Poetic Muselings

Why be difficult, when you can always be impossible?
One of my family’s mottos when I was growing up.

Last month, my epiphany about letting go of what’s driving me nuts, and engage in activity that could free my synapses, helped me resolve the issue I wrote about in A Purse Full of Poems. Wonder of wonders — I’m still using my “new” old purse, haven’t overloaded it, and know that my shoulder is happier.

Thus emboldened, I tackled my password pandemonium that’s felt like herding cats for over a year. Choosing the most basic organizing idea I could think of, I grabbed some ten-year-old index cards, made alpha labels, and started putting one name/site/whatever on each card, with the appropriate alpha letter in the top R corner.

Feeling silly at the low-tech approach, but loving to write with pens anyway, I searched my emails, iPad, iPhone, and Mac to corral them. I’m still in gathering stage, and make bold decisions about which to delete as I find them. Next I tried to find the most recent passwords, test them out, and at some point, will decomplicate them. Who’s gonna get into my writing.com account and create havoc?

if only my mind
could grasp what is before me
as it is right now

Once I figured out how to actually attack this, and started, other things fell in line. Perhaps the benefits of procrastination are to take the time to become frustrated, snarl at the tasks, separate out the goal/end result from the process. Then DO something.

The real thing is that I feel I can move forward again, and am glad I took the pressure off myself.

Now, if I can continue to stay focused on just a few things at a time, I do believe I can get some old stuff done that I want to do, and make choices about what can just sit or can be considered “done” in their current state.

I enlisted my sister Muselings to try an accountability circle for a few weeks, with each of us choosing only two goals to work on. We all decided we need to move / exercise / walk more, so we’re reporting in on our progress every few days.

We each chose a problem to tackle; our choices ranged from making dreaded appointments and figuring out what to do next, finishing a picture book draft, diligently keeping up with an embroidery challenge, and (mine) doing what I need to do to get Lifelines back in publication.

Wonder of wonders — we are all making huge progress on our “stuff”! We’re jazzed, keep each other on point, provide encouragement when needed, pose pointed questions as appropriate. And, it’s working. Once again, we’ve taken our book title literally, and are providing a Lifeline to each other.

When I told Lisa Gentile, one of our Mentors, and my Coach, what I was doing about my password project,  she said, “We forget that a new system can be simple. It doesn’t have to incorporate the latest tech. That just makes the adoption curve higher and the change bigger. The key is having any system that makes things better. I still have a paper Rolodex for immediate storing of contacts!”

So do several others I admire. Onward! Or backward? How do you stay on track with projects, and herd your passwords?

Michele