On the one hand, it’s the annual regular slowdown as the usual instigators have left town to visit their families, so of course things have calmed down at work. On the other hand, management is changing hands and databases are being frozen in preparation for transfer as the cataloging of community assets is digging out all sorts of improper burials.
With all this chaos being stirred in an obnoxiously festive cup, it would be a fair assumption that I would not be able to tell if the time management seal was having an effect or not this early into deployment.
Except I can.
It isn’t changing who comes in the door or what they do after. It isn’t change what reports are required and what redundancies can be eliminated. It is bringing into sharp focus what I can control and what I can’t.
It is bringing into awareness those moments when I choose to work on This instead of That, or when I allow myself to continue an unnecessary conversation longer than social etiquette requires, or when I’m passively accepting the flow I’m caught in rather than actively diverting the momentum into something more productive instead.
In short, the seal is calling my ass out.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” You can expose all the opportunities I allowed to slip away but you can’t make me start seizing them going forward. I will admit to having the vain hope that the seal would make my workload light or prevent unnecessary complications from spilling over my desk.
Instead, the seal is holding me accountable for my actions and placing the means of fixing my deficiencies in my hands. It’s not taking away my work, it’s opening my eyes to the Work.
And regardless if I ever have a clean desk again, I’m glad I made it and put it in play.
Non Sequitur: Andrew Watt, to whom I had linked to in the Day 8 post, has posted his response to the seal’s prompt. Please click through to his educational work while I ponder the difference between a seal and a sigil.
Comments
One response to “Do Magick December ’18: Day 10 – So The Problem Is…”
Frustratingly, I think this is most of what magic’s low-hanging fruit looks like. We create seals or sigils or emblems, and the symbolic work doesn’t so much shift the world around us, as shift a thing inside our ‘little head’ so that we see what we ought to do instead of what we want to do. Alas, it’s paying attention to those little shifts that make bigger shifts possible later on.
Pondering the difference between sigils, seals and emblems…. I think “sigils” are personal diagram/squiggle-things that do magic for their creators in a non-replicable way. I can’t draw your sigil and get the same effect. But “seals” are diagrams that have magical properties regardless of who creates them. However, a magician still has to create them for them to work. You can copy them out of a book, and they’ll work for whoever draws them. And finally, “emblems” are diagrams or images that have magical effects upon any viewer who sees them. There appears to be a difference between an initiate’s emblem and a non-initiate’s emblem — some emblems only work if you’re an initiate into the tradition that they come from: you read them differently because of what you know and the charism you carry. Other emblems work on anyone who see them, some more effectively than others (and nearly all of modern advertising appears to fall into the uninitiated category of emblems. They work on everyone to lesser and greater degrees, but you don’t need special knowledge to read the idea that drinking this sugar-water will make you friendlier and more attractive to the opposite gender, or that laundry detergent will make your life simpler and happier).
And finally, I want to congratulate you. I think that making a sigil is a ridiculously easy thing to do; I must have a dozen or so operative at this very moment. But making a seal (by the definitions above) that does *anything*, even if it must feel like a very small effect, is a really tricky thing to do at all. And I have been feeling the effects of my own copying of your seal-design very much. This one works, it does what it’s supposed to do… and damn it, I made the thing TWICE. What the hell was I thinking??