I know I’m doing it. Every single time.

I run in the morning, and I love the feeling of movement. My own power, nothing stopping me, GO. It’s pure freedome until I get to Arrow highway.

Going up the hill, I always break the law and jaywalk. I’m careful! I look both ways, and when there are no cars coming both directions, I RUN across and keep going. What this means is I get to keep moving.

But what goes up must come down. I am more tired when I come down. I stare at that stoplight the whole way.

It’s red. Then green. Are there cars coming by? Will there be a break?

There’s a name for this: a known unknown.

Donald Rumsfeld made this idea famous, but I have been familiar with it from my job for a long time. It has to do with assessing risk when you are planning to get things done. When I am making a plan of action, I have to remember to put my time and attention on what can be done, not on what I don’t know.

It is a big trap to base my actions on incomplete knowledge.  I can’t know. I know I can’t know. And I still try to know.

I know that stoplight is coming. It looms for blocks as I run towards it. I don’t know whether I will be able to cross the street by the time I reach it.

I slow my pace, trying to time my arrival at the corner to coincide with the green light. I cannot.

I fall into the trap every time. I want to be certain what my next step is. I want control.

My favorite physicist, the amazing Richard Feynman, wrote about this idea:

“People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

It’s a lie and a trap to think I know, or to think I have control over what I don’t. I want to learn to stare down that light and run without second-guessing. I have to have faith.

There is always a light looming.

So I’m guest blogging on Lillian Csernica’s blog today

Guest Blog: The Writer’s Path by Murphy Daley

Day before yesterday, Chris and and I were watching twelve o ‘clock high. I hadn’t seen this war movie before.

Gregory Peck was in England during WW2. So it was raining. It’s always raining in England.

I looked over at Chris and said, “Do you think it will ever rain here again?”

“What?”

“It’s just that it is always so dry here. I miss the rain.”

It rained the next day. And the day after the mountain were covered in white white white snow.

And it kept raining.

I think I feel magical.

“Mommy, I know what’s making me cough. It’s my mouth water. My spit.”

She probably means her throat, or maybe post-nasal drip. She’d been coughing all night–a dry little barky cough that meant she had a touch of something and that no one was going to sleep much that night.

So I got out of bed at 6. When I heard her coughing again at 6:15, I said she could get up and watch some TV.

All this is so fantastically ordinary. For the next banal drama, should she stay home from school?

I did not want her to stay home from school. I was very very eager for her to go back to school. She’s had a three day weekend and I was tired of the age-typical games of “I am the boss of you, mommy, and you must do everything I say while I criticize and berate you. It’s pretend!”

Get out of my house. Go somewhere safe and beneficial and let me get something important done.

So I left her to have my morning run, enjoying apple juice and streamed PBS programming.

As I pushed my legs up the hill just like every morning, I felt guilt that I wanted to get away from her. I thought about the horrible TV show I just watched, a period piece, where the little daughter suddenly caught sick and even more suddenly died. How horrified and angry I was and still am at the moralistic tone. The TV mom took a moment for herself while the kid was with the grandparents, but because she didn’t drive the nails HARD ENOUGH to keep her securely on her crucifix she killed her daughter by her sin of trying to have a her own life.

It’s not fair!

It’s also not fair that this run that I do every day isn’t easier. Shouldn’t it count that I run these steps every morning? I’m still the same slow I’ve been since I started.

My daughter is not going to die. As I try to take longer or faster strides up this hill, I try to lay my mother fears to rest. Yes, children do die of illness. It is rare in my time and place, thank God, and highly unlikely. I can lay that worry down. It’s not helpful. I can trust my child’s attentive and caring teacher to notice and send her home if it is serious.

I may not get to that tree much faster than I do every day. Or maybe I did get there faster today. Is this the part of my playlist that is usually playing? Maybe I am a little faster today.

It’s only 15 minutes of running. I spent the same amount of time reading my emails and Facebook before I rousted myself to put the workout clothes on.

