I Heart Deadlines!
A scheduled outage is, erm, scheduled in 18 minutes. (Make that 17.) On blogger, that is. Naturally that makes this the perfect time for a new entry!
It is an established fact of physics that liquids held in a container of some sort will assume the shape of the container. As it turns out this frequently is also true of people, especially watery people like me (that's an astrology reference there). Thus the highly useful nature of the deadline-- it serves as a container for a project, provides something to push against, something that increases the pressure enough (there I go back to physics again) to get the reaction, the project, to completion. Deadlines also have the power to be delightfully liberating; projects with no deadlines can remain unfinished forever, but projects with deadlines actually END, whether complete or not. Isn't that just fabulous?! Now the trick is to create deadlines for projects I *want* to finish that I can believe are real, whether those deadlines will be externally enforced or not.
This, to me, is one of the greatest failures of the public education system (ack! six minutes!). With externally imposed deadlines always looming and my extreme need to please/fear of failure as a child, I performed excellently in school (you could say I'm a very skillful hoop-jumper) but I languish and suffer horribly when put in charge of my own activities. The liquid has no container! I can only speculate but I do believe that in the absence of that focus (for decades of my young life) on externals I could have developed my abilities to follow my passions and complete projects without this need for external reinforcement. That's my theory, anyway.
Two minutes to go, and calling it done! WOOT!
It is an established fact of physics that liquids held in a container of some sort will assume the shape of the container. As it turns out this frequently is also true of people, especially watery people like me (that's an astrology reference there). Thus the highly useful nature of the deadline-- it serves as a container for a project, provides something to push against, something that increases the pressure enough (there I go back to physics again) to get the reaction, the project, to completion. Deadlines also have the power to be delightfully liberating; projects with no deadlines can remain unfinished forever, but projects with deadlines actually END, whether complete or not. Isn't that just fabulous?! Now the trick is to create deadlines for projects I *want* to finish that I can believe are real, whether those deadlines will be externally enforced or not.
This, to me, is one of the greatest failures of the public education system (ack! six minutes!). With externally imposed deadlines always looming and my extreme need to please/fear of failure as a child, I performed excellently in school (you could say I'm a very skillful hoop-jumper) but I languish and suffer horribly when put in charge of my own activities. The liquid has no container! I can only speculate but I do believe that in the absence of that focus (for decades of my young life) on externals I could have developed my abilities to follow my passions and complete projects without this need for external reinforcement. That's my theory, anyway.
Two minutes to go, and calling it done! WOOT!
posted by J.S. | 12:42 AM
1 Comments:
Did you have your baby? How's the coffee shop? Almost a year since you blogged~ lol, you need a deadline :)
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