Sometimes, when you’re caught in a slurry of projects, and you’re stumbling through difficult parts in all of them, you begin to question yourself.
The problem is that there’s so much uncertainty in the air; you’re making the best decisions you can, trying to navigate wisely, but so much is out of your control or beyond your direct knowledge. In the end, some of your uncertain endeavors will fail. But more than failure, it’s the persistent foggy doubt in the air that wears you down over time.
And so I found myself strangely looking forward to stapling some copies of a document together. It felt comfortable for a change to have an almost certain success through unthinking progress: Place the two sheets of paper on top of each other; staple; repeat.
Maybe the lesson is to always have comfortable unthinking projects on the back burner for those times in which the uncertainty of more ambitious and uncertain projects becomes oppressive.