Ow. My knee has a crick. Keep running. It will work itself out.

I had just read on my computer yet another one of the free downloads for success at one of my projects. Yet another. Something about this one was kinda different though.

Was it really that easy? Could I just churn it out, like that?

Maybe success–or its synonym, progress–really is yeoman’s work. I keep wanting a jetpack, but it’s not like that. Maybe it is just one thing after the other, lifting my knees up the hill.

Lifting my knees even though there is a screaming banshee in my head of all the other things that I could be doing better or different.

I could do it better, I’m sure. But doing it at all is the real marker of progress. There will always be a banshee. The trick is not to mind.

When I got back home, I took my daughter’s temperature. She’s normal. No mercy, kid. Sorry you have a cough, but you gotta go to school. There’s the life lesson. Show up.

“I can’t believe they pay me to do this!” My computer genius friend from college had come down to Silicon Valley, with hundreds of others just like him. The nerds converged there to get paid. Paid to do what they used to pay universities to let them do!

They worked long hours, not leaving for meals and sleeping in their cubes when the deadlines loomed.

Heady times.

I never slept in my cube. And I knew the lure. I felt the headwind of push and rush and look what I can do!

I can do all this! Amazing–to do something I never dreamed I could. I made that! I made that happen! I can do it again.

Until I am doing it and not doing anything else. Twelve hours a day and still behind schedule.

But look at what I am doing! I am so good at this! I am doing what I never dreamed I could!

In our dreams we all know we can fly. And in my waking hours I flew. Until I woke up to realize I couldn’t. Not like this.

I saw the ground coming up at me. I had to make a landing as soon as I could.

It was my fault. Except I had plenty of help to self-destruct.

What am I talking about? It was just a job.

People say it all the time: You can’t let a job be that important.
They don’t know what they are talking about. This job gave me wings! I could fly when I got there.

Like my friend said, those twenty years ago. I can’t believe they pay me for this.

They do. They do and they never stop asking for what I can give. Somehow, they don’t care about the sustainability of the flying I do for them.

I am an exploitable commodity. I forget that in the intoxication of my own possibilities.

Maybe those cautionaries do know what they are talking about when they say don’t let it get so important.

This career landscape is where I learned what I was capable of. My first. I won’t forget my first time stretching to do more than I thought possible.

It was me, though, not the environment. I did that. I know how. When I remember that, the job can be a lot less important. What I love about my job is really what I love about me.

I figured it out. I will always know how to fly.

[the events this article alludes to are fictionalized in The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver. Download the story today!]http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B005O54AS4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1430433151&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=the+parable+of+miriam+the+ca

We finally got to the tiger trail at the wild animal safari park. We’ve been there so many times, and always the kid conks out before we get to the tigers.

She’s getting older though. THis time, we went further than ever before. As we entered the tiger trail, there was a statue of a tiger, looking very ethnic from wherever it was from. The striped tiger face looked like a demon. Scary! But we had nothing to be afraid of. These tigers were safely in cages

They are big kitties, right? Sleeping in the sun, flicking their tails. Oh look! That one is licking his paw. Let me see if I can get a photograph of his tongue.

Then he turned his face right towards me.

I saw it. I saw the terrifying demon face of a tiger. I saw what that imitation of an imitation of tiger art was hinting at.

a human being never wants to see a tiger face. That is the end of life and this striped demon tiger looking right at me through the glass was a brush with my abject powerlessness.

Then he went back to licking his foot.

I still remember. He’s not a kitty

It was my first semester of college, and I turned in a paper late. See, the beleaguered writing professor had chosen my semester as the one to take a stand. She had a reputation as a softy, and she’d gotten tired of all the essays being turned it on the last day of class.

I didn’t understand the idea of a syllabus and keeping track of when things were due. So. I turned my 2nd paper late. And there was no appeal. I lost a full letter grade.

I suppose that B was well worth it, because I never forgot how important those deadlines were. I made it a habit to turn papers in a week early, get feedback and improve the paper so that I got the best grade possible.

