Floundering For Fun and Profit

Even more than usual, the following is just me floundering and hoping that by the time I get to the end I'll have something.

If you're reading this, that means I published it, so it wound up striking some small gusher of usefulness after all...which would make this intro unnecessary. If not, you won't be reading any of this, including the intro. So my typing this part is an exercise in utter futility.

Or is it? It dawns on me that this illustrates the very issue I'm pondering. When is floundering futile? And what's the alternative?

I've been planning to move out of the country. Many reasons, but they're not pertinent to today's posting. And I've been going about it in a weak, slithery fashion. Which freaks out some of my friends because I'm generally Mr. On-Top-of-It.

"Jim Aims To Conquer"(TM), so I should be doing a zillion clever moves, boosting myself to the highest odds to eke out a big win here! I should have plans and contact lists and strategies and back-up strategies. I should be scheming and plotting. Armies should be mobilizing.

And I do have some time pressure. And financial pressure. And other pressure. Yet, to my shock, I find myself approaching this like a hapless vagabond. I'm traveling there at the end of the month, and have lined up nothing, not even an AirBnB. I know people there, but I'm not alerting them, or having them alert their networks. I'm not even scouting - no voracious devouring of online information. When I think of ledes and angles, my reaction is a bland "meh".

What's wrong with me? It looks like I've lost my edge! And this isn't a new story. In recent years, I've executed some shifts of perspective (charted here) which have led to the dropping of some old patterns, some of which seem awfully helpful. Yikes. Have I lost babies with the bathwater?

Let's say I tried to do this smartly, to try to force a killer result. I have 58 years of experience to draw on in predicting how that would play out, so here's the upshot: I'd delight in having found just the right home in just the right town in just the right region, at just the right price. Score! But all victories are Pyrrhic. There are no happy-ever-after endings in this world, because there is never an end point, just an ongoing wash of turbulence and fresh opportunities and slate clearings. Nothing but endless waves to bodysurf (or to moan about as they crash over your rigidly planted head).

There are no actual landings - no footholds - because Jane will not stop this crazy thing...ever. Those who imagine they'd be happier if the churning stopped, leaving them in peace to marinate in static staus quo, have missed the entire point of this worldly undertaking. Here's a poem I once wrote (click here for the original posting with a great accompanying photo):

The reed,

unendingly assaulted by violent wind,

never suffers.


It never occurred to the reed

that the wind was a separate, external thing.


Insofar as the reed thinks at all,

it thinks it's dancing

If I were to find the perfect place in the perfect place at the perfect price, and did the move, there would inevitably arise an unpleasant neighbor, or termites, or a village seven hours away where all the residents bake cookies for each other on Fridays. I'd be disappointed by my water pressure or the local bus service or the rising crime rate. On the other hand, I'd be ideally suited to find the BEST place. So I'd move to Cookietown, vet my neighbors and my water pressure, spray down the termites, and immediately find new things to be disappointed about. Also: unexpected delights.

In my posting "Decision Factors" (a "Popular Entry" indexed in the left margin), I tried to help a friend's daughter through her college selection:

The fabric and feeling of your college experience will be determined by the aggregate of myriad trivial factors and derailments you can't possibly anticipate. The circle of friends you wind up with. One great professor who gets you excited about a topic you never knew you cared about. A line in a book of poetry. An insight that occurs while you walk home one day. Loneliness. Depressingly awful scrambled eggs. Romantic heartbreak. Your outcome, in hindsight, will consist of the sum total of all such spontaneous minutiae, none of which has the slightest thing to do with any factors you might pre-weigh, or with any of the big-picture scenarios you've mentally conjured. Big-picture scenarios are like cartoons, and we don't live in cartoonish big-picture images, we live in trivial moments. This is not a movie. We're raindrops slowly working down windows, not heroic protagonists.

You can attend your last-choice school and emerge a brilliant scholar, gainfully employed, deeply curious about the world and full of insight, head over heels in love with a true soul mate, and enjoying a circle of friends you'll retain for life. Or you may attend the Sorbonne, and emerge miserable, lonely and intellectually numb. You can't engineer either result via consideration of Factors. "Optimality" is nothing but a head-fake.

Do the research, and fool yourself into believing you're deciding smartly, but understand (and feel comforted!) that there's no right or wrong choice. Rich opportunity awaits at every juncture of every decision tree. Any choice, no matter how bright or disappointing, can yield a jackpot or a dud. In the end, it's not about the choice, it's the chooser. It's you, playing the cards you're dealt - both good hands and bad - with delight and exuberance. If you focus on the rich immediacy, rather than the cartoonish big picture, you literally can't go wrong.

So, yeah, I've understood all that for quite some time. But it takes me forever to fully integrate my own insight. My insight is always miles ahead of my head (I'm far more wise than smart), so, as I notice my failure to properly prepare, I worry, and feel impelled to write Slog postings explaining to myself why I'm making certain odd choices.

I am a very slow child.

Until I understand, I adopt a conventional view. So in this case, I worry that I'm being lazy and sloppy. I've lost my edge. I'm beaten down and hapless and dragging my sorry ass to another country out of rote obedience to some harebrained scheme I've cooked up.

But, again, being 58 I know how things go. When the political scene in America turns really ugly, and my savings have started really dwindling and I realize how sorely I needed a change of environment, I'll survey my new perch in my new country, with sunshine and garlic, and finally see the wisdom of it. It will all make sense. Despite the lousy water pressure and unreliable bus service and missing out on free cookies.

Letting go of control and declining to thrust one's agenda pugnaciously forward, for someone born in a place like America, feels like dereliction of duty. The self-evident fact that we only imagine ourselves to be in control - perspective (framing!) is where our free will resides, not action - is awfully hard to digest.

Perhaps I'm old and hapless and reduced and lacking in vim, vigor, and motivation. Perhaps I'm letting the world walk all over me rather than seizing the diem. But the more I do things this way - so counter to my striving/hounding nature - and witness the surprising results, the more I realize it isn't resignation. This isn't losing. Rather, it's as close to winning as one can get in this world.

Donald Trump has plenty of what everyone imagines to be victory. People scrape and suffer and murder in pursuit of that result, yet he's miserable, anxious and deranged. Even the most virulent Trump haters have not fully internalized this lesson and recalculated accordingly. But if you process the implications, you'll begin to recognize that real victory doesn't involve grabbing gold rings. The secret I've gleaned from 58 years of hyper-curious observation amid a world composed of Skinner Boxes is this: the rewards are never so fulfilling and the punishments are never so daunting.

Real victory feels more like settling back into sunlight and garlic and blithely, indistinctly noticing the myriad ugly fates you've magically evaded by your bemused, curious, unambitious putterings about. Flounderings, even.


I know I sound very much like an old guy. Planted in his rocking chair, watching the frolicking children through sad, distant eyes, and endlessly insisting to himself that he's living The Life. I suppose either old people have had it right all along, or else I've simply found a way to flatter my hapless enervation. I can't be the one to decide. That's for you to ponder.