The (now) longer nails on my left hand.

I’ve been hesitant to mention it here, in large part because of the significance. I bit my fingernails for my entire life. I’m pretty sure I stopped sucking on my digits as a toddler and started to bite my nails off the next day. It was an activity as normal as breathing for as long as I can remember.

What’s puzzling to me about it is the unceremonious manner in which this habit ended. I simply stopped without thinking about it. Seven days later I had to find a nail file and shape my newly-grown orange peelers. (Luckily, I inherited an antique “Diamond Deb” nail file from my grandma. It’s actually coated in diamond dust, making it an amazing file.) My new habit is filing my nails once a week.

Maybe we don’t always need to face our bad habits head-on. Maybe it’s possible to do an end-run around them. Or maybe we should focus on our good habits and they’ll crowd out the bad ones? Maybe there is a lesson here related to identifying my goals. I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite happy to have shed this habit.

Malibu, California sunset, February 13, 2010

Every now and then, something or someone will cause me to ask myself, “where are you going?” (I mean “going” in the metaphorical sense and not the literal sense. Though, knowing where you are going *in life* often means actually going somewhere too.)

Very rarely can I respond to that simple question with a simple answer. That makes me uncomfortable. I wonder about it. Where *am* I going? And the obvious next question is: “what are my goals?”

Does everyone have defined goals? Am I the only one who hasn’t put definitive goals to paper yet? What does that mean?

So, the other night when something spurred me to ask myself, “where am I going,” I decided it was time to get a serious answer down. A simple one derived from a few goals. I might use a few posts here to explore this question more, but I’m determined to get a firm grip on what it means to know where I’m going, why I want to go there, and the inevitable change that comes with knowing where you want to go.

So to start, I’m just going to ask everyone if they have goals. Do you? If you do, do you know where you going? Don’t worry if you don’t want to comment here, I’ll probably ask you in-person.

do you know how hard it is ... by catklein on Flickr

dinner is green and orange and dark green. colors that smell as good as they taste. mind is empty. ish. i wonder what i’ll do before the end of it all? still a few hours to go. maybe less.

strum a bit. i’m glad my guitar is within reach, even if i still only know those same 15 songs. at least a few of them are my own.

wash it all off, the day where little made sense. shampoo it out of my hair too. don’t try too hard to make sense of it. remember the people, not the place. at the end of it all, just be able to sleep soundly, smile about it and leave it there. at the end of it all, is the beginning.

Recently, I did a dumb thing. Without getting into specifics, let’s just assume that the thing I did was sufficiently dumb to warrant self-reflection, more than one apology, and a blog post.

So how do you recover from doing a dumb thing? I don’t know for sure, but here’s where I started.

Accept that you did a dumb thing

If you did something dumb, you need to own up to it. It can’t be overstated: you save yourself a lot of trouble when you are honest about doing something dumb. Everyone does dumb things from time to time. The time it takes you to recover from doing a dumb thing is directly correlated to how willing you are to accept and admit that you did a dumb thing.

Accept that your reasoning might have been flawed

Chances are, while you were doing the dumb thing, you had a rational reason for why you were doing it. Now that you are out of that moment, you should probably go somewhere private and think about whether or not that reason is still rational. What sounded perfectly normal in the moment probably seems dumb now. Try explaining your reasoning to a friend or say it out loud to yourself. Or, say it to your cat (don’t let anyone see you saying it to your cat, because that is dumb too).

Understand the dumb thing before trying to fix it

Never set about fixing a dumb thing before you understand what you did. Some dumb things don’t reveal themselves as dumb things until time passes (or someone walks up and tells you). You may have done a dumb thing that hurt someone’s feelings, changed or harmed a friendship, or made daily interactions with others difficult. Doing a dumb thing can carry more weight than you know. Be sure you understand the magnitude of what you did before you try to mend it.

Accept the outcome of doing dumb things

If the dumb thing you did hurt someone, be ready to accept that things may never be the same between you and that person. Don’t try to fix a dumb thing by doing more dumb things. This just compounds the situation. It’s important to accept that doing dumb things comes with consequences that you have no control over.

Above all else, accept that you did a dumb thing with grace and humility. Those affected by the dumb thing you did may not forgive you. A friendship may have been harmed or lost, or a relationship altered. Or both. Some dumb things are forgiven with time, but not all dumb things are forgotten. Accept this and learn from the dumb thing you did. Make sure that you’ve made amends and apologized to those affected…if you can. Some dumb things may be difficult or impossible to talk about openly and that may make it harder to recover from. Just try to move forward with grace and humility and hopefully things will work out.

Once again, I’ve stayed up past my bedtime in Atlanta. However, tonight I did more thinking and less working. I love to travel because in every new place, there are thousands of places to stop and ponder something you may take for granted in your usual surroundings. Here’s my short list of thoughts from Atlanta:

• I’m super, ridiculously silly-tired.
• I sometimes use hyperbole abundantly when I’m tired.
• My relationship with flying is still so odd to me. I love to soar above everything. I’ve been in a single engine propeller plane (Citabria) and all sorts of passenger jets. By far, I love flying more than any thrill ride at any amusement park. But it puts me in such a weird mindset. Before a flight, I think about every person I know and care about. I wonder if I’m leaving them well. That is, am I right with that person? I guess the morbid-sounding way to put it is: if I never see them again, are they going to remember me with a smile? I have trouble explaining it and I usually ends up sounding like I hate flying.
• I’m always so grateful to the people who live and work where I’m visiting. I find that I say “thank you” profusely on trips. I’m just so excited to see new places that I want to thank every person I see for making my experience enjoyable. I need to do this more at home. Everyone should be thanked for making life enjoyable for others; whether I see them every day or once in my lifetime.
• I like being tossed into new situations with no expectations. It scares the crap out of me, and I’m shy in new situations, but I really enjoy the experience of being up-ended by new surroundings.
• I think an awesome gift you could give someone is a “Yes” coupon. The person you give the coupon to can ask you for anything (obviously, you’ll want to give this someone you trust) for a set period of time and you have to say, “yes.” I can’t remember where I first saw that, but I was thinking about it tonight and I think it would be an awesomely selfless gift.
• Sometimes, you just have to keep walking. Last night, my conference co-attendee Tom and I walked to the Fox Theater. They were gearing up for the last night of The Color Purple musical, so we could not go inside to check it out. Tom had been inside the night before and he said I should see it. So we wandered around Atlanta until around 10pm, when the show let out. As the crowd began to stream out of the doors, Tom and I walked toward the door. Right as we got through to the inside, a door person asked Tom what he was doing and instructed him to leave. I just kept walking. I faintly heard the door person call me back, but I just kept walking. I turned back once and made eye-contact with the door person and I think he understood that I wasn’t going to turn around and leave without seeing more. I patiently waited for the crowds to come down the staircases and then went up each one until I was on the third level. I walked into the theater auditorium and was momentarily breathless. It is amazing. It looks like a hazy, evening sky. It’s like you walked outdoors on a perfect Georgia night. Unbelievable. If I had stopped when asked, I would have missed out on an amazing experience. It’s a sappy metaphor for life, but sometimes you really have to keep walking past those who would stop you or you’ll miss the pretty stuff. I’m so glad I got to see the inside of that theater. Of course, I profusely thanked the door person as I made my way out.

Thank you, Atlanta. It’s been real. And I still have one more day.