Reality — you can learn something from it. You can learn how to work with it.
First you must accept this: Stuff will resist.
Time and money are particularly ornery. Estimate how long a project will take and how much it will cost, then double that and you might be close — or still a bit shy. Cost is like shaving cream in a can. Press the button and it expands in you hands. Time is like a cumulous cloud over the mountains; it billows into the stratosphere.
Then there are objects — put them to work and they will war with you. You pick up one thing and other things move with it. They jump, fall, dive and zipline together — usually in the direction of the floor, and chaos.
Take long, stingy things — they are the worst! They knot, wrap, tangle and snag. Garden hoses are particularly uncooperative. Walk anywhere with one, it will reach out and hook on a door knob, a sprinkler head, a plant. And it gets worse. Hoses are also kinky. No matter what virtuous, moral and cooperative nature was claimed on the cardboard they came with, they bend back on themselves and resolutely refuse to give water, until you walk over to them and give them what for.
And then there is the dry stuff — it gets on you. Sawdust, Splenda, flour, sanding dust — they are the worst. Sand a cabinet, the dust generated will cover the walls and floors and blinds of your home. Dust loves your hands, your face, your hair; give it a chance and it will go for your lungs, and try to kill you.
Wet stuff, the same — extremely irritating. Take caulking, take paint — it wants to go, to be free. Pry up a paint lid and the paint will run, jump and fly up your elbows, up your neck and into your hair. Water, it covers over 70% of the planet, and wants more.
What to do?
Make friends with reality, as it really is — volitional. Accept this. The material world is full of will, intention, agency — and conspiracy. You are in less control than you think. Stuff will have its way!
The answer, the way to sanity, the route to hope — it lies in letting stuff go about its business as it will. Let stuff have its say, its day, its moment in the sun. Let it act, as it will — and be dangerous if it must — where it can do the most good,
Dollars, hours, hoses, flour, paint — you have to work with them; you have to let them resist. Then you have to be nice; you have to talk sweetly to them; you have to talk them into helping. And if you do, they can help you renew and restore the world!
Thrive! 