Category Archives: Breaking Away

This is the time of year when painful emotions can overwhelm us if we do not stay alert. An unexpected setback can leave us hopelessly resentful of the holiday mood we see about us.

If you would like to improve your chances of getting through the holidays unscathed, try letting go of the past for a moment and consider what might happen if you got a fresh start.

Right now. Right here, as you sit reading this. Ask yourself this? If you could make one change in what you are doing. What would it be?

If you can’t think of a change without getting into heavy shame, blame and regret, you need to cut back on the gradient. For you, the right question might be, is there anything at all that you can do without making things worse?

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I touched on this point in an earlier post, but I didn’t give it the attention it deserves.

Your emotional state, good or bad, is your responsibility. If you don’t agree with this, that’s fine, but you won’t be able to change your state for the better unless you have an inkling that you might, just might, be causing your current state of mind.

You will find that you can always change your mind and you can always improve your emotional state.

Either change will require some determination and a little effort, but amazingly enough, you will be most successful if you go at this with an unserious state of mind. If you tackle this or any other problem with the idea that nothing must go wrong, you are setting yourself up for failure.

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One of the perils of being irrepressibly creative is that there is always time to start new projects and never enough time to file away the results of the last project. As a result, I have a desk that looks like the aftermath of an explosion and a workshop that has enough work in progress for a shop twice its size.

There is supposed to be an optimum balance between organizing and producing. I understand that it should be 25-30 percent organization at the beginning of any project and perhaps 10 percent organization during the remainder of any project.

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Gretchen and I took a new route for this year’s Thanksgiving trek and it made a vast difference in our perception of this holiday. These lines from Robert Frost’s poem still hold true, for us at least…

Two roads diverged in a wood
And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

We have great open highways in this part of Virginia which provide high speed access to distant destinations at all points of the compass. We have used them often and marvelled how these limited access highways still deliver effortless speed where the crowded freeways of California no longer can. Even so, hours and hours of coursing these highways, admiring farms and scenic views from afar would leave us curiously burnt out.

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