Andrew and me at the top of Hogback Mountain last fall

Andrew and me at the top of Hogback Mountain last fall

It’s been a pretty low-key week.  Nothing major to report, just life going along as it usually does, which is nothing to complain about!

Andrew’s birthday was Wednesday.  He hit the big 50.  Of course, I had to tease him about entering “coothood”, as in “old coot”!

I read an interesting blog post from Seth Godin the other day that got me thinking.  It’s entitled Obedience and the GPS:

“My Garmin gave me a route to the airport, but I had a hunch it was mistaken. So I went my way.

As I turned left instead of right, I heard her voice hectoring me, beseeching me to go right.

And I confess, I felt terrible. I was disobeying. Not following instructions.

If it’s gotten to the point where we are uncomfortable disobeying a 3 inch by 4 inch touchscreen, then you know we’ve been brainwashed. It’s actually okay (in fact, quite possibly productive) to call out the Garmins, the bosses and the influencers in your life, and ignore them all you like.”  (emphasis added)

Wow.  This blew me away.  I struggle to ignore those little voices in my head, often from people who are no longer in my life, who tell me that what I do is a waste of time, that I’m wasting my life, that I should be doing this or that or the other thing.  And sometimes it’s me, telling myself that I can’t or shouldn’t do something, and that I’m crazy for even trying.

Hilary, over at Crazy As A Loom, had a great post about this issue the other day.  She has a Cranbrook countermarche loom she had never been able to get to work properly.  Finally, she decided to either solve the problem, or sell the loom.  It turned out to be a simple error on her part, and once she corrected it, the loom worked perfectly.

In her post, It’s a hawk! It’s a pitbull! she said:

“All this time, I have been blaming myself …….chastising myself, for being too dumb to GET THIS.  Too obtuse to understand the mechanism behind this particular kind of loom.  It was too hard.  Over my head, out of my scope.  Learning curve deadly.

I BELIEVED that I couldn’t do it.  I BELIEVED that it was too difficult.  When in fact, it wasn’t difficult at all.  I was being HOGTIED, so to speak, by one simple little error.  So small, that it was remedied in a matter of seconds.  FROZEN by my certainty that I would fail.”

Hilary said it was her pit-bull-like determination that kept her working to solve the long-standing problem with her loom.  We must stop believing the lies we hear from ex-husbands, parents, teachers, “friends,” bosses, the media, and even ourselves.

It’s time to embrace our inner pit bulls!