Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 19

Connecting without an intermediary

The old ways were about waiting to be found, waiting to be discovered, all of us diamonds in the rough looking for our big break.

The new ways are about climbing on a platform and eliminating the “middle man,” going directly into the act, whether someone tells us we’re ready or not, and maybe we’re rougher and less polished than if some intermediary had discovered and polished us up, or maybe we’re more real for the lack of polish: Maybe we’re more appealing warts and all, just as long as...

Keep doing

I had a dream where I was at a political convention, talking with an 80-something former governor who was thinking about running for governor again, and he was animated and delightfully surprised that people seemed to be excited about the idea, not dismissive.

I was hesitant to add my support because being governor is such a big job and age is a thing, but then again, if you have the energy and your mind is still there, why not keep going as long as you can?

“Do the best you can for as lon...

Life is what happens while …

I’ve been sitting here for five minutes, thinking about what I could be writing, instead of actually writing.

I wonder if that’s a metaphor for life: You could be living, but instead you sit and think about the life you could be living. Oh, it’s important to sit and think, too, it’s a form of preparing for what’s ahead, but you know, I’m not writing down any of the things I was thinking about — not yet anyway. First I wanted to explore the little metaphor.

How many of us think and think ab...

‘an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary’

[I wrote this three years ago but slightly misquoted Mencken; he actually wrote “most of them” not “all of them.” So here’s a slight rewrite, #TBT on Tuesday.]

Remember when the government flew off a fiscal cliff and collapsed because Congress didn’t pass an extension of the national debt? Remember when millions of kids starved because of cuts to the federal school lunch program? Remember in the early 1980s when the world supply of oil ran out? Remember when all those computers crashed on...

Making a list

“You should carry a notepad and pen around wherever you go,” Red said. “In fact, I’ve started using the Notes feature on the iPhone.”

The subject was short-term memory retention. I worry more than I should about being absent-minded. Every person of a certain age starts to do things like walk into a room and forget what they came for. But it seems to be happening with greater frequency, and more than once a day I have a Homer Simpson “DOH!” moment when I remembered something I was going to...

Fear knots

© Brion Curran | Dreamstime.com

It starts when you’re always afraid that if you step out of line, someone will come and take you away. And then you become afraid of being afraid of being afraid, but you don’t know how to stop being afraid, and you get upset when you meet someone who doesn’t seem to be afraid, because you’re afraid they’re not afraid.

Then someone says, “Fear not!” and you reply, “Fear knot? Damn straight! I’m tied up in fears!” but that’s OK because who wouldn’t be afraid ...

On hesitation

Is hesitation an instinct that protects us, or is it a demon that hates when we take action? Or is it … Oh, it’s you!

Hello, fear, my old friend, are we to have this chat again? All those years of fear, and here we are on the same precipice with the same doubts and the same paralysis and the same psychoanalysis.

And all the many pauses and hemhawses and chances that passed for not taking them — “It’s not the things you did that you’ll regret, it’s the what you didn’t do when you could....

Do what you can

So you’re swamped, too much on your plate, and sure you’re not going to get it all done.

Do what you can.

There will always be a to-do list longer than your ability to get it all done.

Do what you can.

You think other people on your team aren’t pulling their weight? You don’t know that. Maybe they’re doing all they can with what’s on their plate.

Do what YOU can.

Any time you spend anxious about what’s not finished is time not spent doing and focusing on the task at hand.

...

Opening to a short story set on a space station three-quarters of the way to the moon

© Sergey Fedoskin | Dreamstime.com

The shuttle from Halfway Station was exactly on time, and he marveled at the precision needed to do that. A quarter of the distance between the Earth and the moon, measured in thousands of miles or kilometers or whatever, and the shuttle docked at 4:32 a.m. Greenwich Time, just as the schedule indicated.

Only three people disembarked, and a couple dozen boarded. Not many people stopped at Station 3/4. Who wants to live, work or play three-quarters of the ...

I find a grain

“Search for the grain of truth in other opinions,” Richard Carlson suggested this morning as I continued my slow stroll through Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.

Coincidentally, the morning feed brought word that an older person whose opinions rarely coincide with mine had sent out an Independence Day message taking issue with the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

“Equal to what? What men? Only white men? Isn’t it something that they wrote this in 1...