I am sure you experience this. You take on something new. You know you are interested, you know that you have time, that you can fit it in your schedule. But then you embark on your new project and find that everything falls apart, entropy takes over, and you have to pull yourself together again before you can resume activities as normal.
This seems to be a scenario that fits my life in so many ways, from tasks large to small. I am not particularly good at integration. I've known this for a long time. For example, when learning a new piece of music, I have to learn the parts for the left hand and the right hand separately, and master them before I can put them together. This continued to be true even after I had been playing for years, even when I was practicing several hours a day. The same thing happens at the gym, where my primary focus at remains mastering technique. I might think I have learned the proper technique for a squat, or for getting a barbell off the floor and up to my waist or shoulders, but as soon as I add some new component, such as getting that barbell from my chest to over my head, it is as if I forget everything I have learned before, which of course means I haven't really mastered anything at all. I'll give myself a boost by saying that anything that involves body mechanics is not my strong suit at all however and I am more than willing to cut myself a little extra slack in this area.
But I need to remember to take the time to master the individual components of any process before I can piece them together and master the whole. Whether what I am learning seems difficult to me, such as mastering new ways of moving at the gym or the yoga studio, or easy, such some of the materials in Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, which I am taking online through Coursera, I need to make myself go slowly to work through things until they are fully absorbed rather than rushing ahead if I think I have the gist of it but glossing over the details. Details matter.
Sometimes this process of slowing down seems antithetical to this world in which we live, a world that appears to revolve around "more" and "faster". And yet I find myself slowing down, calming down also, realizing that doing more is not necessarily better than doing well, nor more fullfilling. But of course life is not lived in isolation and the general rush of life intrudes and interferes. There are times when more and faster dominate and times for slowing down. Finding balance seems to be a lifelong quest.
There are still storms and lulls on the homefront, and I still tend to be emotionally tossed about or becalmed by the ever changing tides of dementia, but we seem to have a structure in place that more or less rights itself and continues on, and this has allowed me to branch out a bit. That doesn't mean that I always manage to juggle the bits and pieces of my life well but I am working on it. I need to be careful to go slowly, not to jump into too many things too quickly, not to lose the things that are important to me.
One of those important things is this blog. The difference between thinking about blogging and actually writing is significant and worth far more than the time involved. I suspect if I tried it more often I would feel less muddle-headed.
