Crawling through the sand

Crawling is the wrong metaphor, I'll go in a different direction with this one.

Full disclosure, My little family is in the middle of buying a house after literally having just sold ours. That's my current excuse for not writing more often. Maybe I should start a series of posts tagged with 'Why I'm not writing very much right now'. Ha, a paradox, a post specifically written about how I'm not writing when obviously I had to write it. 

"That would be almost as meta as quoting and attributing myself!" -Austin Tyson

It would be easy to say that my mind has been on one track while working on buying the house, but you know me, I can't let it be that simple.

The visual of a track is a clever one. Trains carry cargo from a starting point to a final destination. Likewise, our thoughts -if we run with the track visual- carry ideas from inception to completion. Along the way there will be some cargo that gets added, and other cargo that gets dumped. 

The idea - like a train, needs fuel in the form of some driving factor, some inspiration. 'My car exploded, I should probably get a new one', or, 'I like that shirt, I think I'll buy it', or, 'I don't want to eat all of this chicken sandwich, I should throw it at an Abercrombie sales kid' are obvious examples.

The idea, the payload, changes according to what is added or subtracted, but the original idea and all of it's iterations (in this case 'Let's sell our house and buy one in another city') must be carried completion.

Crawling through the sand was the metaphor I was going to choose to describe the process of buying a house. All of the searching, waiting, more searching, more waiting, paperwork, excitement, more waiting, more paperwork, etc. sparked the title of the post. But it sounds a too negative, and buying a house is pretty dang exciting. It's a lot of work, but exciting work. 

The train metaphor then, is much more appropriate because trains are awesome and somehow manage to somehow excite me. 

An idea as a train is also appropriate because of the parallel of usefulness. When is the last time you sat, stuck at a train track while a freight train blocked your path and thought 'That's a great train!'?

Exactly. 

Alternately, for some reason I never mind stopping at the tracks to wait for a fully loaded freight or passenger train fly by. It's going somewhere, it's in motion! 

A train is only useful when it's in motion. Our ideas are only useful when they are being fostered and developed. An idea not acted on, that is not in motion, is an idea blocking the road for progress. 

So then, the image. Since I had already titled this post I decided to make that the search string for the 240px image of the week. It's a sea turtle baby! Or as I like to call them "Burtles"!

These turtle's don't need my opinions or snarky captions, they are turtles. They hatch from their eggs and go towards the water. I'm sure it's terrifying, but they know where they belong and that to get there they must fight the ebb and flow of the most uncontrollable force on earth. We could all learn something from our turtle buddies.