You would think I would have learned to stop worrying by now but I haven’t. I can’t count the number of sleepless nights and subsequent lousy days I have had in the run up to an event or a project launch. No matter what I do to try to stop the worrying it still gets to me, usually between 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning when the enormity of what I haven’t done, or still need to do, floods into my mind.
Yet, when I look back, nearly everything I have been involved in has followed the same path. Before everything should have started I go at it with hammer and tongs, trying to beat the clock by getting everything done in advance. I start off with high hopes and nothing happens. I start to sweat but in a few days there is a small uptake, just enough to allay some of my fears but not enough to calm me down. In fact I start to worry more in case that is it.
Then, over the next few days and weeks, the numbers start to trickle in, one and twos with a few days in between. This is followed by a small surge, giving me hope that I am going to get there in the end. After that is another period of becalmed waters, leading to further concern. By now I can see the event horizon appearing and put my back into a campaign to get whatever I am doing over the line.
I guess that this is the point that people interested in what I am doing wake up and realise that it is time to get engaged. There is a final flourish and the numbers required are past and I am left wondering if I need to row back.
In 9 out of 10 times everything works out fine in the end, so why worry? It’s the way I am and if I didn’t worry perhaps I would never get these things to the finish line in the first place.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer says in his book Shosha, ‘In everything man does there are obstacles so that he can discern the hand of Providence’.
When it comes to work, I can definitely feel the hand of Providence. As I have always told anyone how will listen, anything worthwhile is hard.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 