Saved by the Beatle

Despite my very own admonition of two days ago, I was scrolling social media as I contemplated what to write in this space, and I was getting discouraged. Many people from my past, people I have always considered friends, were sharing political agitprop full of rage that is demonstrably false about other people from my past and other people I have always considered friends. Oh, the one set of friends was not specifically insulting the other set of friends, but they were saying horrible things about people and issues that I know the other set believe in, so they may as well have been personal insults.

It’s very discouraging, this tendency to frame political disagreements in terms of good versus evil, and after a couple of decades of this, a guy almost loses hope. Yes, I said a couple of decades. It’s gotten downright insane in the past 10 years because of you-know-who and the people who hate him, but this is just the natural evolution of what had been building.

As I’ve said before, I try to come up with things to say here that are encouraging, entertaining, enlightening, or a combination of two or all three. While browsing through the latest servings of seething hatred and anger, it’s nigh on impossible to concentrate on any topic that might be positive or optimistic.

Fortunately, I also had Apple Music in the background playing the “Warren Bluhm Station,” where the algorithm spins a collection of random songs that I have shown an inclination to play more often than not. And suddenly I noticed Paul McCartney was singing about how “People Want Peace,” from his 2018 album Egypt Station.

Brothers and sisters, I beg you to listen,
I know that it isn’t too late,
For we as the people, the voice of freedom
And we’re open and clear, we don’t wanna wait:
People want peace

And I remembered that the world may have politics and government in it, but politics and government are not the world. McCartney’s surviving bandmate, Ringo Starr, always signs off his public statements with “Peace and Love,” and there will always be more peace and love in the world than the politicians can foment the opposite.

That was close, though! I let the merchants of anger and despair get to me for a little while. I will try to remember this lesson.

Stall tactics

I still remember Seth Godin’s blog post of a few years back, “Are you stalling?” It made me uneasy, no doubt because I sensed the answer is “Yes.”

Ironically, less than a month earlier I had passed the 100th day of my 92-day challenge to myself. On Aug. 1, 2020, I had quietly set myself on a quest to see if I could post something here every day through the month of October, or 92 days. It would be a while before I said it out loud, but I sailed right through 92 days, crossed 100 days, and kept on going. This particular post represents my 2,182nd consecutive daily post.

I often convince myself that this regular writing habit is proof that I am not stalling. After all, in these last six years I have published a novel, a novelette, a flash-fiction collection, and six collections of blog posts.

But I must admit, I have been stalling.

I stand up and say to the room, “Hello, my name is Warren Bluhm, and I’m stalling.”

“Hi, Warren,” the room responds.

Now, my instinct is to continue, “I have decided to stop stalling, and by the end of this year, I intend to …”

But remember the part where “it would be a while before I said it out loud”? There is some wisdom in the advice not to announce anything until you have succeeded.

And then again, I have, several times in the past, outlined this same logic and announced that I wasn’t going to announce anything but I might be working on something, and even then the work I was hinting at fizzled out.

And I have now written nearly 300 words about stalling, when I could have simply stopped stalling and gotten busy.

More than 50 years ago, a psychoanalyst named R.D. Laing wrote a very wise book called Knots, in which he illustrated various ways that the mind can twist itself into pretzels. I believe my mind’s ruminating about stalling would have fit very neatly into that book.

I’m still stalling, aren’t I?

“Yep,” says the room.