Eat, Sleep, ****, repeat.
Unwinding complexity
In the background Fatboy Slim is cranking out some beats at Creamfields courtesy CreamfieldsTV and I’m finally taking a few minutes to put down some thoughts. Over the last couple weeks I have been almost completely consumed with a very different kind of movement than the Fatboy Slim reference would suggest. I’ve been moving house. Except, in typical me fashion, the move is to storage. Let me explain…
My mind has been twisted up like a Gordian knot of late. I have been under-contract on my house and had not found anywhere to go. Put simply, I had too many degrees-of-freedom. There is probably a good post simply in discussing how degrees-of-freedom can inhibit, rather than inspire, progress. While I was considering this difficulty I came to realize something about the typical modern condition. Some call it a rat race, but that isn’t it. Some may say overwhelmed, but that’s not it either, though that very well may be true. What I realized is that over the last several years I had woven a complicated set of interactions, relationships, aspirations, and expectations. These were not simply physical inter-connections but emotional, and cognitive too. One day last week, dealt one more challenge, I hit bottom. I’d reached a physical, cognitive, and emotional trough.
The trigger was something quite simple. A failed service call. What i realized after standing outside with the mechanic for a few hours of head-scratching in the misting rain was how much I had pinned on this working. An expectation I needed to be able to continue with the mental gymnastics that I was undergoing in moving my physical assets and self off my property and to another place. Several people that encountered me that day remarked how tired I looked. They seemed to be able to see the accumulated depth of fatigue.
Sure, my diet had been a steady one of eat, sleep, move, repeat… day in and day out for a couple of weeks. As I crawled onto the floor to go to sleep that night I put myself to sleep wondering how I came to be so tired. Suddenly it seemed as though all the positive physical and mental health gains evaporated. In the quiet exhaustion on the floor that night I realized that what wore me out complexity.
Where to move, what to move, how to move it, when to move it, how to coordinate with the buyers, the agents, the appraisers, the mechanic, the vendors. A complex multi-variant, non-linear equation with a definite time-boundary to it. No matter how many values I evaluated - no solution presented itself. With this I became stuck, my mental horsepower pulling on an intractable stump in the ground. The stump didn’t move, I just wore down. I was caught in a reinforcing negative feedback loop. The harder I worked, the more complications I was making. The more complications, the worse the situation got. My control point, the fix? Was to stop. To crawl onto the floor that night, defeated and down. To pause.
In that pause I realized I believed that all my years of moving prior did not apply to this move. I wasn’t going to something. I was heading into the unknown. I did not have that place I was going to. I did not have that thing I was going to do. Never before in my life had I had so many degrees of freedom and it was daunting. Once I realized that the methods which had worked for me in so many previous moves were not directly applicable to this one, that this was not simply a repeat, my mind went to a different space, a space Clement Decroup calls “The idea space.” And that made all the difference.
I finished the move. The house closed. Today is day one in a brave new world.