Intentions.
I was chatting with a mate yesterday about the power of intention. Not the woo woo stuff of ‘The Secret’ (actually I must admit I have never read the secret, perhaps it is not woo-woo, but you know what I mean) but the reality of things tending to manifest if you set your mind to them.
I started 2020 with a single goal of ‘FOCUS’. In hindsight, I think that goal was somewhat unfocused. The gist of it was to clarify intentions and try and cut out the things in my life that aren’t critical to my larger goals. But what are THEY? It’s tough to clarify BIG THINGS when you can’t break them down into digestible chunks.
Standing in my kitchen this morning, surrounded by shit everywhere I started writing out a backlog of things I need to do around my house. I noticed that the tasks I was putting down were not easily actionable, i.e. ‘finish setting up record player’. The actual list to achieve that looks more like:
- Find/make speaker stands
- Run Speaker cable up the wall into the ceiling
- Mount speakers in the pool room
- Buy new speaker cable
- Connect up amp/speakers
I have been putting it off because I know the ceiling cabling part is tricky. I can’t cleanly get it up the wall cavity, so I need to run it up a corner and then find some cladding to hide the cable. Oh, so that goes onto the list, as well as:
- Find cladding to hide cable
- Buy brackets to hold cable to wall
- Buy brackets to mount pool room speakers
- Wire pool room speakers
At work, we talk a lot about this act of ‘breaking down projects’ so we can gauge what is involved. An ‘estimate’ to ‘setup record player’ might seem like a quick job >1 hour? I suppose I have over complicated it somewhat (I am good at that) I could just leave the speakers on the shelf, ignore the poolroom’s second set of speakers and use the existing cable I have. Then it would be done, but I would be annoyed that it’s not how I had imagined it.
Which loops me back to setting an intention, I set the intention when I started re-doing this room that I wanted my turntable set up to be just so. I am good at picturing something in my mind and then designing the high-level vision, but then often get stuck in the process. My house is a good analogy of this at the moment, and I would assume it is the literal manifestation of how my brain works — a lot of grand ideas and half-finished execution. My intention of FOCUS was to try and do a better job of nailing the small things. Baby Steps. Six weeks of small tasks equal a big win.
But perhaps I am too hard on myself. While I sit here in my 3/4 finished music room and look out to our front room which is literally full of half-assembled cupboards and tools and clothes and tarps, I know that it WILL all get done, eventually. The road there is just going to be a mess. It’s always been a mess; everything I have achieved in my life has been done that way. Am I kidding myself to think that I can just change the process? In a month, or two, I will be sitting here, and the speakers will be up, and I will be stressing about some new grand plan. I will also be annoyed that I didn’t hide the cable as well as I possibly could have and there will always be a part of my brain that wants to fix it, but probably never will.
Over the last week, I started posting up old travel photos on Instagram. Everything 2020 has thrown at us has made me incredibly nostalgic for travel. I have felt claustrophobic and enjoyed reminiscing on some of the stories. The little snippets I have been writing have helped me to get back to this process. Writing. Something I used to do lots of. For good or bad. One of the intentions I have had for 15 years now is to write/finish a book I started about a crazy adventure I went on once. I asked a few of you this week if I should start posting it as weekly blogs or just finish the damn thing. The second option is harder; it seems bigger and scarier. But that is what I should do. Continue to do the big scary things and know that the road there is going to be long, curvy and full of obstacles I need to clear. I can’t expect it to be simple. Nothing is.
