One of the most entertaining things about living as I do is watching things fall apart, knowing that they have to fall apart, and feeling helpless to do anything about the fact that they’re necessarily falling apart. It’s like watching the sad, sorry, crushing part of your favourite depressing film. You know it’s important, heart-wrenching, and painful, but there is beauty in it that wants you to appreciate it. It’s not entertaining like a comedy, but you’re fully invested.
The Vietnam adventure seems to have reached its end. I’ve pulled every lever available, every magic trick has been attempted, and every joker is on the table, but I’m coming up bust. I’ve got a Hail Mary in the pipes, but living on a prayer only works for Bon Jovi. I’m sitting in an unfamiliar place, but it’s a part of reality that everyone needs to sit in once in a while: failure.
I had grand dreams, amazing plans, and incredible designs for the time, but they depended on a lot of cosmic support, the likes of which you can’t really rely on. Luck, Grace, Providence, Synchronicity, you name it. The sort of things that, until now, I felt I could work with. I may have been delusional.
The primary line I have misread is work. I’m halfway through a contract with a client (and half has been paid) but we’re so far behind schedule that I have to accept that it’s probably a write-off. It’s standard practice to ghost freelancers, but halfway through a half-paid contract for work that they’ve not yet implemented? This is unheard of.
The message is clear: all that glitters ain’t gold. There were plenty of warning signs, but I was blissfully ignorant (or overly optimistic) and didn’t plan for the worst while hoping for the best. That’s my bad.
It’s not just career, it’s relationships as well, though I guess the same message is there. Blissful ignorance and excessive optimism have little place in reality, and the warning signs that I ignored were not delusions. I trust my gut most of the time, but in work and relationships, I override it and white-knuckle my way past the edges of healthy decision making. To my credit, nobody can say I’m afraid of trying new things.
So the career path is collapsing, the relationship structures are disintegrating, and my satisfaction with how I spend my days is dwindling. It sounds terrible, like there is no goodness at all, and it is easy for me to sit in this space and feel nothing but failure.
And yet.
When I came to Vietnam, I had two clear goals: I wanted to eradicate a habit pattern that I have grown tired of, and I wanted to drop body fat. The habit pattern is complicated where the body transformation is simple, but they are interconnected.
I think of the habit pattern as ‘optionality’, but perhaps it can also be described as indecision. There is a quote I read in German that says something like: ‘whoever leaves all the doors open, spends their entire life in the hallway’. The idea is that if I want to do 23 things at the same time, I am not going to do any of them as well as I wish.
How this manifests in life is I try a variety of meditation techniques, multiple body practices, I change countries, and careers, and relationships, and self, all at once, and all these things get 60% of my full attention. (I hear every report card from primary and high school whisper in my ears: ‘Constant distraction to others. Does well when he applies himself.’ I’m pretty sure I’m also a constant distraction to myself though. But I digress.)
What this has looked like in Vietnam: I’ve tried stand-up, teaching English, being an intermediary for foreigners looking for apartments, leading fitness and chi gung classes, applying for jobs I’m not at all interested in, building relationships when I’m unsure if I want to stay in the place I’m in, and I’ve tried to drop body fat.
But only one of these has been clear from the outset. I’m fit and healthy, but I happened across an osteopath of nearly 80 years of age in Thailand, and he put the size of my belly on notice. It rang a bell connected to a memory from 2012, where an ex-girlfriend said to me ‘you’ve got potential, babe, like Paul _____ potential’. Paul _____ was a horribly fat, incredibly unpleasant person we worked with, and that seared itself into my memory. I’ve dropped over 30kgs since then, but my approach has been holistic, relaxed and meandering, and the results have followed that pathway. And I am entirely happy with those results.
And yet.
Two months ago I jumped on a fancy machine at the gym that measures muscle mass, water body weight, fat percentage, and so on. I weighed in at 82.3kg, with 14.9kg body fat, giving me a body fat percentage of 18.1%. This is acceptable, but it showed most of the fat distribution across my midsection. So I decided to focus on dropping body fat.
I ride my scooter everywhere, so incidental exercise is non-existent. I train a couple times a week, and I stay active with sessions in the park, but I am far less active here than I have been in any other country. But all day, every day, I sweat. So the only lever to pull has been diet. I pulled it, and stuck with it. And it has been easy. .
Recently I jumped back on that machine. Two months and four days had passed. This time I weighed in at 79.5kg, with 12.4kg of body fat, giving me a body fat percentage of 15.6%. This was the band-aid my soul needed. It worked.
The numbers aren’t important. That I focused on and committed to one thing, and it yielded results, was important. With every aspect of my life in freefall, this was like a life raft in a tumultuous storm. ‘You can focus on one thing and get results. Not only that, but you can get good results, and fast. Focus on one thing more often, not one more thing, and get good results.’ Message received.
Now, with the bank account on zero and an understanding that concentration works wonders, I can put my efforts on The One Thing, being work. It’s no question, I need to make pesos. If I want to do that, I have to do one thing. The last months have shown me just how clearly I refuse to do the 80% of things that bring little, and how willingly I redirect that time into a different 80% of things that also bring little. Pareto may have been onto something, but if I want to intelligently leverage his law, I need to have some capital behind me to pay my way out of the 80%, so that I can focus on the 20%.
The only way out is through. For now, it looks like ‘through’ is going to take me back to home soil, and I am going to be feasting on humble pie all the way. But the only failure in life is the experience you learn nothing from. Please believe I have learnt plenty from this experience. What I don’t want has always been clear, but it’s even clearer now. But what I want, or need, is also clearer, and this has been an elusive thread for a while.
I’m happy it’s clear, and I’m ready to bring it front and centre. Let’s see where this thread takes me.
Catch you all soon <3 (Sorry for the delay. Life has been a menace)
"What a long, strange trip it's been...."
I can't tell you it's all going to work out, or things happen for a reason, because I sure as hell don't know squat about either of those situations. You're going into a 'suck it up buttercup' phase so I wish you humor to endure and good luck to succeed and a shoulder to cry on when needed.