Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:The Briar Wood, photogravure print
(1892)

"Waiting for perfection only perfects waiting."

This story serves as a soliloquy by me for me, an encouraging little sermon to bolster my forward momentum. Yesterday, I finally completed all the hurdles for approving my Cluelessness book for publication. The gauntlet qualified as an absurdist’s rendering of bureaucratic inefficiency, but I made my way through it. It seemed like the least effective process possible, but I still managed to make progress and succeed. I felt like simply giving up several times, but I persisted. Cluelessness will launch into another war, into a distraction machine that worsens anything The Blind Men, my first book, faced. HardTimes are not necessarily EndTimes, just EndDays with trepidations. …

—

EndDays inevitably seem like HardTimes. I’ve greiving, seeming to lose another cherished something every time I try to accomplish anything. My bridges, across which I’ve so often passed without thinking, without appreciating, are burning when I arrive. I might run, but I cannot effectively hide from the grim realizations that my familiar life is ending and one, until recently unthinkable, seems sure to take over. It remains impossible to contemplate, but also not all that impossible to acknowledge now.

Timing sure seems poor to initiate anything, yet I cannot hold my life in suspension until these inconveniences pass. Life insists upon going on with me in tow, even though the timing sure seems poor. I might prove capable of only anticipating the worst. The test comes when I feel challenged to initiate something, especially when it’s something important to me. I can choose between all the reasons I can’t or at least one even dog-eared reason I might. I am challenged to choose the latter, for otherwise I seem cursed to accumulate only more reasons why I couldn’t.

HardTimes are not impossible ones. They bring plot complications, though not necessarily total negation. My Blind Men and the Elephant book was released the same week we went into Iraq, released into a world terminally distracted. This rendered it nigh on to impossible to garner much attention for it, but I continued with a heart filled with waning hopefulness, for I didn’t want to own any reasons for not having at least attempted to achieve something significant for me or this world, though HardTimes can leave anyone feeling impotent in the face of any opportunity. That book eventually became a best seller, but not necessarily by the easiest way imaginable.

It’s never the perfect time to initiate anything. If I go seeking reasons to avoid something, I’m that much more likely to find that something and thereby grow ever more skilled at avoiding. The purpose of my existence cannot possibly be to master the fine art of avoiding anything, but to maintain and improve my initially underdeveloped abilities to be up to something significant, especially in times when any positive outcome seems especially unlikely. Destiny takes no days off due to inclement conditions. There are no deep-down decent reasons to defer any decency, regardless of complicating conditions. Waiting for perfection only perfects waiting. Now was always the time.

I don’t mean to encourage myself to go charging into situations where I’m likely to get vanquished. Not every day seems equally auspicious. It’s just that during EndDays, few days seem all that auspicious. I guess the conquest might depend more upon something other than absolute auspiciousity from the outset, then. It might depend upon an ounce or two of foolhardiness, an adequate substitute for both courage and decent weather in a pinch. EndDays seem to encourage a baseline certain foolhardiness, if only because so few opportunities really seem all that auspicious then. It’s a time when one necessarily comes to live by chance, and comes to understand both the cost as well as the many benefits of loss. I miss that same old bridge I never hardly noticed when I crossed. I find that I’m interested, though, in finding another serviceable road between here and there, so even though it’s most definitely HardTimes, and perhaps even maybe the wrong time to go searching for an alternate route, it also happens to be the perfect time to go looking.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz