The other day I quoted Ashley Brilliant in an email to tammy and Kaitlin:
I feel so much better now that I have given up hope.
It goes along with
Play your part well and let go of the results.
Giving up hope and going with the flow doesn’t necessarily mean being passive, just watching and waiting. It can also mean being fully involved in the process and not worrying about goals and results. And not worrying about how much time that process will take. That’s the big one for me, knowing a project will take a long time and still committing to the the patience and persistence I will need.
I had two projects like that this past week: (1) doing the research for contesting our new tax assessment and (2) trying to understand why MailChimp was sending out notices of a new post only about half the time.
I emailed the MailChimp tech support (available for the first month for nonpaying members) about the problem and the first advice I received was maybe I was scheduling the notice too close to when I posted. It was exactly an hour later, so I moved it to two hours. The results were the same, so I tried contacting them again. The answer I got this time was maybe I scheduled the notice too late. Try moving from two hours back to one hour. Oh, oh, they didn’t know.
So I’ve been gathering data, trying to figure out how it works. I ended up setting up 24 “campaigns” (that’s what they call them), one for every hour on the hour. So far in 24 hours it missed sending out five times, at 5 pm, 7 pm, 11 pm, 12 am, and 1 am. I’ll let the campaigns run for a few more days to see if there’s a better time to send the messages.
Hmm. I was scheduling between 11 pm and 1 am, and as Kaitlin has pointed out, Rummuser doesn’t seem to be having any problems. He seems to be sending his out at 2 am, so I will try to have the notices sent at a better time and see what happens.
I’ve also figured out an easy way use MailChimp to schedule my own email notices if that’s ever necessary.
Anyway, no lack of chances to practice being curious and open to life.
definitely we can each have our “flow” in the things that matter to ourselves… or not as the case maybe.
at the moment a couple of my friends, said that with no real schedule, I appear to be unpredictable…they assume one thing, and discover something quite different – not that they’ve complaining though…
with more time on my hands, I have been doing things differently and I’ve not much idea where any of the extra “flow-time” will lead, or if I even want it to “lead” – that’s not to imply that “I’m giving up hope…”
I’m curious to see what you end up doing. I’m glad you have the freedom to choose.
” I feel so much better now that I have given up hope.”
this struck me funny at the time.
but after giving it a little more thought in other areas…
as in politics that I cannot control… it has actually given me some comfort!
some things… even technical… it might be better to just go with the flow.
everyone has to decide on their own what they wish to tackle!
but tackling tax problems… UGH! no flow there! 😀
I don’t do badly about taxes either. I finished the research for the increased property taxes and will let Andy write the first draft of the protest letter. We’re now figuring out how to send in amended forms for our federal and state income taxes. The instructions for the state are a bit confusing, but we will figure it out.
Rummuser is plain lucky. He personally does not have a clue as to what happens. His son and heir does the back room work. All the best in your war against the scheduling.
It’s great spiritual practice. No monkey mind here. I didn’t teach those classes in emotional aikido for nothing.
I could tell that something new happened in your relationship with MailChimp lately. When I saw your email introducing this post this morning, the title was live, allowing me to click on it and get here immediately. Praise be! I’ve been doing it the long way since you changed over—copying and pasting your title into my browser. It worked, but I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of posts as a result. Yes, Rummuser is lucky. His post announcements only faltered once or twice, and I’ve been able to click into comments with no problem. Oh well, all is good—I love it when things work out with no effort on my part!
That’s interesting that Rummuser’s faltered once or twice too. Thank you for letting me know. I will have to pay attention to that.
I received a message form MailChimp this morning saying they are glad it’s working for me now. I sent them a record of all my recent posts that got sent (yay for them for making this record!) with the message:
I’ll be sending email notices until/unless they make the automatic notices more reliable. Even though I’m having problems, I’m impressed that MailChimp doesn’t charge small users like me and that it gives me free tech support for the first month.