Observations: The Second Time Around

I've had a song running through my brain most of the day so far (it got lodged there because I have the CD in high rotation on my iPod play list). It is from the Indigo Girl's new CD "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug" and the song is called "Second Time Around." The particular lyric that I have trapped in my head is:

"Here's what I find about compromise, don't do it if it hurts inside, cause either way you're screwed, eventually you'll find, you may as well feel good, you may as well have some pride."

I find that it comes close to explaining my position on compromise. It's not a rock solid position, but, in general, in the course of my life, I have found that for the most part, when you compromise (with the rare exception of when it is a true compromise - a true meeting in the middle), you will end up regretting it. It may be a small regret. It may be a large regret. Most likely it will fall somewhere on the middle of that spectrum. But you will regret it.

I find the sentiment holds true in both my personal life and my professional life. You may gain when you compromise. You may even be able to measure the gain and the gain may be greater than what you would have received if you had not compromised. But that seed is going to lay in there until it finds fertile ground and grows into regret.

In the early nineties I went through a protracted period of soul-searching where I found the answers to some of my questions - if not the specific answers, then the form of the answers to come. I came out of that time with a triple resolution that altered my life. I vowed three things to myself.

First, I vowed that I would never again do something I did not want to do.

Second, I vowed that if I was working in a job and I got up one morning and did not want to go to work (not in the sense of a single day, but in the sense that the work was wrong for me), that I would go in and resign that day.

Third, I vowed that I would do what I thought was the right thing to do in each circumstance, regardless of what other people around me thought.

The middle vow (about work) came out of the work environment that I had just exited at the time. It had been a good enough job - I worked with good people - but the work content had been grinding and soul-sucking. Do you recall that game you play as a child? Where you imagine you are an animal? I had been driving into work one day and come to the sudden realization that I had become a worker ant! I got up. I went to work. I did stuff. I went home. Repeat until your soul dies.

Since that was a larger item, I have never broken that particular vow. Armed with that vow I have always (since then) paid careful attention to work content, to what the position or profession required that I do, and since then I have pretty much consistently enjoyed the various manifestations of my profession.
The first vow I have broken several times, always to my regret, and I think that is why that particular lyric echoes with me. I won't go into the details of what breaking that first vow involved (they are mostly irrelevant), but each had the same framework - I did something that I felt pressured into doing. I generally knew that I was making a mistake as I did it, but I often felt I was making the best of bad choices.

The third vow I have also broken several times but there is a key difference between being compelled to do something you don't want to do (you take an action) and not doing something you feel you should have done (you do not take an action). All thoughts aside, what impacts us in this life are mostly the things we do and fail to do. If you fail to do something, you can "make up" for it by either doing it at a later time, or perhaps by doing an equivalent action later in time. If you do something - you cannot undo it. It is done.

So, I think my advice there, based on thirty years as an adult would be this -

"Here's what I find about compromise, don't do it if it hurts inside, cause either way you're screwed, eventually you'll find, you may as well feel good, you may as well have some pride."

Daily Life: My Restive Mood Continues

I woke this morning in that same restive mode that I ended yesterday in. It dawned on me this morning that there may be a correlation with the weather. Over the last four days our temperature here has gone from 95 (Monday) to low 47 last night (Wednesday). That is a pretty impressive 48 degree temperature swing. According to the weather channel we are going to spend the next couple of days, through the weekend, in the high sixties and low seventies, but with sunshine.

I wrote extensively about Sunday earlier in the week - that was just a dang good day, all in all. I think that day has cast a shadow that is flowing across the entire week (in a good way). My restive mood is not a bad mood, it is just a restive mood and I can just roll with that. I think part of what may have fueled the mood as well was the deliberate decision on my part to not do very much as we moved through the heat wave. In life I have certainly learned that you do not fight the weather - you roll with the weather, you respect the weather, you accept the weather. The weather is the tiger and you are the tail as far as that relationship goes.

My thoughts were wondering all over the place as I started the morning and made that commute in. I drove down Williams and stopped at the coffee shop near Williams and Moorpark and saw a near collision between a big white truck and a small car. The small car was moving along at a good clip and the truck make a turn into a parking lot, but the driver of the truck made the turn without hitting his brakes - he just kind of slowed down in the lane and let the truck roll down to a slow enough speed to make the turn and the small car never noticed until they were right on the truck and then they did a hard brake and a sharp jolt to the side to dodge it. It would have been one of those pointless accidents where both drivers contributed. The truck driver should have signaled and the car driver should have been paying more attention.

I got my coffee and headed up Lawrence Expressway, listening to NPR for part of the while (the troubles of the auto industry), and then I switched over to the CD player and started listening to the Indigo Girls new album "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug" (which was released a few weeks ago - March 24, 2009). I really like it. I have listened through it a couple of times and plan on plugging in the ear phones and listening to it some more when the morning meetings pass by and the afternoon calm settles in. The commute in was mostly smooth, but my mind was all over the place, for a wide variety of reasons, having imaginary conversations, musing on things that often had nothing to do with nothing.

There was one particularly beautiful sight this morning. As I came up Lawrence (which runs north-south) I could see the mountains to the north-east of San Jose. They had clouds spilling over them in dark shades of gray. It was quite striking.

Then, just past Lawrence and 101 there was a three car accident that had traffic a little tangled. Once I got past the accident I got stuck behind a mosquito fighter of a car that was leaving a wonderful blue trail of gasoline smelling smoke behind it. Then I drove by the Sunnyvale dump, with the wondrous scent of methane filling the air. It was a short tour of bad smells!

I am spending most of the morning in teleconferences (of the type that I refer to as "listen meetings") where my primary role is to listen to the teleconference and keep an ear out for any interconnecting pieces that might impact my operations and to serve as an information resource if any questions in my sphere of influence arise. I am going to spend some time today (and perhaps tonight) exploring this restive mood I am in. Though I suspect the primary drivers behind it are the physical restrictions due to the bad foot and the changes in weather, there may be something else underlying it. Either way, it is a good excuse to be introspective today.