Boomer Randomness

At the beginning of each year my friend/colleague Mary chooses a word that represents her goal for the year.   Since first learning of her strategy a few years ago I have done the same and that concept, combined with my annual January process of reflecting on the past year and looking ahead to the coming year, has helped me arrive at the present destination on my self-discovery journey. My previous keywords include simplify and focus , among others.   Sometimes the word keeps me on track through the whole twelve months and sometimes I completely forget it till fall, when the word suddenly pops up in my brain as a reminder to get back on track.   I don’t remember the other words right now, but I’ll dig back through past blog posts on this topic and find them.   I do know that I keep each word into the following years and eventually I’ll have a whole sentence to push me along my path. My word for 2014 is commitment .   I am committed to taking my cur...

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."  ~Martin Luther King Jr.

I am so freakin’ busy that my head hurts just thinking about it.   However, I am also occasionally lazy and often a procrastinator.   I am also very organized, in thought, but not always organized in action.     These disparate personality characteristics converged into a perfect storm Tuesday afternoon, resulting in my missing a huge deadline on a very important work project.   I got one complicated project completed only to be asked when the other numerous associated projects would be completed.   What other projects?   Aren’t those due Thursday?   No, said the December 16 th memo forwarded to me in response.   It’s all due Tuesday, plus one more thing that was not in that memo. So I freaked out, temporarily, took a few hundred deep breaths and a walk around the perimeter of my office, and began to figure out my damage control plan.   Very long story very short, I stayed at work another 3 hours to finish the most immediat...

The temperature in my part of Maryland will get down to 5 degrees Farenheight tonight.  Wind Chill ... feels like -15 or something like that.  With that in mind, this is pretty funny ...

My life is great.   Things couldn’t be better.   Job, friends, housing, social life … I am mostly living the life I dreamed about for years.   Despite all of that, I am experiencing a little bit of depression tonight. There is nothing new about depression in my life, but it has been quite a while since it hit me.   It used to happen frequently but the quantity of occurrence diminished considerably during the past few years of my self-discovery journeyand it is a rare occurrence now. So why did it hit me in the middle of one of the best months I’ve had in years? Actually I think I have an answer.   It’s that same old issue I’ve struggled with for a long time: overscheduling.   As a society, we pile on the obligations and activities one at a time without seeing the impact those things have on the total picture.   Then we wake up with too much to do and not enough time to do it.   I am a fairly organized man with a good amount of disci...