Hectic Re-centering

At my old job, a long time ago, in an office far away, I traded precious metals on a computer screen. (To the observer, the whole experience could easily have been confused with playing video games all day.) I watched a visual representation of a metals market, displaying the bid/ask prices and quantities of the current market. It was a long and lean, red, blue and gray display that reminds me somewhat of a cribbage board, but not. Anyway, the screen is in almost constant motion, reflecting the market activity. There is a horizontal line at the current trading price, at the intersection of the bid and offer. With the double click of a mouse or by tapping the space bar, I could center the line/current price right in the middle of the screen. Either because of my nervous stomach or OCD or boredom, I was obsessive about having the current price right in front of my face. I couldn’t tolerate it being an inch off center. However, there were days, when the markets were really moving that re-centering wasn’t possible. The prices were breaking or rallying so fast, the horizontal line bounced around like a soccer player juggling the ball. Then there were times when the horizontal line would just suddenly disappear one direction or the other off my screen, accompanied by a wicked medley of, essentially, ringtones—bells, alarms, and sometimes, yes, squealing pigs, meaning that I had a position in the market. As exciting as that was, I always felt better once the line was back in its happy middle. Since no personality or behavioral idiosyncrasy was too small to be part of the constant commentary in our office, I was, ‘Newman,’ in the play by play, ‘with the hectic re-center.’ In a sometimes silent room, with a little or a lot going on, you could hear me almost continually double clicking to re-center my market.

After about 5 weeks in my new land, I have finally been able to re-center my market. I have been hectically, but completely unproductively, trying to get a hold of the current cross. It’s been a bit brutal, as I have desperately tried to gain perspective—feeling disconnected with myself as I learn where the best place to re-place a broken baking dish is when there's no Target, learn Xhosa names and introductions, share a car with my dad (that portion is over,) mediate between witch doctors who object to Bible study at work and missionaries, remember that the right lane is the fast lane, not the left, think in Rand terms, and wonder what I’ve done in coming here in the sense that this is just a life and not some gauntlet that’s been thrown down—or is it? Now that I’ve felt my center click back into place, it all seems like, of course I would have felt those things, but at the time I felt so in it, my face submerged underwater and not able to lift it up to see the sun shining. I’ll try and use this better feeling I am having to relate some of what I’m seeing and doing around here—which according to my Aunt Sissy is what she’s been waiting for—some good letters from me.

This week also marks my first demonstrable professional accomplishment. After a cold-calling experience last week, wherein my colleague (and by colleague, I mean hilarious Zululand, been everywhere selling used cars and advertising friend) Darren and I went to tour bus companies, encouraging tour operators to make a stop at our retail outlets because we really do offer something unique right on their way to significant tourist attractions, I followed up and actually got one company to commit to regularly stopping at our strip mall—with the promise of financial kick back, of course. Aside from the new, immediate business this brings us, it brings me hope—for more jobs to offer to the people group we work with and for myself. There’s a lot to the discussion about what good, if any, non-profits do around the world. Moments occur where I wonder if we are contributing more to problems than helping to solve any. (This isn’t good for my morale, by the way, but it’s an undeniable possibility.) On the flipside, when there are 12 people in the room and 9 of them are HIV positive, running to the grocery store for them seems like a positive no-brainer, and I can't think of a more practical way to help someone. In the midst of all of this, I want to apprehend hope--that Goodness is at work, regardless of my circumstances.

I’ve been reading this book about the importance of knowing one’s life story in understanding how to participate in your own future life with God. The following is a quotation (taken from a second source about screenwriting) from the book.

“But then there’s an event—in screenwriting, we call it the ‘inciting incident’—that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality. A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time—from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day—have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.

Good stories tell about the intersection of desire (‘subjective expectation’) and tragedy (‘cruel reality.’)”

So there are a ton of things I see and am experiencing right now that I would characterize as an absolutely uncooperative objective reality—I use this term with a glint in my eye and laughter close behind because I think the last five weeks of watching my subjective expectations—which were refined to the point of gold and highly protected by me—collide in slow motion, epic, movie style bombs going off is, now, just damn funny and UOR is just a really academic way of saying life is hard. Desire and tragedy make life really good, hope necessary, and my story mine.

That’s what’s new with me. You?

The pictures: #1 Clouds coming over Table Mountain...as I'm standing on it
#2 My edgy, urban pictures of our jewelry, that we're not using on the website
#3 Mandy and I in our two layers of wetsuits when we were the NSRI's Women Overboard Dummies in like 14 feet swells