I detect a growing cultural condescension toward second thoughts and mixed emotions, zigzagging and course changing, waffling and vacillating, false starts and do-overs. Today’s zeitgeist is a bias for the unwavering and resolute.
Whether this shift is good or bad, I’ll defer to other arbiters, referees, and historians. But I will prologue today’s post with a reminder that I am a sailor, so I’m comfortable with, indeed inclined to, zigzagging. (“Tacking” is how sailors move upwind.) I am inquisitive, readily and frequently intoxicated with wonder, and addicted to adventure. So false starts and do-overs are familiar to me. In fact, I’ve likely learned more from dead ends, failures, and course changes than anything else.
Where am I headed? Well, there’s a detour ahead. And mixed emotions. Second guessing. Contradiction. Paradox. Possibly veering toward cognitive dissonance.
Although the exhilarating buzz of hummingbirds’ comings and goings emphasizes their speed, agility, and minuteness, it’s their capacity to hover with mysterious precision that fascinates me. If their apparently haphazard zigzagging suggests levity (and an almost whimsical wanderlust), their sudden stops and undeviating levitation demonstrate exactitude and accuracy. While their course hints at vacillation, their pinpoint accuracy at blossom after blossom is unvacillating.
(Source: Hummingbird Haiku)
I am pulled in many directions, inspired by multiple models, nourished by dissimilar sources. And I thrive when I am free to toggle between and among them, when my progress is perpetuated, not deterred, by challenges, contradictions, obstacles, and conflicting priorities.
Regret and second thoughts are not anathema. Not weakness. Not dead-ends to be anticipated and sidestepped. They are part of our marvelous yet mysterious humanity.
Old chapters end, and new chapters begin. With each new threshold, a bittersweet goodbye and a wellspring of enthusiasm for what is beginning. Always both. And so it is, as we cartwheel toward a new threshold, I do not run from the anticipated nostalgia even as I cultivate excitement and optimism for the still uncharted chapter(s) ahead!
(Source: “Anticipated Nostalgia”)
This new threshold, obliquely insinuated but rarely addressed head-on, is the crux of my journey these last two years. And as I approach the anniversary of the personal challenge that I set for myself two August 1sts ago, I’m readying myself to step out of the shadows. To articulate exactly and precisely what I’ve been deliberating. The future of Rosslyn; the future of our relationship with Rosslyn.
Allowing that there will be some complex, mixed emotions if Rosslyn becomes the home of another family feels freeing. This is one cost of adventuring onward. I’m comfortable with that. Now it’s time… to revise my overconfident response with less bravado and more openness to a future just beginning to reveal itself.
(Source: Second Thoughts)
It’s time to act, to trust in hopes and plans enough to take action, to embrace possibility, risk, and freedom.
Yes, there are mixed emotions. For sure! But also the exhilarating, heart quickening, creativity empowering flicker of possibility.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Source: The Crack Up)
It’s time to move forward!
What do you think?