With strength training on a two-week hold that ends Friday, listening to new music an activity for which I’ve recently developed a disorienting aversion, and sleeping continuing to include at least three wakeups every night, life feels more improvvy now. These circumstances are mildly destabilizing. I feel like I’m wobbling.
But as of last night, these circumstances are also invigorating. The fact is, if I’m capable of RDLing nearly 380 lb after five hours of sleep, I’m capable of being my joyfully intense self in the whole of life regardless of how much sleep I’ve gotten, regardless of whether there’s a plan for the day, regardless whether I feel “on top of things.”
I’m finally beginning to grasp what some work colleagues probably meant last year or the year before when they said that I need to learn to “lead through ambiguity”: It means that historically, I always want to preplan and then follow the plan, that I never want to make decisions on the fly about how to spend my time—and that as a result, I’m inflexible, overly conservative, and prone to spend too much time engineering my time.
That feels like it is changing. And despite the disorientation, I’m finding that it’s actually kind of fun to have to make decisions on the fly.
I’ll likely still press for clarity and plans, especially for things like prayer and exercise, anchors of time and health which are so easily cast off, but clarity does not I always have to have a written plan, nor that I ought not stop everything in the absence of a plan just so I can make one.
Let me be like Abraham and just go.