Some people do things at the last minute. It’s a source of inspiration.

I hate the last minute. I like to be prepared and over-prepared. That’s good, right?

Maybe. There is a saying going around:

Begin before you are ready.

I can look back at my very first semester of college now, and have mercy on the girl who didn’t quite get it. I can laugh at the penalty of getting a B. At the time, thought I felt a huge failure.

Perhaps I wasn’t ready for college yet. Or perhaps I was, and doing it imperfectly was part of the experience. I would have chosen differently had I known better, but I was there to learn.

Lots of things in life are begun before we are ready. Birth is the most obvious example. Absolutely no baby is ready to handle life on the outside at first. We don’t think of that though. It just must be done.

Falling in love, learning a new skill, parenthood– these are all things we are thrust into. Ready or not here we come.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

I am attracted to the idea of loosening my grip on my feet. And terrified.

I remember in 2003 when I started writing my soon-to-be published book The Russian American School of Tomorrow. I didn’t know it would be a book. I didn’t know it would take more than ten years. I’m proud of it now, no matter what happens. And I never would have predicted it.

Back in 1999 when I met Chris, taking a chance meeting a new guy at the local pizza place, I didn’t know that we’d end up married and have all these adventures.

I wasn’t ready for any of this. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t taken the first step. It is a dangerous business. I don’t think I’m ready for it, but here I go.

So we went to the thrift store to help Veronica get a costume. Next week is her 100th day of kindergarten and she is supposed to dress like a 100-year-old woman.

We had picked a few things and I was having her try them on. The woman next to us was watching so I told her about our adventure. She chatted about things and was friendly.

Then she said “I was supposed to have a baby. ”

She went on to say she just had a miscarriage two days ago I gave her sympathy I told her that one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage.

Then she told me she had had three miscarriages and she was 19.

Whoa.

I tried to be encouraging I told her there was still time.

“The last two weeks have been really hard.”
The next thing she says is her mother kicked her out of the house because her brother told her mother that she would not let her brother play video games.

Also her friend had just died.

And her husband is in jail for something he didn’t do.

She’s not sure what she’s going to do.

What am I supposed to do with this information?

Some part of it is not true. Some part may be true.

Some part of her is playing me.

So. I told her to hang in there. Tomorrow is another day.

I suppose all women are like me. Or maybe I’m making excuses for all the lotions and potions I hoard in my bathroom. This Christmas I got even more–which my husband says is a sign I’m impossible to buy gifts for. I love them though!

Deep in the dark corner, I rediscovered a particularly exotic bottle.

My husband’s business involves a lot of German suppliers. They are all quite charming, and his business associates sent presents when Veronica was born. Blankets, clothes, books; so many sweet and thoughtful gifts. I am still humbled as I remember it.

The bottle said “pflegeolbad- mutter und kind.” Inside was highly aromatic oil–licorice. How foreign! Americans wouldn’t have a licorice-flavored baby. And I couldn’t deal with it when she was a baby. But now that I’ve found it again I find it sort of earthy and interesting.

mutter and kind– well, I’m the mother in that line up, and maybe I wouldn’t mind smelling like aniseed. I can cipher out that olbad means bath oil.

But I have no idea what pflege means. Should you put the oil in the bathwater? Use it before or after the bath?

Maybe pflege means scented.

I recall that the Project Management Institute claims that 67% of communication is non-verbal. Not words. So maybe it doesn’t matter what it means. It’s fun to think about what it might mean. Probably if I asked babelfish it would be something boring.

I haven’t always thought that way. I do so love words. I think I raise the median on that 67%, because my verbal communication is more like 90% verbal. I have belabored over emails and memos to find words to express the shade of meaning and tone I want.

And again and again it has been missed.

Only a few years ago I learned that it wasn’t a fault in my prose. It’s just the nature of communication.

