This morning I sat down with my coffee and the recollection of a simple task I had reminded myself to handle this morning. Easy stuff. Add a profile picture to an email account. No problem. On it. But… no. It wasn’t that simple. I appeared not to have administrative access to those details, directly. Wild. Am I not an administrator on this account, I wondered? I checked. Nope. I am an administrator… should be able to do this… what am I missing…

I get a log in prompt… no saved password. Well, shit. What was that password? I noodle around awhile unsuccessfully. I drink more coffee. I go do something else. I come back to this task. I repeat those steps and a few others.

I started to become frustrated, then paused. Walked around the block. Came back to my desk thinking about the context in which the email account with the profile I was looking to update was created, just this week… I found my success almost by mistake, looking at a sticky note with a password jotted down, crossed out, rewritten; I had been figuring out what the password would be, and went through a couple iterations. I didn’t think it would have been for this email account (for which I had failed to save the password on my computer)… but the timing was similar… so… I tried that one. It worked.

Here’s the thing; we go through this life without clear instructions, and without a map to guide us. Doesn’t matter if you follow some strict belief system with rules laid out explicitly or not – we’re largely on our own and making most of this shit up. True of hiking new trails, finding a new apartment, building a new relationship, or yeah, even setting up new email accounts. We don’t always have all the information we may need. Our decisions are not made in advance, generally. Our results will vary. The outcomes are not certain. It’s not always a given that someone else will have an easy answer for us, even when we know what questions to ask (and we often don’t).

…Sometimes we’ve just got to figure it out…

(No, I’m not saying it’s “easy” – it fucking isn’t.)

Begin again. Try something else. Approach the thing differently. Give it a rest and come back to it. Work at it. Take notes. Maybe just move on from it if the struggle subtracts all remaining value from the potential achievement. There are verbs involved – count on it.

“Success” isn’t even always about what we think it is… sometimes it’s about the decision-making to “cut our losses” and just do something else. lol

Figure it out. You’ve got this. One way or another…

Are you ready to begin again? 🙂