Delayed Ramification

It’s amazing how easily – and willfully – we will jeopardize our future by choices we make in the present.  Consequences/schmonsequences be damned!  Anything that doesn’t overtly upset an apple cart or change the rotation of the earth is probably fair game.  Besides, there’s always tomorrow to make up the difference.  And there are always excuses and explanations to be offered – or perhaps someone else to blame!  Or we might be able to pawn it off on someone else to do.  And there’s always a chance that the statute of limitations on IOUs will eventually run out. 

It’s equally amazing how resignedly we accept the fruits of past choices.  Perhaps our “saving grace” is our adaptability to less than ideal circumstances … which we are wont to create for ourselves!  Of course, we don’t do it without fair warning from our mothers: 

“You make your bed, you sleep in it!” 

The willingness to accept our own Fate is graphically illustrated in the book “Working” by Studs Turkel (The New Press, New York 1974) – but, often, it’s our only bridge to sanity late in the game: 

“When I got out of high school, I didn’t want no secretary job.  I wanted the grocery job.  It was so interesting for a young girl.  I just fell into it.  I don’t know no other work but this.  It’s hard work, but I like it.  This is my life.”    Babe Secoli (p. 282) 

However, regret over past laxity and poor choices tends to creep in. 

“You always have the idea that you’re gonna better yourself.  You think ‘Gee, I wonder if I could write a book’ or just exactly what I could do.  I think I could have done a lot better … “  Doc Pritchard, Room Clerk in a Manhattan hotel (Working, p. 250) 

Let’s take a closer look at “The Problem With Now”: 

The problem with NOW … is that it just happens to fall in between everything else. 

It lies between rising and retiring ... 

            … Between meals …

            … Between phone calls ...

            … Between projects …

            … Between crises ...

            … Between cups of coffee ...

            … Between … well, everything except NOW! 

And more often than we would care to admit or have brought to our attention, we treat it as a “coasting” period … something just to be filled by “BEING” before the next “happening” or other intervention on our radar.  Anything not pressing or distressing can wait an indeterminate time – or at least for NOW – until it becomes so. 

So it’s no big deal.  We’ve been here before … just us, and here, and NOW. 

But NOW is the most important time of life NOW!  To BE, and to DO. 

And, ready or not, NOW moves quickly into NEXT.  The way we control NEXT is to do now NOW … to stay on track with our GRAND PLAN and keep planting the seeds for the future NOW ... putting up the framework, nailing down the shingles, and moving the PLAN forward.

So we need to develop a refined SENSE OF URGENCY about NOW:

NOW is the best time to create opportunity; NOW is the best time to increase capacity; NOW is the best time to defuse challenge; and NOW is the very best time to do whatever will become “pressing” or “distressing” first next. 

Whatever we do NOW will almost certainly have Delayed Ramifications, one way or the other.  Let’s make them as POSITIVE as possible and turn some of that Immediate Gratification/ Delayed Ramification rain into some spectacular Delayed Gratification/Positive Ramification sunshine!  Quartermaster 

Anticipation

Dateline: Christmas, 2015 

Anyway you cut it, Christmas is about anticipation.  Yes, of course, there was Simeon in the temple and millennia of Hebrew pilgrims who looked longingly forward to the coming of a “Deliverer”. 

But Christmas has become a lot more generalized, not to mention commercialized. 

The delightful presentation of “A Kentucky Christmas” at the Woodford Theater centered on the word “Expectant”.  This theme highlighted the anticipation of seasonal changes, the blanketing of sleeping hills by snow, Christmas presents, treats to eat, and the engagement of friends and family in celebration.  It also included two mothers-to-be, anticipating first newborns. 

Hope springs eternal!  It’s what drives us onward through even the most dire circumstances.  Remove Hope, and you take the spirit out of Life and Living. 

Hope, expectancy and anticipation derive from many sources.  Perhaps not most of all from the daily news.  But often from small things: From sharing; from random acts of kindness; from stories of heroes and heroines; from stories of Unlikely Champions; from role models; from each new sunrise; from joyful experiences to be re-experienced; from things fresh from the oven; from worthy projects completed, from “raindrops on roses …”; from birthdays; from paydays; from small affirmations … 

Sometimes, of course, they come from completely unjustified and irrational “Dreamings” – like “Someday, my knight will ride by on his white horse and take me off to happily ever after.”  Then there’s the “Force” in Star Wars, magic in Harry Potter, the deus ex machina from Greek tragedy, gambling in the casinos, and diehard UK football fans ever yearning for a “breakout season” above 0.500! 

But who among us won’t cling to the unjustified and irrational when everything else is going down the tubes? 

It’s worth noting that irrational and unjustified “expectancy” never hurt anyone who busied himself tilling the soil and planting seeds of possibility. 

Perhaps most of all, Christmas gives us the challenge and possibility of revisioning the life-changing, transformative progression: 

IMPOSSIBLE to IMPROBABLE to POSSIBLE to PROBABLE to INEVITABLE

 

 

We could start by choosing Something Like a Star:

 

  

 “... So when at times, our paths unblazed

                                                Allow us to digress too far,

                                                We may choose something like a star

                                                To stay our minds on and be staid.”

                                                                                    Adapted from Robert Frost 

The good news is that the “Force of Life” is moving ever onward.  Though it may rain in our own backyard, the sun – the Earth Star – WILL rise somewhere tomorrow, and keep rising.  And, though there is an ebb and flow, so do the tides …

“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;”
Brutus, Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224

William Shakespeare 

Most important of all, we don’t have to deal with life’s challenges alone. 

“Life is inherently disruptive.  You just have to adapt.  There’s no secret hack, [no magic], no work-around, no pro tip for that.  Except maybe this: to manage the personal hurricanes that will blow your way, you’ll need aid and comfort from [significant others].  And that’s when a little … codependence can be a good thing.”   Susanna Schrobsdorff (TIME, Dec. 14, 2015, p. 90) 

Zig Ziglar used to remind us that the fellow saddled with shoveling the most manure is closest to the pony. 

Remain ever expectant!  The Life Force is moving.  Tap into it.  Manure may hit the fan by the truck load.  But keep shoveling, till the soil, plant premium seeds, find ways to engage and help others, keep your vision “star-bound”, and you will have more than reason enough to anticipate good things happening.  Here’s wishing you all the very best of “good things happening” this Special Season, and wishing you a Very Happy New Year ahead!  Quartermaster