Opportunity Is The Devil’s Playground

And yet we try to engineer serendipity, right? Why?

the details are where they say both god & the devil dwell…

Everyone’s looking for a break and we all want the good things to come our way, but…

maybe we should be a bit more hesitant in giving breath to those desires.

Maybe our wish for an ease of operation that is not really of our own making is more often responsible for the barriers and challenges that come with actually getting things done than we give them credit for.

Maybe the path to the better life and career and art is not from taking opportunity or even wishing it, but by taking responsibility. Or something else entirely. Shall we examine this a bit?

Many of us have experienced getting derailed from a project, getting thrown by the discovery of something that initially looks better than the path we are following, but in fact never leads to something that will ever come to be.  

There you are finally making headway on that screenplay or business plan when someone asks for a meeting and then offers the potential of collaborating on that sure-to-go whateveritis.

But does it happen? And how long does it take to see that it was always a mirage?  Why did you go to that meeting in the first place?

Now three months have gone by and you lost the thread of what you were working so well on at the time. It seemed too good to be true, but heck you sure deserved a little of that good fortune; why shouldn’t the cinema gods finally smile down upon you this time?

But what a cruel little joke it was after all.

Every time I open my computer, I hope for some sort of good news to greet me. “Hi, Ted!”…  be it an invite to something or perhaps just a conversation. Sometimes there it is waiting for me, but mostly I am just disappointed. And most of those invites come far too late for me to partake anyway.

Why did I want? Why did I want them? I was doing pretty darn well on my own. Did I need them to notice? Did I want their approval? Would that improve the outcome?  No. No. No. But yet, there that was: the wish for a better opportunity.

That wish initially seems harmless enough, right? It dresses well. Even innocently. It’s just a wish. We all want something better. Why resist? But don’t forget about the wolf in sheep’s clothing…

The wish-for-opportunity is a hideous demon that we can’t even see. Maybe the most hideous demon, drooling, biting, snarling, and sniffling. It is the blocker, the obfuscator, the potion of confusion, the misplacer, the ultimate debtor, the virus, and the cancer.  Out, out, damn spot. Be gone, dread demon, be gone. I shall not want what I haven’t got.

You, dear reader, may have noticed that I have been playing with sort of notion for a while now.  Maybe you figured out why. Imagonnasplain.