Rearview Mirror

When do we move beyond the past and live our life in the future? Let's
be honest, that should be when do I move beyond the past and start
living my life pointing toward the future rather than gazing into my
past. I was lying in bed this morning, my alarm having gone off, when
I felt a familiar clenching in my gut. My new friend anxiety coming to
pay a visit. Anxiety can't just come and hang out for no reason. There
must be something that I am dealing with in my life that is making me
anxious. I don't remember what issue I started to fixate on, but I
stopped and asked myself if the thoughts were causing the feelings of
anxiety or was the physical sensation that I have come to link with
anxiety making me find something to feel anxious about? I never really
had the physical sensations that I was experiencing before the bad
January of 2020, when I took a large load of work stress with me on a
trip to Disney World. I spent the entire trip in knots about a couple
of decisions that I had made. They were risky decisions that were not
panning out and I worked for a company that worked hard to protect
itself from risky decisions. The situations were resolved and my
reputation with some people was damaged. I thought that was a big deal
and those few weeks hounded me for months. They still do. The decay of
that impact is asymptotically slow. It lingers. It's why I had that
clenching in my guts this morning.

If emotions are just the labels we put on physical sensations, that
incident back in 2020 taught my system to treat a certain kind of
feeling as the anxiety that comes from regret about past actions and
the fear of what those actions may have on my future. I need to
reprogram that sensation and teach myself a new way to interpret those
sensations when they emerge. It's like my body got in the habit of
feeling that way for a few months and finds every opportunity to
recreate that experience. Disney World has been linked to that
episode. The complete release from reality that I used to experience
while on property has been replaced by this bracing for something bad.
Sitting on the porch at Riviera taking a call about what was going on
at PDI remains a vivid memory. It's like a part of me wants to go back
to that moment. I'm not in that moment, but I continue to experience
the fear and helplessness that I lived with during that entire trip
every time I step back on property. I will continue to relive that
bleak time until I fully confront that issue and put that period
behind me.

That's a very poignant and sharp instance of where a moment in the
past provides the lens through which to experience my present. That's
not the only one, even if it is the one that I dwell on the most. My
obsessive record keeping started as a way to track my progress. It
looked very future directed to me when I started, but the practice
roots me deeper into my past. I'm in a constant struggle with the
previous me. I'm not battling with my fear of The Edge or finding ways
to propel myself to new levels of performance or achievement. I'm
training for my next marathon in the context of my training for my
previous marathon. It's not about what I'm doing this time, but how
this time compares to what I did the last time. The objectivity of
training run distances and times has always attracted me to running,
but the ability to go back and see what I did last time is not really
helping me get ready for my next race. The cold clarity of the numbers
obscures the context in which those numbers, both present and future,
are produced. The question of whether I am doing all that I can to
prepare this time is muddled with how much running I did last time and
the impact that has with how I managed to perform on race day. I'm not
training for my next race. I'm retraining for a race I've already run.

The record I keep of how many times I've been intimate with my wife
reminds me of how things have changed in our life. Seeing trends go up
and being able to do more of what you enjoy is fantastic. It's easy to
read that as I must be doing everything right. It also makes it easy
to say that I must be doing things wrong when the numbers go down. The
numbers need to be seen in the proper context, but digits on a
spreadsheet don't say very much. They are clear about a very specific
event, but they say nothing about what was going on in every other
part of my life.

This rooted in the past orientation that I've been in for a couple of
years is really an issue of poor data interpretation. I hit a dip in a
few measures and started obsessing over the fact I hit a dip rather
than incorporating that trend into a broader time frame. I never dealt
with anxiety or similar feelings before that January, at least not to
the depth and duration that I hit in January 2020. I had always been
able to engage the problem and move beyond it. I wasn't able to do
that so much in January. I didn't solve my own problems so they kind
of lingered. I accepted the lessons and made some changes in how I
approached work, but the stress and anxiety stuck around. The world
didn't help, but I didn't really help myself either.

Bookshelf Zero keeps me pointed towards my past too. My books have
always been something that I enjoy having around. If I read them
great, if not, that's fine too. I made some choices to buy books in
the past, the choice to read that book was a choice for the future.
Bookshelf Zero makes reading all those books a sign of progress. A
year I read more books than I buy is successful while a year in which
I fail to achieve that goal is a failure. That's a 100% self-imposed
performance metric. Should I celebrate reading a book, no matter how
it came to me, or chide myself for reading a book that I just bought
or some book I got from the library rather than clicking another book
off my shelf? There are good reasons for both, but I feel like this is
also a question of data interpretation. It's the story I tell myself
about my reading habit that matters.

I feel like I've kind of built my own emotional prison (a bit
dramatic, but it was the first thing that came to mind). I put myself
here, I have the ability to get myself out. Let's start now. I saw
that a former colleague has a new title. He's in the space where I
used to toil. I felt a small pang that he was having that success that
I'm not, but then I had to ask myself why that matters. I made the
choice to leave that organization. I'm doing something new now. That's
what matters. I need to stop revisiting places where I used to do
things and put my energy on where I am now. I'm building a new life.
I'm sitting outside, by my pool, writing this entry at 11 pm on a
Monday night in December. In short sleeves. And it's super
comfortable. This is what matters now. The fact that Jim is a Team
Lead is great for him, irrelevant to me. I miss my old organization,
but that organization is dead. It's time to look ahead.