Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
-Michael McGriffy, M.D.
Maybe it's true.
It's after midnight here, the apartment is quiet and it occurs to me that I just need to shift my 'doing stuff' time some.
I can work while people are sleeping perhaps.
Everyone else was working on various projects tonight so I curled up on the couch with music playing through my odd little walkman, with my 'homework' ... the 'Getting Things Done' book and my massive Voices from the Summit book of essays by climbers.
I have a half-finished manuscript of interviews with New Zealand climbers and as I read my way into David Allen's Getting Things Done book, I'm finding so many parallels between the climbing and business worlds.
Mountaineers are perhaps the penultimate business people ... they have to create action plans and etc or it's quite likely that they will die on the mountain they're climbing.
I'm curious to see where David Allen takes me, wondering if it's over terrain that I've travelled via the words of the climbers I've met, read and interviewed.
I love the way that life experience trips over itself and bleeds into the next level of your life as you travel ... 4 years as an Airforce officer's wife gave me so many experiences and friends, and interesting conversations with people the world around, 12 other years with the same man while he was a teacher.
Two years as a English teacher in Istanbul ... 1 year interviewing climbers back in New Zealand - reading all the climbing literature that I could find ... university student from 1999 through into 2002; motherhood, stepmotherhood and grandmotherhood ... all combined in this new Belgian 'hood', each role approached from another angle, a new take on old experiences; a consciousness of an objectivity that I didn't have that first time I fell into a 'role'.
So now I'm learning how to 'achieve stress-free productivity' and smiling a little as I write of it here.
I'm serious, it's time ... I'm a photographer with an instinct for people and I want to do it this time.
4 comments:
I love your paragraph about all the 'hoods at Kiwi Villa right now.
Life is indeed exciting here in the Middle.
I had to smile Veronica ... your comment reminded me that back in New Zealand we used to call naughty kids 'hoods'.
"He's a little hood!" just after the object of their attention had hit another kid on the head perhaps.
So yes, there are more than a few 'hoods' living at Gert's place at the moment ;)
Hey Di - Great to see you're looking at your old interviews again - publish dammit - publish!
Hi Mark, I need some European climber interviews now ... then I could try again hmmmm, having hunted down my old interviewees to make sure they're still cool with it.
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