Tuesday says hello.
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Posts Tagged ‘mostly work’
Work. That Is All.
Posted in Other, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2022, mostly work, Thoughts on October 25, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Day of Badassery
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2022, mostly work, Not Entirely As Planned, Thoughts on April 29, 2022| Leave a Comment »
How have I spent my day? Not writing, but I have been fixing problems and making things and helping people.
So that’s cool.
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Epiphany, with Dragon
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, backwards, dragons, epiphany, mostly work, still fun, upside-down on April 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You know how one day you can look up and something that made sense yesterday no longer does? Or a collection of disparate facts coalesces into a unitary whole? Or perhaps you walk into a room that has looked essentially the same for years and suddenly, something pops out at you?
That happened to me this morning.
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This is my dragon:
He is wood and paint and gilt animated by magic. I found him years ago, on Bali, brought him home in a shipping container via the Port of Boston, and we have been together ever since.
He has yet to tell me his given name.
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Originally designed to hang from a ceiling hook, for years he has made a comfortable aerie at the top of my largest bookcase. He presides over a stack of treasure that includes copies of The Expanse, Butcher’s Codex Alera, a first edition of Following the Equator by Mark Twain, a set of Lord of the Rings letter openers, one of many copies of Lord of the Rings, a hand-woven coin purse from Peru, a black cat carved in peat, a sand dollar that reminds me of my grandfather, a set of magnetic train cars, and other treasures.
He looked like this:
I walked into the room and looked up, seeing the usual painted wood and wings. The epiphany occurred when I realized that I’d spent the past who knows how many years staring at the blank underside of the dragon’s wings.
Why not flip them around?
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It only took two minutes to rearrange my view on dragons.
Today, I took that idea and upended a work-related problem I’m tackling. What, I wondered, if I flipped the question on its axis and came at it from another angle?
And suddenly a whole new path appeared.
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Next time I’m stuck on a problem in work or writing, I’ll try turning it upside down and/or backwards.*
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* Have I mentioned that I used to write that way? I began my academic career (a.k.a. kindergarten) an ambidextrous upside-down and backwards adventurer. No longer, but it’s still fun to remember.
J.R. Johnson 
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