Tag: goals

Day Three

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere on day three I started itching to get back after it.

Nothing was wrong. That’s the strange part. We’d eaten well and slept in and laid around and seen genuinely beautiful things, and I was lying there feeling lethargic and vaguely dissatisfied about something I couldn’t point at.

It took me a while to name it. It’s an expectation not being met — a low gnawing one, running in the background, that says a day is supposed to have something accomplished in it.

I miss the gym. I miss the feeling of making progress. Mostly I miss having my hands around what’s going on, guiding things where they’re supposed to go, knowing what today is for.

Here’s what I don’t miss, and it stopped me when I noticed it.

I have not been stressed in about five days.

Not lower stress. None. And that is such an unusual condition for me that I had to sit with it a minute to identify what I was even feeling. I’ve been running on some level of pressure for so long that its absence didn’t register as relief. It registered as something’s off.

Which tells me the itch on day three might not be about productivity at all.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I didn’t actually stop.

I called this a full pause. I said the seven habits were coming off for the week and I meant it.

Except I’ve read my Bible every single day out here. I’ve written a blog post every day. The Bible pictures have gone out every day. Three of the seven have run the entire trip and I never once decided to do them — they just happened, the way brushing your teeth happens.

And I’ve gotten my steps every day without trying, because when you’re on one end of a ship and everything you want is on the other end, the geometry does it for you. Add an island where you don’t know where anything is and you’ll walk five miles looking for a shop.

What actually stopped was the gym and the counting. The two that need equipment and structure and a decision.

So the week has sorted my habits into two piles for me, which I did not ask it to do. Some of them are mine now. Some of them are still scaffolding.

There’s a list waiting when I get home. Lifting, the eating and water, walking, creative time. The rest of the music that needs to go up. Social platform work I’ve been putting off for months.

And this is where I catch myself, because I could write that list a lot longer and it would feel productive to do it. The truth is I don’t need a longer list. I need to know which two or three things on it actually matter, and I still haven’t done that work.

I’m saving the mid-year review for day six. There’s a sea day coming and the family will be occupied, and I’d rather take that time from the ocean than from them.

I thought this week would tell me that taking a vacation was a good idea.

It has told me that considerably more emphatically than I was expecting.

Two-Thirds Down The Page

~ David Willis ~ 2 Comments

We missed a kayak rental this morning because of something printed on a piece of paper in our room.

It was there. That’s the part I want to say first, because it would be easy to write this as a complaint and the complaint isn’t honest. The information was in our stateroom, in a packet, on a page, and it explained exactly what we needed to do. We had it the whole time.

We just didn’t read down that far.

Here’s the shape of it. The island is a tender port, which means the ship anchors and small boats run you ashore. You need a ticket to get on a tender. We did not know that.

We showed up when we thought we were supposed to show up, without a ticket, and it took over an hour to get across.

The page that would have told us started with general information about being in port that day. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, tucked into the middle of everything else, was the one operational instruction that actually mattered.

I asked somebody. The ship was in full frenzy trying to move a few thousand people onto boats, so the answer I got was quick and incomplete, and I didn’t know enough to ask the follow-up. He had to go ask somebody else. We crossed the ship twice and stood around a long time.

We got ashore around eleven and were back aboard by two-thirty. Sunburned, worn out, and we’d swum with stingrays. It was a good day.

The kayak was thirty dollars.

So I’ve been thinking about the page instead of the kayak.

Years ago I worked somewhere that brought in a consultancy for a very large ERP implementation. Enormous project, enormous money. Their focus was functional design documentation, and they wrote it — hundreds of hours of it, genuinely thorough, full of exactly the information people needed.

It didn’t read like anything a user would ever want to open. So we ended up building training to teach people what was already written down.

As far as I know, every one of those documents got filed and never opened again.

I’ve spent twenty years around that problem. Information being available is not the same as information being findable, and the gap between those two things is where most of the real failure happens. It never looks like failure, either. It looks like documentation. Somebody can always point at the page and say it’s right there.

It was right there this morning too.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

This is our seventh cruise. It’s our first with this line.

I didn’t skim that page because I’m new at this. I skimmed it because I’m not. I know how a port day works. I’ve been handed a version of that packet six times before and it has never once contained anything I needed. So my eyes did what eyes do with a document they’ve already decided is boilerplate — took the top third, confirmed nothing had changed, moved on.

Something had changed. Different line, different ticketing, one paragraph two-thirds down.

Six cruises of experience is exactly what made me not read it.

If I’d been at work, reading that same page professionally, I’d probably have caught it. I’d have marked it up, pulled the actions out, made a list.

I was on vacation and I already knew how this worked.

That’s not a failure of the document.

Running On Fumes

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My wife and I met at a church where the preaching was worth showing up for.

It was a place where scripture was treated as something you could work through — where God was rational and supernatural at the same time and nobody made you choose. The community was real. We were known there. That’s where we found each other.

I took a music minister job two weeks before our wedding, in December of 1998, at a church across town.

We left all of it behind on the same day.

I had no business doing that job.

I was a junior. Music performance had been my major, not music education, which meant I had never taken a conducting class in my life. I knew how to sing. I knew how to be respectful of people. I knew roughly how to move my arms in front of a congregation and look like I meant it.

I did not know how to build a choir. I did not know how to teach people to sing in parts. I made almost all of it up as I went, and I was so certain I was where God wanted me that I put my head down and kept plowing.

I aggravated people. I wouldn’t put someone in front of the church who couldn’t sing. There was a couple who insisted on hauling in their own sound system and setting it up for their numbers, two weeks after the church had spent real money rehanging speakers to fix the acoustics, and I did not handle that with anything like grace.

Some of the people there loved us well. We made friends we still have. I want that on the record before I say the next part.

The sermons were the same sermon.

It didn’t matter what passage he opened to. I could look at my watch and tell you almost to the minute when he’d arrive at the reason you needed to get saved. Every week. Any text.

We had come from a place where the Bible was alive, and now I sat in a room where it went flat in front of me for two years.

And I stopped. Not dramatically — I didn’t decide anything. I just stopped praying, and I stopped opening my Bible for any reason except to have something ready for Wednesday night.

I was running the machinery of a spiritual life with nothing moving through it.

Then a bigger church offered me a youth ministry job, and I interviewed extremely well.

Here’s the part I’ve never said out loud. I had every skill that job required. I could speak in front of a room. I knew the Bible cold — I’d grown up in it. I genuinely wanted to be good to those kids and I still do. Anyone assessing me on paper would have hired me, and they did.

I was also empty, and had been for two years, and nobody asks about that in an interview. There’s no line on an application for is anything actually running.

So I performed. For a while performing works, because I was good at the visible parts and there are a lot of visible parts. Then it stopped working, the way it always does, and I was standing up there with nothing behind it.

You know what happens when a performer can’t perform anymore. You get booed off the stage.

I got booed off the stage. For a guy who’d spent his whole life being the one who was good at this, that was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

What I understand now is that God had not gone anywhere. I’d quit doing the things that took me to Him, and then I was surprised when the distance showed up.

The fix, when it finally came, was not dramatic either.

We found another church and sat in the back of it. On purpose. We didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t sign up, didn’t put our names down. We went and we listened, week after week, for a long time.

Eventually I got into a discipleship class. And somewhere in there I started praying again, badly at first, the way you do when you’re out of practice at something you used to be able to do without thinking.

That’s all it was. Show up, listen, start again.

Nobody had to come alongside me for that part. It was available the whole time.

Left Click Or Right Click

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug.

Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code.

I could do that by hand. It would take days. Instead I put an AI tool on it, worked through it with the thing, and had the answer before my coffee got cold.

In 2003 I did not know what SQL stood for. I could not have told you what a data pipeline was, because the phrase wasn’t in general use. Artificial intelligence was something from The Matrix — machines that were coming to take over, not something that would help you find a dropped record on a Tuesday.

My title has the word “data” in it. The job is mostly defining the rules for how a system is supposed to work and then governing it by building consensus with people — running the state of the data about the way you’d run the state of a country. It is not a glamorous line of work. I’d have to look up when a job like it first existed anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of this year saying nobody ever laid the path out for me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not in the wilderness stretch after.

But I don’t think anybody could have laid this one out.

There was no one in 2003 who could have looked at a twenty-five-year-old with a sociology degree and pointed him at a job that didn’t exist, using tools nobody had built, in a role that wouldn’t exist for another decade. The people around me then couldn’t have gotten here either. It wasn’t a place yet.

A map to a known destination is geography. A map to an unknown one is prognostication, and nobody owed me that.

Except I keep thinking about Randy.

Randy was an adjuster at a place I worked in my twenties. He’s the reason I got that job — he knew they needed somebody and he put my name in.

I was the most computer-literate person in that building, which tells you more about the building than about me. So Randy would come to me with questions. Do I left click or right click? I’d tell him. Next time, same question.

I was still answering that question ten years later.

I loved that old man. He was good people, and I mean that. But somewhere in there I remember thinking, buddy, at some point you have to learn how to click your mouse.

He had the thing I say I never got. Somebody right there, patient, glad to help, for ten years. He just never asked a question big enough to take him anywhere.

So it’s two things at once, and I’ve been saying one of them.

Nobody could have mapped me to this job. That part is true and I’m going to stop treating it as a grievance.

But the terrain under my feet was always well understood by somebody. Why a gallery calls the people who already bought from it. What the volunteers at that church were actually offering me. What an editor does. None of that required foresight. It was ordinary knowledge, sitting in the room, that I either wasn’t given or didn’t know how to ask for.

I don’t know how to tell which of those it was, from here.

The twenty-five-year-old wanted to write songs for a living.

He’d be disappointed by the office. Not by the problem-solving — he’d have liked that part, he always liked figuring out what was broken. But the fact of an office, every day, doing something with a title he couldn’t have parsed.

He’d have been wrong about the songs, though. I’ve got an album out. Eleven tracks, written and recorded and released, in a year when the day job was going fine.

Nobody mapped that either.

Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.