Gandalf on the low road. In an Astra.

Over the last few weeks, it has come to my attention that I'm not good at some things. This revelation is, I'm sure, as much of a shock to you as it is to me; I certainly didn't see it coming. Unfortunately, however, I can no longer deny the truth of it.

The thing is, as anyone who has read any of these rambling excuses for blogs will undoubtedly have guessed, I'm all about the vision, the big picture, the overarching meta-narrative of any given situation. I love dreaming great dreams and imagining fantastic possibilities. Generally, the thought process that usually attends one of these ideas when it explodes onto my consciousness is runs thus: "That's A-MAAAAAAAAZING!!!!! Let's drop everything else and make this happen IMMEDIATELY! I have no idea how, but we'll somehow muddle through." Herein lies the issue. I'm not all that hot on the 'hows' of stuff. In fact, I find it a positively life-draining effort to get my head around the practical planning of details and minutiae that naturally attend making any grand plan a reality. To be fair it's worked out okay so far, the 'screw it let's do it' (via Richard Branson) approach to life has seen me accomplish such things as the Three Peaks Challenge, starting a church in a pub, (almost) completing a PhD, and driving 1800 miles across Europe in a K reg Vauxhall Astra while dressed as Gandalf. However, I'm beginning to see the limitations. I'm beginning to accept that practicalities and details do need to be taken seriously, and somehow I need to get better at them.

Because we all need to be aware of our weaknesses, otherwise they have the annoying habit of completely blindsiding us. No, not only be aware of them, we should be actively doing something about them. I'm a big fan of the Myres-Briggs personality type indicator. For those who have never heard or Myres-Briggs, you can read a bit about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator) but in summary it is a personality test designed to help you understand how you perceive and process the world. Now, the beauty of the MBTI is not only in affirming you as an individual (you are not 'wrong' to see things as you do, you're just a certain personality type), but it helps you recognise areas of life that do not come naturally. This is not to excuse those 'weak' areas - quite the contrary, it is to help you see where you need to expend more effort and resource to compensate. So I'm crap at practicalities. I'd better start finding ways of dealing with this then.

Sounds like a lot of hard work doesn't it? Welcome to life on the "road less travelled" (to quote M. Scott Peck). As I understand it one of the principle tenants of Buddhism is "life is suffering". The idea goes that if you can accept this truth fully, then you will never again suffer. I'm not sure I'd agree with this fully, but I would definitely go along with "life is hard". At least, that is, if you are serious about becoming who you were created to be. We naturally try and avoid the hard things in life, especially when it comes to facing our weaknesses. Human beings are remarkably adept at deceiving themselves and we find all sorts of ways of excusing destructive habits because "that's just who we are". The easy option, the mental low road, is always to avoid hardship.

Sadly for us, Jesus was quite direct on this issue. "Those who want to be my followers," he said, "must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me." There we are then. No getting around it. Damn.

So I'll try and work on my aversion to practical stuff. Not sure how yet, but perhaps just accepting I need to is a good place to start, especially in light of the fact that my current grand vision is to open a pub that will be a ministry base for Llan.

But more about that next time...