Demolition ball was how I had described someone who is close to me. He had a completely different perspective on life than me. While I am time sensitive and laser focused on order and foresight, he is time-blind with ADHD and lives mostly in the moment. He will get things done in parallel often ignoring order of operations which can take far longer to finish. But he does do things to perfection versus my approach of doing things in logical parts prior to assembly. He’s remarkably brilliant and often several steps ahead of everyone else. He envisions a result before he even attempts it. But as I have often said to him, “People can’t grasp the totality of what he holds in his mind and that sometimes, a slower and more structured approach to ‘walk’ people through a plan can be more expedient.” Our styles often clash however our aims are the same.
But when I am stuck, he often asks me to reflect and take a less trodden approach. In fact, sometimes my outcomes-based thinking leads me to a dead end, especially when an outcome is unclear or unknown. For him, it’s less about results but more about pathways and exploration. I acknowledge that sometimes, walking around an obstacle is far more effective than trying to move the obstacle, but I also find it difficult to operationalize my life using this fuzzy approach of explorative discovery. While his may be gasoline for creativity, this approach can be time consuming and costly. Nevertheless, his lessons are valuable to me and I try to adapt them when I struggle. I find it works in three areas of my life that I need improvement: patience, anger management and quieting the mind.
Much to learn, I have.
Admittedly, I am an extremely impatient man. It is immediately evident when I am driving. People who take more than two seconds to react to a light changing to green and still sitting there with the brake pedal depressed will get a blaring horn from me. For these situations, my remedy is to douse the flame by personalizing the situation and imagining that the driver in front of me is my daughter learning to drive. Accessing unstructured compassion helps me a lot.
Admittedly, I have a short fuse and am quick to temper. Sometimes this temper cascades into a chain reaction. While it’s never a pretty site when I get into these moods, I am lucky that my anger is usually short lived and the most damage I cause are people’s ego being bruised. As soon as the irritants are gone, so too is my anger. My short fuse is matched by my speed to cool. For these situations, rather than harshly censuring people or tossing things aside, I have taken on my resting bitch face. It is a quiet contempt as I seethe at the waste of oxygen that person has consumed. There are no words exchanged and there’s no show to watch. The outer turmoil is deflected as I imagine a qi surrounding me and shielding me from external incursions. I can’t control the outside, but I can control the inside.
Admittedly, I have much difficulty trying to bring order to chaos, mentally. After years of post-marital strife, custody disputes, single-fatherhood, demanding work, home renovation and a few other legal matters thrown in, the dust is finally beginning to settle. While I used to take medication to sleep, there is no magical panacea that cures my turmoil. I can never bring order to all things and so I have learned to contain matters so that they don’t spill into other areas. This method of compartmentalization allows me to confine matters and then resolve, a bit at a time, a day at a time. It’s a snakes and ladders game where sometimes one needs to take a step back before moving two forward. This contradicts my impatient nature, but incremental progress is still progress. A long journey has undeniably begun as soon as the first step is taken, however small that step might be.
Much to learn, I have.
