This one's a bit ineffable, so stick with me for a bit here. This morning's been busy. I got dressed, made myself a nice breakfast, did some house chores and financial management type stuff, and sat down to spend a good hour and half or so on my side project.
I've been struggling with this little interface nicety, about selecting rows in a table, especially in a tiny space, like on a cell phone. While I worked, I was listening to a favorite album, on Spotify, Phillip Lober's Children of the Wind.
At a certain point, I made a good decision about how I'm going to move forward, technically. I looked up, where that green arrow is pointing, and saw the time. I realized that if I wanted to get to my day job on time, I couldn't do any more work on it just now.
It felt frustrating. But then, I had a flash of insight.
I've got the time. Expecting to be done with something, anything really, by a certain time, is a shenpa, an attachment. Specifically, it's a form of the anger shenpa. "If I just get this done by then, then everything will be perfect. The fact that that's not the case, or might not be the case is unacceptable and thus makes me angry!"
Don't mistake me, I'm not confusing determination for anger. It's a good thing to push forward, be ambitious, seek change and roll with it. The problem is the attachment. Attachment gets in my way.
I did spend a good amount of time this morning realizing the reason my checkboxes weren't displaying on the page I was building was because I was missing some needed CSS and JS files. And I did get it working, enough to see that the direction I first was headed in was not the direction I wanted. It wasn't time wasted, not at all.
What's more, I had a loosely held plan, and I traded it for a new, slightly different, but also loosely held plan.
Tonight, when I get home, I've got some time to myself. Missy will be away doing something else tonight, so I can pick it up when I get home.
When I stop fretting about it, I see the truth: I have all the time in the world to keep going on things that are important to me. When do I have it?
Now.