On the Raw: The Importance of Flexibility

Today, the plan was for my family to go to the Renaissance Festival.  My family and I are absolutely enormous nerds.  We were looking forward to this date with glorious anticipation.  We had secured bottom basement cheap tickets, and had the day planned out with absolutely amazing friends (I wish one of them were actually a member of my family).  The drive had been made, and for me who drives three hours five days a week, it was no small thing to ask me to hop in the car and hike another mile up to the venue site.  Hike we did, and all the while we spoke of things we would do.  Sights we would see, and chances to take pictures with our favorite humanling who was itching to get out of his car-seat.  As we make the turn into the parking lot, my wife gains a look of utter rage and horror.  Startled, I stop the car and ask her what is wrong.  “I left the tickets on the table!” she screams, at herself or me I’m not certain.

So.  That was that opportunity ruined.  We are over an hour away from home, and by the time we get there and back, our friends will have been waiting two hours, and we would be entering the Festival during the heaviest rush of the day.  It was… bad.  None of the people in the car were happy, and everyone seemed to be in a grim mood.  Life is like that sometimes.  You can do everything right, make all the plans in the universe, and still crap out when it comes time to execute.  The most important thing that was needed at that moment was an open mind to find new opportunities.  Thankfully, due to where we at, I knew that there was an enormous and amazing shopping plaza that my wife adores.  Plus, there are several places available there to eat a sort of “destination lunch”.  I liken that to a place where you sit down to eat, but there is more to do than study the various bric-a-brac tacked onto the wall to make things look “festive”.  This one happened to be themed on dinosaurs.  It wasn’t noshing on turkey legs and shopping amazingly well crafted goods, but my son did get to dig in a sand pit and find dinosaur “bones”. 

That moment is something that is bringing home more and more the point that I’ve actually matured.  Much as I like to claim that I am basically a twelve year old with a credit card, I’m actually able to land on my feet whenever things get out of hand.  That’s the sign of a very well rounded and mature mind, and is not something that just “happens”.  Sure, a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, but for it to become a consistent pattern of behavior takes a little more than random.

So why do I share this with you?  What do you have to gain from what basically amounts to a brag?  Well, the more time that I spend on my career, the more time that I spend sewing writing and being a writer into every single aspect of the fabric of my existence, the more I realize that things like this matter.  Your career does not begin in a vacuum.  You don’t just randomly decide to be an author, and then have it magically happen overnight.  Who you are, how you live your life, and more importantly the ability to develop an active and flexible mindset is crucial to being successful as a writer.  You have to be willing to dig into the muck of every day life, and pull something meaningful out of it.  In order to do that, you have to realize when there’s gold in them thar’ hills, and when you’re just knee deep in a pile of crap.  Knowing how to capitalize on opportunities is key to that entire experience, and more and more I find that maximizing the time that I have available will go a long way to getting me into the “Successful Author” column.  And really, that’s where all of us truly want to be when we start this journey.

Flexibly yours,
Justin