blinded & rough,
Fallen through cracks, hung by fingertips.
And learned in time how to trust enough.
I look back to when we were friends
Not through dark clouds or rose colored lens.
It is not how we started but whether we've found ourselves by these ends.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Friday, March 13, 2020
Fragment - Focus
I had a plan for a post, but I have forgotten it at the moment. The catalyst for my reaction today is due to timing. It is difficult to manage, and I tend to notice it more when things don't align than when they perfectly do.
I visited my family today & they were working on a jigsaw puzzle. A lesson from this is that people's personality & problem solving methods really surface during the process. It is a given that not every piece locks with another & it takes time & effort to achieve the rush of connecting them for a bigger picture.
I am reminded of when my grandparents were driven by my aunt & uncle over the last holiday season. My uncle loves to engage others around him & really brings life & light to a room. He also has a particular enjoyment of convincing my mother to be his big sister & share in his joy of childhood fun & hijinks. They decided during this visit to hold an informally official puzzle building competition. When it was described to me, I did not realize the subject was a 75 piece children's puzzle. It was a challenge of dexterity & timing - a sprint, not the marathon distance of effort I had envisioned. So my grandparents & I witnessed members of my family crowing & cheering over the participant's assembly methods time after time. It was exciting, it was enthralling, it was a simple children's puzzle. I was shaking my head in incredulity of the absurd situation. How we were able to wring joy & competition out of a low stakes educational tool. Some people worked the edges first. Some dumped the box out & tried to cut corners. Each person has an idea of how they could shave seconds off their time with their strategy & execution.
I look back on that fondly, but I do not find peace through that vein of meditative picture problem solving. In the past weeks, I have been working on crocheting an afghan blanket as a gift. It is something I have done multiple times before, and is usually more time consuming an endeavor than an engaging one. Unless I have a pattern in mind that forces me to be more proactive in my creative execution, the time drags. I almost lean into the mindlessness, but it does not feel like a full use of my faculties. Typically I watch TV shows or listen to podcasts to maximize my utility of absorbing something while crafting something else. But taking in media is its own can of worms. I often get entangled in the stories & want to unwind them upon someone else to be free of the isolation of experience. It is a solitary practice to craft & consume, and I begin to crave company & balance.
I have a relational mind. It spools linearly, but tangled like a crochet pattern & series of looping knots. If I neglect to keep you apprised of my train of thought, I might be two rows higher in my stitches & lose your attention as to where I now am. I am getting better at communication through experience, but timing is ever difficult to nail with individual people. I need time to acclimate to each person's rhythms and patterns of behavior. How to best convey and receive information in ways so we shall understand one another. But I am not the only one growing in time. Often my references for how a person interacts with me are out of sync with where they are now in phase.
So timing is difficult. I have had to be a little more decisive with how I spend my time lately, as in times past, I liked to be passively invited to things & accommodate others' schedules. It comes from being in a large family & being accustomed to the needs of a larger group. It was easier to have an empty schedule and be able to pencil myself into the lives of others. But I am realizing this simply does not do. I feel guilty cancelling on my commitments, as I feel obligated to keep my word. But it is a startling reality that people often do not have the same relationship & respect for others time that I have held. Others grow impatient with vague shapes of schedules & try to carpe the diem out of their day to the juices & bones, and any wiffle waffler who cannot decide can be run over or taken for a ride. I understand this control impulse in the abstract, as it is very attractive for a control freak to have stability & decisiveness in a structure.
So learning how to catch & release time in schedules is taking some patience to retrain myself in the discipline of management. I shouldn't dwell on the fishes that have gotten away or resent others for their hauls, but to learn from my mistakes & tend my lines as best I can. But timing with others is an art as well, of reading situations & asking good questions to keep referential tabs, so as to better map possible intersections of trajectories in the future. How to avoid collisions through carelessness with outdated information. (These would be misunderstandings of the person which can cause conflict & debris of damaging words.) Too technical on my metaphor for my tastes even, I have fallen in love with my metaphor & wanted it to fit. Maybe it makes sense to others as a possible explanation. There will be others which will serve better as frameworks for a different situations.
Timing. So much of storytelling & humor rests on timing of the teller & the ability to maintain the attention of the listener to play & prey on their expectations, fulfilling & subverting them. I realized today that occasionally, a thought comes that I want to share with a specific friend. A song, a movie, a topic. But, I occasionally forget the timing of things and people when focused on the topic I want to share. Sometimes such sharing is thoughtless & careless in that it might be relevant & topical for ME, but is like grabbing a puzzle piece from a familiar box & trying to connect it where I think it should fit. Things would be so satisfying if the edges would fit. But lately, I realize that my timing is off for what I am sharing & with who I was trying to connect. That corresponding puzzle piece I am trying to connect to might have been lost with that other person. They have moved on in a different direction & if I want to connect, I have to know which boxes to check to fit that picture. And that takes effort & maintenance on the relationship status. And there are some people with whom I have not been able to maintain that familiarity.
My realization was that the specific friend that I wanted to share that piece of memory with was the friend from the time & place of that shared memory. It may not be the person who is, but the person who was. The people we are now are no longer the people who we were then. And that absence can ache like an old wound, like a lost tooth of growth. I am grateful to the permanent teeth of the friendships that have lasted through chewing past meat & gristle of heavier topics through time's tide. But there are still days when I remember the attachments which have fallen away & with them the lost vitality of youthful metabolism which could process those sweeter times, never considering the possibility they would ever be lost.
I visited my family today & they were working on a jigsaw puzzle. A lesson from this is that people's personality & problem solving methods really surface during the process. It is a given that not every piece locks with another & it takes time & effort to achieve the rush of connecting them for a bigger picture.
I am reminded of when my grandparents were driven by my aunt & uncle over the last holiday season. My uncle loves to engage others around him & really brings life & light to a room. He also has a particular enjoyment of convincing my mother to be his big sister & share in his joy of childhood fun & hijinks. They decided during this visit to hold an informally official puzzle building competition. When it was described to me, I did not realize the subject was a 75 piece children's puzzle. It was a challenge of dexterity & timing - a sprint, not the marathon distance of effort I had envisioned. So my grandparents & I witnessed members of my family crowing & cheering over the participant's assembly methods time after time. It was exciting, it was enthralling, it was a simple children's puzzle. I was shaking my head in incredulity of the absurd situation. How we were able to wring joy & competition out of a low stakes educational tool. Some people worked the edges first. Some dumped the box out & tried to cut corners. Each person has an idea of how they could shave seconds off their time with their strategy & execution.
I look back on that fondly, but I do not find peace through that vein of meditative picture problem solving. In the past weeks, I have been working on crocheting an afghan blanket as a gift. It is something I have done multiple times before, and is usually more time consuming an endeavor than an engaging one. Unless I have a pattern in mind that forces me to be more proactive in my creative execution, the time drags. I almost lean into the mindlessness, but it does not feel like a full use of my faculties. Typically I watch TV shows or listen to podcasts to maximize my utility of absorbing something while crafting something else. But taking in media is its own can of worms. I often get entangled in the stories & want to unwind them upon someone else to be free of the isolation of experience. It is a solitary practice to craft & consume, and I begin to crave company & balance.
I have a relational mind. It spools linearly, but tangled like a crochet pattern & series of looping knots. If I neglect to keep you apprised of my train of thought, I might be two rows higher in my stitches & lose your attention as to where I now am. I am getting better at communication through experience, but timing is ever difficult to nail with individual people. I need time to acclimate to each person's rhythms and patterns of behavior. How to best convey and receive information in ways so we shall understand one another. But I am not the only one growing in time. Often my references for how a person interacts with me are out of sync with where they are now in phase.
So timing is difficult. I have had to be a little more decisive with how I spend my time lately, as in times past, I liked to be passively invited to things & accommodate others' schedules. It comes from being in a large family & being accustomed to the needs of a larger group. It was easier to have an empty schedule and be able to pencil myself into the lives of others. But I am realizing this simply does not do. I feel guilty cancelling on my commitments, as I feel obligated to keep my word. But it is a startling reality that people often do not have the same relationship & respect for others time that I have held. Others grow impatient with vague shapes of schedules & try to carpe the diem out of their day to the juices & bones, and any wiffle waffler who cannot decide can be run over or taken for a ride. I understand this control impulse in the abstract, as it is very attractive for a control freak to have stability & decisiveness in a structure.
So learning how to catch & release time in schedules is taking some patience to retrain myself in the discipline of management. I shouldn't dwell on the fishes that have gotten away or resent others for their hauls, but to learn from my mistakes & tend my lines as best I can. But timing with others is an art as well, of reading situations & asking good questions to keep referential tabs, so as to better map possible intersections of trajectories in the future. How to avoid collisions through carelessness with outdated information. (These would be misunderstandings of the person which can cause conflict & debris of damaging words.) Too technical on my metaphor for my tastes even, I have fallen in love with my metaphor & wanted it to fit. Maybe it makes sense to others as a possible explanation. There will be others which will serve better as frameworks for a different situations.
Timing. So much of storytelling & humor rests on timing of the teller & the ability to maintain the attention of the listener to play & prey on their expectations, fulfilling & subverting them. I realized today that occasionally, a thought comes that I want to share with a specific friend. A song, a movie, a topic. But, I occasionally forget the timing of things and people when focused on the topic I want to share. Sometimes such sharing is thoughtless & careless in that it might be relevant & topical for ME, but is like grabbing a puzzle piece from a familiar box & trying to connect it where I think it should fit. Things would be so satisfying if the edges would fit. But lately, I realize that my timing is off for what I am sharing & with who I was trying to connect. That corresponding puzzle piece I am trying to connect to might have been lost with that other person. They have moved on in a different direction & if I want to connect, I have to know which boxes to check to fit that picture. And that takes effort & maintenance on the relationship status. And there are some people with whom I have not been able to maintain that familiarity.
My realization was that the specific friend that I wanted to share that piece of memory with was the friend from the time & place of that shared memory. It may not be the person who is, but the person who was. The people we are now are no longer the people who we were then. And that absence can ache like an old wound, like a lost tooth of growth. I am grateful to the permanent teeth of the friendships that have lasted through chewing past meat & gristle of heavier topics through time's tide. But there are still days when I remember the attachments which have fallen away & with them the lost vitality of youthful metabolism which could process those sweeter times, never considering the possibility they would ever be lost.
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