Temporary.

I'm back in stationary life this week, doing more construction and repair on the little cabin where I spent most of 2020, and all of the lockdowns. It's not my favorite place to be, and with the dark, rain-filled clouds of winter rolling over day after day it's been a pretty tough go.

But as I've worked through the list of repairs, I've noticed a funny pattern - how so many "temporary" solutions have a habit of becoming permanent.

A shelf wedged above the mirror from scrap wood that was supposed to be there a couple of days. The temporary benchtop built from beams balanced on bar stools. The temporary bookshelves made from cardboard boxes.

Every one of those things have been exactly where they were placed for a year and a half now. "Temporary" fixes are what's making up my lived space.

I look around my life, and things are like this everywhere. My balance between work and health, how much time I have for friends and family, the "break" I'm taking from learning the guitar.

It's so easy to frame all these things as ephemeral, externally caused, things that are going to change real soon now. So easy to avoid accepting that they've been this way for years, because of real choices I've consistently made.

I think about what I've planned, intended to do over the last few years, and hear the same quote echoing: life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

And I've thought again about intention versus action, and the insidious nature of intent-based frames on our lives. How thinking, "this isn't what I planned to do" lets me avoid feeling, "these are the actual choices I've made."

It's uncomfortable, and difficult. But at least this time, it's making me do things in ways that aren't supposed to be temporary. To do them right.

Wishing you sun, and a light-filled week ahead,

-Steven

p.s. The best thing I saw all week was this funny and all-too-relatable sketch by Ryan George - about the jerks that our brains can be at 3am. :)