Spinning plates, greased log
~ stress, speed, and keeping our heads in the game juggling yesterday's brilliance and the burden that trails like a litter of yipping thirsty puppies - cute, but yip yip yip
3-days-most recent Musing columns: link to yesterday, Still My Father; the day before Call to action: 'someday' is no plan; and the day before that Pulling our strings, pushing our buttons
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Archived SHORT STORIES + latest posting Shadows on the Prairie
Archived POETRY + latest postings … LEAD THE WAY and BAR SET HIGH, VERY HIGH
Wait for it, first day, every day ...
It’s Monday. Again.
The first business day after Father’s Day. First day of the G7 summit at Kananaskis. And the latest episode of “How Many Spinning Plates Can You Keep Airborne While Balancing on a Greased Log?”
Welcome, would you like to order the combo platter, scheduled tasks and leftovers from last week?
There’s the now. Juggle sticky notes, calendars, and office floor trip hazards. Online inboxes, sent-boxes, task lists. We tick boxes at speed but not scale; nothing is ever fast enough. Beyond yesteryear’s struggles, juggles, and working in daycare runs, kids practices and the family’s schedule above our corporate demands - we are not in near-elder status with more demands than ever. Sure, better tools, but doing more for less conflicts with needs/desires to earn more than before and figure out the future better than before, revenue to collect, broken tools and broken promises to fix. Every second email is “urgent.” The rest? “Absolutely &%$ing urgent.”
The grown-up world often seems short on grown-ups.
Sometimes I wonder: did no one slip self-reliance pills into their porridge?
Then there’s the pipeline; not the energy kind (though that too), but our idea funnel, the essential to sustain anything over time - fresh pitches. Elevator speeches. All must be prepped, pursued, perfected. Because while we’re managing yesterday’s fires, someone else is already courting every future client we haven’t had time to meet.
And I know I can’t drop the ball on anything already in motion, deals can’t be put on auto-pilot at mid-flight with projects half-built, or relationships half-nurtured.
So, how do we tell the difference?
Between urgency and noise.
Between cracked pepper and cracked logic?
We need microscopes, tweezers, and two sniffer dogs.
And here’s the kicker about that future we’re planning?
Already obsolete.
That brilliant idea from last Thursday? … needs to be rethought
The systems we built to manage yesterday’s chaos? Lagging behind today’s hurricane.
Standing still feels dangerous.
Moving fast feels foolish.
So we do both. Poorly.
Stress? Absolutely.
But also, purpose.
So we breathe. Sort. Filter.
Lead with curiosity, not panic.
And maybe, just maybe, this isn’t about doing it all; it’s about doing what matters most today.
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