Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Seventy-Nine, Dateline 10-6-2018
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“Dare to be naive.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-seventy-nine of Operation Achieve Anything. As I said yesterday, this is going to be the last weekend that I have to spend with my dog since we will be putting her down this upcoming Monday. Last night, I dragged my mattress to the ground to give her easy access to people comfort and then sat with her through the night which is how I plan to spend the next couple of nights as well.
Since I want to get back to spending more quality time with my little dog, I’m just going to jump into to discussing yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to discuss the courage needed to cope with change. The book talked about how people can get stuck in failed ventures because of comfort and fears over letting that comfort go when what really may be needed is a significant change to get you on the proper road.
Though I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, as always, I only do up to a point. When I was young, I feared change more than anything in the world, especially after my parent's divorce devastated my sense of permanence. After that, I seemed to mistakenly think that I was facing my fears by having the courage to just go with anything. This is probably the real reason why that I did nothing about the lump that I found on my testicle at nineteen that sent me on a “courageous” adventure up to Seattle to die.
This would also explain why I never allowed myself to get too close to anyone. Whether I was afraid that I just get abandoned again, or feared that I’d get locked into a situation where I wasn’t free to go, my coping skills led me to fear stability all the while thinking it made me brave. The fact that I moved to Delaware a year after my random move to Seattle wasn’t because I was a great exploring, it was because I was terrified that I was getting too close to my friends.
Even this last move from Seattle back home can be blamed on the belief that I was being brave and forcing a needed change when really I was just running from problems as usual. That said, depending on how things pan out, it may have been precisely what I needed to get past my immature phase in order to really knuckle down and take myself seriously as a writer. Where I’ve always been pretty productive and confident in my concepts, I also feel I was stagnant as far as developing better technical skills up until I lost all the distractions and fun.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have preferred to find a better balance, but this honing of skills angle to my argument is the silver lining to how things went down. Even though I’m not as free-spirited as I was in my youth, I think the ability to take calculated risks is now just a trait that’s embedded in me which, at least on the surface, is why I’m able to handle major changes that way that I do. Note that I didn’t say “as well as I do” because I wouldn’t recommend my approach to anyone as a reasonable solution. It works for me and what I’m trying to do even if it can feel like a curse when I constantly find that I’m alone.
Oh well, it is what it is, and not it is time to move on to today’s assignment where I’m supposed to explore the benefits of naivety with the book giving examples of people who didn’t benefit by their desires to rush to grow up. Once again, the blog as a whole is enough to highlight how I’ve already got naivety locked down but can’t wait to see these promised benefits. We’ll see how I handle this in tomorrow’s post. With that, it’s now time to wrap this one up as usual by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
