Tag: Becalmed

I wonder whether anybody else on the Quest2016 feels as though the questions are first grade reminders to get the basics lined up? List the mind mapping, colour code and re-apply them when we get to the problems of the differential calculus. Ducks in a row.

I am not complaining but feeling a little foolish that it should be necessary. I saddled up, pulled down a visor and set off at a gentle canter until I found the lists, and expected to be at full gallop. Instead the mount is lame and I have broken the lance of positive thrust and we head back to the stable. It seems all the others are making solid progress towards the grand finale and the ribbons. I will just use the curry comb and keep the company of the horses. Nothing is better company or better perfumed.

I could not answer this from Sally Hogshead

Your Quest2016 Prompt today:

Of these 3 options, which one is most important in your work right now:

• Quality of life
• Quality of work
• Quality of compensation 

until I had attended to this from John Jantsch

Your Quest2016 Prompt today:

What can you stop doing in 2016 such that it would allow you to focus on higher payoff activities? #Payoff

and I cannot deal with that either, because all that indecision about fountains and which to spring water has not yet found an underground source. But let us suppose I am a model student and pretend to keep up. The quality of work, or any work at all has stalled, but I know to resume I need to live more joyfully, and work more joyfully. The two are inextricably bound together, but truth to tell I don’t find much joy in anything right now, not food, not my garden withdrawing into winter and shivering, not things that never meant much unless they were reassigned to new purposes and triumphed over poverty, by bloody mindedness. Not even the evening glass, insufficiently earned. I am comforted by my few very good friends who I try to spare gloom or complaint, yes to Beethoven who spills out the memory of boundless joy like a distant evocation, an echo of the hope that once was boundless, energising, shared.  I decided today which of his late quartets I would like played when I am dying. Don’t mistake that as macabre or defeat. THAT feels like joy. My cello sits un-played but I cannot bring myself to sell it. It symbolises the silenced past shadowed in its case. C’est moi.

Perhaps what is ‘most important’ is that I am old and tired, and should just accept it?

Please sir. Can I answer these questions next term? If I remember they could be important? If there is a next term?

mage: By Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons