So on Thursdays, my brother Spacey and I have an hour or so dedicated to just talk. Sometimes that's when one, or both of us, is in the car on the way home from work. Sometimes, we're both home by ourselves and can really lean into it and unwind. However we do it, it's pretty damn important that we do it.
Because we love one another very much.
Brother and I, we are polyamorous partners. Our relationship has been, is, and continues to be one of the single most important things in my life. It's magical. He's not my boyfriend, but we are intimate in all sorts of ways, physically, emotionally, ways that I can't even really describe. He's an atheist, and I'm a non-theist, we're both highly technical, rational people, and yet there's a bond between us that defies reason and explanation. We genuinely feel like we're extensions of the same person.
It's profound.
Which is why when we have our little Thursday night talks, we can (and do) talk about everything and nothing. Our talks range from the sillies of goofy nonsense to seriously ponderous life issues. We have no boundaries. There's no topic off limits, no piece of information that's sequestered.
So often, I know myself better through him.
We had a thing just like that this past Thursday. I was lamenting to him how frustrated I am lately, because I'm so on, creatively.
I have this side project for a business I've been working on for several months now. It's QUITE real. I've been engaged in it for about six months. I have a business partner, a mentor, a code repository where I keep it, went to a conference to do research for it, and broke ground on coding it back in early November. I hope to have the prototype for it done sometime in the spring.
After which, I have another software project I'm going to build with one of my best friends, which will also be a business, and is something I have wanted to create for well over a decade.
Meanwhile, my 3rd novel is in a sort of stasis, "up on bricks", waiting for me to get back to it. I have some major retooling I want/need to do to it, too.
And the other day the idea for my 4th novel hit me like a thunderbolt.
Based on the time and energy I have, the schedule for my software/business projects, and just my life, I won't be going back to work on my 3rd novel for at least a year and a half.
I can't see that I will be able to get to that 4th novel for probably two years.
That's right. Two years.
While I'm excited about all these things I have going on, I also feel almost smushed by it all, like a heavy boot is pressing down on me, constricting me. Because I want to do all of it, and I want to do it right now.
This is where my magical relationship with my fantastic brother comes in.
He complimented me on how effective I've been lately. About how I am getting shit done. I've written and published two novels, helped to create over 100 episodes of a podcast that's been running for over five years.
He reminded me of a truth I hold dear, something I know intimately, and which I have taught countless times to others. I can do anything, but not EVERYTHING.
When I've taught this same thing to coaching clients, or just people in general I describe this feeling I'm having as having a Great Wall Problem.
The Great Wall, counting all its branches is over 13,000 miles long. There's a long running myth that it's the only man-made object that can be seen with the naked eye from space. It's massive. When you think that human hands built it, and try to conceive of it, of going from no wall to finished wall, your brain kind of crashes. It's so ridiculously big, that the idea of building the entire thing just can't fit in your head.
Yet there it is. And it was built, brick by brick, by human hands.
Brother reminded me that I've been doing some excellent brickwork lately. It's each brick that matters, not all of them.
I love him.