Burning Down The House

This morning I drove to work in the fog. I like driving in the fog. I actually just like foggy weather, in general, whether I’m driving or not. So this morning, I turned on my GoPro camera… er, actually it was my iPhone camera, but I wish I had a GoPro camera (Christmas hint/wish) … and I recorded a video of driving into the fog this morning and posted it on my facebook page with this caption:

I like fog. It’s nearly opaque at times, yet it always holds the promise of eventual transparency.

That, in turn, spurred these initial comments…

Jan  Heavy!

Maze  Too heavy for 8 AM on a weekday? Haha

Jan  Yea you crazy girl!!! I love and miss you!

LeAnne  Unless you run off into the ditch before it clears. Just sayin’. LOL

LeAnne  But that’s what rumblestrips are for right?

Maze  to take it to another level, deeper even, running off the road into a ditch has the potential to bring the ultimate transparency…”for-now-we-see-through-a glass-dimly-but-then-face-to face-now-I-know-in-part-but-then-I-will-know-even-as-I-am-known,” and all that.

Maze Yes,LeAnne, that is EXACLTY what rumblestrips are for!

Maze I feel a new blog post forming out of this morning’s fog.

…which brings us today’s blog. On fog. And fire and clarity and the decision-making process.

Most of the time, when faced with choices, things feel a bit foggy. I don’t usually have a whole lot of clarity when it comes to the initial phases of making decisions. There are times I make decisions on impulse, of course, but if the decision is going to change something significant in my life or affect others or have obvious ripple-effects in my little personal puddles, I like to have  a bit of time to process the options before making the decision. This often leads to procrastination and putting off making the decision at hand, but that’s a subject for another day.

A rather minor decision I’ve been processing the past few days is whether or not to buy a real Christmas tree or pull the artificial one down from the attic. Not a life-altering decision, necessarily… unless I opt for the real one and then forget to water it and it dries out and the lights end up sparking a fire on the dry, thirsty branches and maybe I’m not home to put out the fire and the fire ends up burning my house to the ground. That would be more than slightly life-altering. But on the surface, at this stage of the decision-making process, I’d classify the decision to go with the real tree or the artificial tree as a minor one. Obviously, though, even minor decisions could result in major consequences down the road a ways.

Another decision I had to process recently concerned my position at work. This was definitely a decision that carried more weight than the Christmas tree dilemma I am facing at the moment. The decision was to stay in my current position (regional level) or move to a supervisory position for a newly-forming unit at the state level. Even though there was a whole lot of fog and very little clarity around these choices, the deadline to apply loomed and I decided to go for the new position. I sent in my resume and was called about an interview within a few days. The interview was set up for a Monday morning. Once the interview was set up (about a five days prior to that Monday morning), I noticed I was becoming more and more irritable and my mood had taken a nose-dive. I spent the weekend prior to the interview re-accessing my decision and came to the conclusion that I made the wrong decision, that I actually had no desire to do the job that I applied for and was about to interview for. In fact, once the fog started clearing that weekend, I realized that the program that I’d be supervising, if hired for the new position, was the very program that causes me so much stress in my current position, and furthermore, the work I currently do for that program in my current position would no longer be part of my workload once this new unit was off the ground because that work would shift to the newly-formed unit that I’d potentially be supervising. The fog had lifted. Clarity, at last. I called the person I was to interview with and told him I’d changed my mind. As soon as I did that, I was flooded with relief, my mood did a 180, and I was not the least bit irritable any longer.

When I was driving in the fog this morning, I thought about that decision and about how clear the right choice was for me as I drew closer and closer to experiencing the consequences of the decision. While on the road this morning, as I was viewing the fog before me, it was beautiful, somewhat opaque, with a hint of transparency. I could see the fuzzy outlines of the trees and signs and buildings ahead, but until I got right up on those trees and signs and buildings, these things were not at all clear. They weren’t formless, but they were entirely without detail. At one point, I noticed the form of a farm house ahead, framed by tall trees with a barn set several hundred feet behind it – and it was a beautiful scene. Once I was right up on the house, without the haze of the fog distorting my vision, I saw that the house was actually nothing but a shell of a house. Once I was close enough, I could see that the farm house had suffered a fire and was blackened and gutted. There was yellow tape wrapped across the porch of the house, warning of the danger of collapse. Quite a different view than the one I had seconds before. And nothing except my perspective changed. Nothing was different except the fog was no longer masking the truth of the situation.

Sometimes, if I talk (or write) enough, I come up with the clarity I need to make whatever decision I’m weighing at the moment.

Like right now, about the Christmas tree.

My unintentional segue from the dilemma about whether to get a real tree this year into the decision about the recent job opportunity into my metaphor of the burned-up house in the fog makes me think I should go with the artificial tree, thereby reducing the possibility of adding another burned-out house to the landscape.

I’m Maze. I’m an addict.