Do Something; Even If It's Wrong!

...not legal advice, by the way

Hi! Welcome to The Night Shift where just about anything is up for discussion

It's about 2AM as I start this.

The house is as quiet as it's going to get.

The neighborhood has been neighborhood-ing, as it has been known to. There's not much I can do about that.

The pets have been put to bed.

I have coffee. And a hunk of homemade bread with peanut butter spread upon it.

Let's get into it.

Tonight I am thinking of an admonition that used to come from my now-deceased stepdad, uttered during moments of escalating dysfunction:

Someone would be mid-sentence, mid-tirade, or mid-this-project-isn’t-quite-working-as-intended-or-envisioned, when from my frustrated stepdad would come:

‘Crisse, fais de quoi, meme si c’est mal!’ or, in English, ‘For Christ's sake, do something, even if it's wrong!’.

Whether in the kitchen. At the dining room table. At his workbench. Around a vehicle that wouldn't start for some obscure reason. Basically any time a group discussion or project had stalled in a way that didn't work for him because the man did not ‘do’ physical, social, or project paralysis.

I used to think that this was reckless, because surely the goal is to do things correctly the first time out?

But.

Now that I am older and wiser, the more I see of what destroys things isn't usually wrong action. It's stalled action. The long slow decay of prolonged indecision or passing the proverbial buck.

I don't know about anyone else, but along my life timeline so far, I have done plenty of things that were at once both decisive and incorrect.

Taken on responsibility that wasn't mine

Attempted to outwork nonsense social structures

Assumed effort would or could compensate for reality

You know what?

Urban homesteading is a particularly fertile ground for such delusions. And many others that we’ll get to..at another time.

Ahem

Moving on.

The myth, and it is a particularly seductive myth, reads that if you are smart enough, scrappy enough, and resourceful enough, you can override dysfunctional physical or social infrastructure to handle whatever nonsense comes your way, fix what's messed up, grow nifty things, rebuild community.. . La di da. Hallelujah Amen

Sigh

Then one day, you come to something resembling your senses to discover that somewhere along the way you've bought yet another tool you that you aren't that familiar with, yet you are hoping that you can figure out how to use the sucker by way of studying a YouTube tutorial.

Or, you're busily reading local building code and thinking ‘really?!’

Or, you're realizing that you didn't sign up to witness the neighbor's learning curves and experimental phases.. any more than the neighbors signed up for witnessing yours.

That's the point when maybe when your pride is the only thing left functioning, hopefully before you bought chickens or built a bunch of raised beds for the garden this year.

Recently, though, on my end, the neighborhood/Universe/what-have-you escalated the ridiculous, perhaps to make the point that, for me, no matter how many skills or efforts or willingness to do more with less that I put into the thing, urban homesteading was not quite where it was at.

What happened?

Paid off vehicle title in hand, I found myself in a driveway discussion with a reposession agent. Not because anything of mine was being repossessed. The repo man was just in the wrong driveway. Which, when you think about it, is a great metaphor for modern urban life.

So there I was, discussing with a tow truck driving stranger, explaining that I am right and he is wrong. While he was asserting the exact opposite. This is not the first of such things to have happened here.

Mid-conversation, I decided ‘this is bullshit’. And invited the tow driver to get his employer over here so we could all get in the same page before walking away.

A few days later, the Universe, in its way, elected to really drive the point home. One of my newer neighbors showed up on my doorstep to alert me to some other brouhaha going on locally with some of the other new neighbors.

The ‘funny’ part about this, ‘funny hmm’, not ‘funny. Haha’, by the way, was that what was going on according to our neighbor, were things that I had experienced and/or seen before.

Turns out, I simply didn't have the knowledge to have the vocabulary to fully explain to myself or to anyone else what I was concerned about, and this was and is actually mixed blessing.

So there I was, standing in front of our much more urban than I ever thought of being neighbor. The same neighbor who is by now breaking down what's what around here exactly, and in such a clear way, that I, in mid-conversation, thought, ‘what am I to actually do with this information?’.

Do something, even if it's wrong..

In the end, and all things considered, I could choose to keep grinding it out in perpetual indecision, the kind that on the outside looks noble in that ‘nevertheless she persisted ‘ kind of way. Because it looks considered. Patient. Adult-ish even. But sometimes that's just fear dressed up in business casual. Meanwhile, the ClueBus of life is ever- idling in the driveway, waiting on an adventure ….

But that's not what ‘do something; even if it's wrong ‘ actually looks like, to me.

It looks like:

Stop tolerating messed up environments.

Stop tolerating absurdity that's set up camp in the yard.

Refuse stagnation.

Accept that wrong action gives you data. No action gives you rust, or erosion.

Accept that standing still just makes one easier to locate.

I've decided to, in light of all this, to make adjustments and go forth with the knowledge and conviction that we are all allowed to choose our own life terrain, and moving forward over it, beats being frozen in place to it. Even if that means that the first step means I'm done explaining myself to folks, and especially the ones who are strangers who show up wearing a hi-visibility vest, Timberland boots, and carrying a clipboard, while trying to sound official.

For now, this is all. Have a good night, Gentle Readers and Listeners. We’ll talk again soon. Toodle-oo!

Deb