Tag Archives: Optimism

Bad juju…

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I suspect we all run into them from time to time – days that are just filled to the brim with some kind of bad juju. For me, today was just dripping with the stuff. It’s not like anything bad actually happened (to me at least), but from the time I walked out the door this morning to the time I came back through it tonight, every second felt vaguely unsettled. That small voice in the back of my head that seems to become more sage the older I get, whispered a near constant “just keep your head down.”

I can’t pinpoint exactly what the problem was today, but it just had the unmistakable feeling of being ready to come off the rails at any moment for any reason. It seemed like all it would take was the barest nudge and the whole thing would end up out in the tall grass somewhere. Creature of habit that I am, unsettled does not make me happy. I’m sure that only adds fuel to the fire of the day’s already uneasy feeling.

Since we don’t get mulligans in this game, I’ll send the rest of the evening trying to shrug it off as a large group of people collectively having a bad day. I’m not optimist enough to fall back on the idea that tomorrow will always be better, but if it avoids getting worse, that’ll be an enormous step in the right direction. Who knows, maybe a good night’s sleep will shake off the bad juju.

The Routine…

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Hard experience, training, and too many years working a job that involved thinking about all the boogymen out to get us have left me with a decidedly pessimistic streak. That’s probably why long stretches of good things happening tend to make me edgy – or rather they make me edgy when I’m paying attention and not letting myself be hijacked into some kind of irrational exuberance. It doesn’t happen often these days, but from time to time I still let blind optimism drive the train. Historically, those are the moments when I get an abrupt reminder from the universe that it’s patently ridiculous to expect the future to be much more than an extension of the past.

It’s an angst filled lesson. Every. Single. Time.

I’m always a guy with a plan, even though like most plans, mine rarely survive first contact with the enemy. Fortunately, when The Plan slides off the rails, my system defaults back to The Routine – those things that happen week in, week out, day after day, that keep me focused, keep me busy, and keep me from dwelling too much on issues where I clearly don’t have any influence. So yeah, today is going to be about slipping comfortably, quietly back into The Routine, because pondering limitations of The Plan isn’t getting me anywhere.

Doing God’s work…

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Sometimes I leave the office at the end of the day feel like I’m doing God’s own work. Other times I feel like I’ve spent the day beating myself bloody against a great stone wall. Nothing uncommon about that, I guess. The problem isn’t that there’s too much or too little to do, as much as it is there’s no moderating influence. Monday might be silent as a tomb and the next day you run with your hair on fire from the time you set foot in the building. That’s not a complaint (seriously), just a statement of fact. Still, it would be awfully nice if there was some way to smooth out the peaks and valleys on the demand side of the equation. When I figure that out, I’ll get busy writing my best selling leadership and management book and retire with a nice royalty check. Until then, I’ll just keep my head down until the winds shift.

Since I’m always the optimist, it’s worth noting that I still smile when I drive across the Susquehanna at 4:25 every afternoon. It’s worth remembering that no matter how strange the day has been, my days were always stranger in West Tennessee than this place could ever hope to be. The benefit of having been on the bottom looking up is that by comparison, everything else looks like ice cream and lollipops.