I heard a podcast this last week about an American guy who fell in love with a French poem. It was cute and simple, and he decided to translate it.

But translate what?

The words? The meaning?

The tone?

The meter?

All of those things were what made the poem so enchanting. He ended up making more than a hundred translations, just to try different aspects of what that poem meant.

And who is to say which English version is most true to the original? Or whether that was ever even the point?

I ran into a friend taking a walk with his baby the other day. She was all snuggled in a carrier on his chest while he and I had a fascinating in-depth conversation about parent concerns. She was cute as a button, half-lidded eyes. He hoped she would sleep, but she never quite tipped over into dreamland.

At the end of our talk he said “She never lets me talk for more than 5 minutes without squawking.”

Well! I can feel very honored. I am the rare individual who gives Baby peace.

So I should feel proud? Probably not. More likely it had nothing to do with me. Maybe she happened to have the right amount of sun hitting her skin, or just the right amount of sleepy so stay quiet.

Did it have anything to do with me? It couldn’t have had anything to do with what I was saying, because she didn’t understand language yet.

Her frame of mind and willingness to listen is most likely a happy coincidence of circumstance.

Or maybe it had everything to do with me.

There is no way for me to know. I can’t translate the human mind.

I suppose all women are like me. Or maybe I’m making excuses for all the lotions and potions I hoard in my bathroom. This Christmas I got even more–which my husband says is a sign I’m impossible to buy gifts for. I love them though!

Deep in the dark corner, I rediscovered a particularly exotic bottle.

My husband’s business involves a lot of German suppliers. They are all quite charming, and his business associates sent presents when Veronica was born. Blankets, clothes, books; so many sweet and thoughtful gifts. I am still humbled as I remember it.

The bottle said “pflegeolbad- mutter und kind.” Inside was highly aromatic oil–licorice. How foreign! Americans wouldn’t have a licorice-flavored baby. And I couldn’t deal with it when she was a baby. But now that I’ve found it again I find it sort of earthy and interesting.

mutter and kind– well, I’m the mother in that line up, and maybe I wouldn’t mind smelling like aniseed. I can cipher out that olbad means bath oil.

But I have no idea what pflege means. Should you put the oil in the bathwater? Use it before or after the bath?

Maybe pflege means scented.

I recall that the Project Management Institute claims that 67% of communication is non-verbal. Not words. So maybe it doesn’t matter what it means. It’s fun to think about what it might mean. Probably if I asked babelfish it would be something boring.

I haven’t always thought that way. I do so love words. I think I raise the median on that 67%, because my verbal communication is more like 90% verbal. I have belabored over emails and memos to find words to express the shade of meaning and tone I want.

And again and again it has been missed.

Only a few years ago I learned that it wasn’t a fault in my prose. It’s just the nature of communication.

I heard a podcast this last week about an American guy who fell in love with a French poem. It was cute and simple, and he decided to translate it.

But translate what?

The words? The meaning?

The tone?

The meter?

All of those things were what made the poem so enchanting. He ended up making more than a hundred translations, just to try different aspects of what that poem meant.

And who is to say which English version is most true to the original? Or whether that was ever even the point?

I ran into a friend taking a walk with his baby the other day. She was all snuggled in a carrier on his chest while he and I had a fascinating in-depth conversation about parent concerns. She was cute as a button, half-lidded eyes. He hoped she would sleep, but she never quite tipped over into dreamland.

At the end of our talk he said “She never lets me talk for more than 5 minutes without squawking.”

Well! I can feel very honored. I am the rare individual who gives Baby peace.

So I should feel proud? Probably not. More likely it had nothing to do with me. Maybe she happened to have the right amount of sun hitting her skin, or just the right amount of sleepy so stay quiet.

Did it have anything to do with me? It couldn’t have had anything to do with what I was saying, because she didn’t understand language yet.

Her frame of mind and willingness to listen is most likely a happy coincidence of circumstance.

Or maybe it had everything to do with me.

There is no way for me to know. I can’t translate the human mind.