Works for Me

You've tried both ways of approaching what you have come to consider your work.  You approach it with confidence, and you have tried approaching it with humility.

There is a great lesson in humility to be learned from approaching a thing with too much confidence.  This is all the more apt because, although you value and understand humility, it is not one of your major qualities.  This is true to the point where, when you find yourself feeling humble, warning sirens begin sounding within your sensors.

You wish to achieve the proper amount of confidence to support any work in progress, but not a superfluous ounce more.

Confidence and humility are difficult for you to judge, thus there is, you feel, healthy cynicism in your vision, or healthy enthusiasm, which of all the tools in your took kit is the one you reach for most often and with, yes, the easiest of confidence.

Your enthusiasms have led you on many a fool's errand.  You're aware of this and of the inordinate amount of time necessary to have cleaned up after some of your past enthusiasms.  But the act of thinking about a project that generates enthusiasm in you is of itself enough reason to favor enthusiasm over confidence or a made-to-order, let's-not-make-more-of-this-than-it-is humility.

In many ways, your advance goal with any idea or notion is to make more of it than it is, to live with it, sleep with it, argue with it, all with the agenda of making more of it than it is.

You've grown from the young man who wanted the big, earth-shaking, significant themes to the middle- and late-middle-aged individual who relishes and cherishes the ability to find and then expose the miracle in the ordinary.  The ordinary is the thing you wish to make seem more than it is.

What a splendid discovery to have had your attention caught up by some tiny thing which, in turn, alerts you to its nuances and frills to the point where you are caught up in it, glory in it, come to love it and then, because you do love it, find the ways to see its asymmetrical nature, its flaws and foibles.  As these things become dear to you, you understand the nature of the discovery you have made.

You have not been seduced by notions of perfection nor won over by the crisp cadences of logical progression.  You love so well that you love beyond the imperfections, all the more reason to understand you have reached a degree of confidence that is of the right balance.

All the more reason to understand you have effected a partnership with the idea or notion or concept or person or place or thing.  Thus in one sweeping discovery, you've moved from humility to relationship.

Let it be said of you that you were a man who had a relationship with his stories and his method of essaying ideas and positions.  Let it be said that you worked to achieve a partnership where the work could not have stood without you, but where, in equal measure, you'd have fallen without the work.