Complex Numbers

Challenge Complete

It's the last day of the official competition, and the last War Chest Wednesday, so it's only fitting I repeat this prompt from November. Write a list of at least 5 blogging prompts to add to the Challenge War Chest to be used for future rounds of the 30DBC. Then, use one of your own prompts to write your entry.

This one was inordinately hard for me. I suppose that's only fair, as it is the last prompt of the month, and the others flowed easily. So yeah, I don't think these prompts are all that groundbreaking, but here they are anyway:

1) Write about one thing you want to do before you bite the dust.
2) If you had to go back and change one decision you made, what would it be and why?
3) Which movie and/or TV franchise would you most like to write for?
4) What job do you wish you had?
5) Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool then to speak out and remove all doubt." Prove him right.

So, the prompt I'm going to use is the first one, but I'm pretty sure it's going to address #5 while I'm at it.

I don't know who coined the term "bucket list," and I can't be arsed to find out. I do know that it became the title of a moderately interesting movie with Jack Nicholson and God.

While I've been known to use the phrase from time to time, I usually call it my "fuck-it list." This is because I've already done most of what I set out to do, and have given up on the rest.

It's come to my attention recently that life is much less frustrating if you can separate "things that I cannot control" from "things that I can control," and to focus on the latter while letting go of the former. This is something akin to the infamous Serenity Prayer, which I resent because a) it's a prayer and b) it's associated with AA, and AA is for quitters.

And yet, far be it from me to reject an idea outright, so I started thinking about it.

Let's imagine that I wanted to win a marathon race. That is, to run 42.195km faster than anyone else in the race. This would depend on who else was in the race, and that is something beyond my control; if anyone has two working legs (or prostheses), or is over the age of 18 months or under the age of 105 years, I would not win. By this theory, the only thing I could control would be my own level of fitness.

But the assumption there is that I can control my own level of fitness. I've been walking every day for the past 5 weeks, which is, like, a new record for me for exercise. My walk is about 2.4km and takes approximately 30 minutes, giving me a walking speed of about 5km/hr, maybe a bit less. And when I finish, I'm out of breath, my calves are spasming, and my shins are on fire. Consequently, I cannot imagine walking 42km, let alone running that distance. It's hard to imagine any amount of training that would allow me to even finish a marathon.

Or take another example. Say I want to take a trip to space. How can I make that happen? Well, probably by paying Virgin Galactic a very large sum of money to fire me into a suborbital trajectory that technically takes me 100km up for a fraction of a minute, thus putting me, by definition, in space. Honestly, even if I were a billionaire, this would strike me as a colossal waste of money. There is nothing about this that I can control, except to decide that I don't really want to take a trip to space after all.

So here's the real example: I want to be published. Now, I'm not talking about self-publishing. Anyone can do that. Some can even be successful at it. What I want is for an editor to tell me, "This story is good and it meets our needs so here's some money." (Actually, it's not about the money, but that's part of the package.) And then have at least one person that I don't know purchase the story.

I have no control over publishers' or readers' decisions. The only thing I have control over is my own process: writing, editing, submitting.

But since I'm utter crap at selling myself and lousy at editing, I can't even control that much.

This is why I've given up on a some of my earlier goals.

But hey, at least I'm walking every day.