Don't Press Which Red Button? (11/26/08 Wednesday)

But it's likely only me that's fallen back to square one. What happened to following Julie's lead? What happened to not imbuing and inferring? What happened to accepting Julie's complexity as immune to my speculation? Impatience happened to all of it. As always, I want to see some signs of progress (another term I thought I'd renounced). Yet I'm the one that needs to progress. How far have I come? Maybe a long way intelligently, but seemingly nowhere emotionally. My thinking becomes clearer and deeper, the answers sprout like weeds, but I haven't grown an inch. In the light of that, I've become tired of bothering with answers. To say that I should stop bothering seeking answers altogether is itself an answer--a bright ironic answer--that I know to be both right and impossible. Right and impossible.

*****

At work today I started to fall back into avoidance mode, not greeting Julie when I first saw her, passing my desk with a cart. I was counting on eye contact (forgetting last Wednesday's effort in proactivity, apparently), but she didn't look my way. I didn't miss my second chance, thought, when I made her look up from a cart after I said, "Hi, Julie!" She smiled and said, "Hi, Dion. How are you?" and turned away after my answer. I relieved her at the window an hour later, asked her how it had gone there, simply to talk to her. I'm trying to file yesterday's non-reaction under "Julie's Rules" and let it go. I would be helpful, too, if I could follow some of my own rules. If I just summarily refused to speculate, imbue, infer and analyze I know I'd have an easier time writing, but what would it to to my thinking and my attitude? (I can speculate on that, right? Let's remove that action from the blacklist.) How about I don't speculate on that and just give it a try and see what happens?