An Unexpected Plunge

Thanks go out again to Susannah Conway for pointing out Chris Guillebeau's latest manifesto, The Tower.

After stumbling across Mr. Guillebeau's A Brief Guide to World Domination a few years ago (tell me you're not surprised I was attracted to a site called "The Art of Non-Conformity"), I have flirted with the idea of legacy. Also not surprising? It's just too overwhelming for me.

I'm a scanner. I have ADD. I can rarely decide which short-term project to tackle, much less even think about a legacy. And I rarely finish the projects I do tackle. I mean really, I took a two year "break" from this very blog. My project list never gets shorter, just rearranged. And longer.

Maybe my legacy is some sort of lesson in how not to get things done.

Oh, the irony. I wrote the above last Saturday then logged on this morning to tell you all about how tired I am because I stayed up until midnight playing sudoku. And if you look here, you'll see that wasting time playing with puzzles is the very first thing I ever blogged about!

I guess that's not really irony so much as exactly-what-I-should-expect-of-myself-based-on-past-experience.

On the side of synchronicity or serendipity or I-have-the-attention-span-of-a-goldfish-oh-look-shiny, I cracked open my copy of Refuse to Choose to a random spot yesterday and started reading all about the Sybil cyclical scanners - lots of long-term interests, never finish anything, often restarting the same things. Oh, oh, that's me!

It's such a relief to be recognized.

Look, I know all the blah-de-blah-blah about being an individual and refusing to fit into neat little categories. It's charming and lovely when people surprise us with the complexity of who they are. But I suspect that's only true when just a few things don't quite fit because too much complexity can be disorienting and alienating. My experience of never fitting into any category has been less than charming and rarely lovely. It's been lonely and confusing and often soul-crushing.

That was a tangent I had not expected to take, but there it is.

So, yeah. The book did give me some ideas for how to arrange my projects and my time, and I had every intention of doing some work on that. But then, you know...sudoku. Because...

Because I'm afraid. I'm afraid none of it will work. That I'll once again get all excited only to find myself back in this same place next year, wondering if I'll ever make progress on anything. And I'm afraid it will work. That I'll have time to work on all of my projects, stop wasting time trying to figure out where I left off, only to find that I'm not any good at any of it.