Carl Setzer

I seek balance, balance between career and family, spiritual and earthly. Balance, perhaps the zen of yin and yang. Balance, though, is not a steady state, rather continuous action. Balancing, redistributing; because you can't have it all, only what you prioritize Thus, knowing what's important is critical. Having goals, big overarching ones to guide you, to allow you focus. With that, one of my traps: forgetting that I can shift, adjust to the changing reality. And that's the real goal, to grow, learn and adjust. Its OK for the goals to move. Actually, its critical. If we're growing, we're learning. That new knowledge will open up possibilities we never could consider before. The glorious future unimaginable. 

I'm getting a lot done, but accomplishing very little. I don't find it satisfying. I enjoy checking off to-dos, but without direction it's, ultimately, empty. Way too many directions in my life. I need focus. Examples: the hundreds of email news sources I subscribe to. And the dozen, or more, tasks I load into a day. That's a weakness in the electronic-tools age. Keeping those emails to read "later" is so easy. Or just shuffle those tasks to another day. Then I get to a point where I have several hundred emails waiting to be read. Or I'm spending 15 minutes moving my collection of overdue tasks to today. It all creates a sensation of "spinning my wheels". I'm tacking this, slowly, carefully. First, I'm now aggressively deleting email. And also unsubscribing. For things I've been subscribed to for years, I feel discomfort. But with so many I haven't even opened in years, it's just time. Time to accept that see the value, bu...

My friend Bill forwarded me a great piece from siliconvalley.com discussing the ways that layoffs have been impacting people's family lives. My layoff has affected me far more deeply than I would've expected. Fortunately, on the whole, I'd say the experience has been positive. This interim gives me much more time with my son, which I take with relish. The tension that I have felt with my wife has been externally focused. The feeling is as the two of us facing out, backs together. For such, I'm quite grateful. The opposite would be an aggravation beyond pale. I have focused on growth and understanding during this time. Watching the news, it's easy to see the greater state of the economy. It's easy for me to not take the quiet after the hundreds of resumes personally. I quite expect that this economic mess will take years to fully recover from. Many years ago I decided my life would not be about wealth or power, but about service and impact. And about living...