" … the very best things in life … tend to emerge from sincere, dedicated, and inadvertent BassingAckwards."

The best things in life aren't actually things. Looking for best in the things realm might be the very best way to engage in an extended search without ever finding the object of my desire, or so my experience strongly suggests. I have stumbled upon the best things in my life, but only after pursuing actual things first. I know of no way to effectively engineer a successful search for anything truly meaningful, for the very act of engineering seems to attempt to inject altogether too much prescience and certainty into a search. One simply must start off in the wrong direction to ever come to solidly understand the deeper significance of any right direction. I insist that successful searches first engage in BassingAckwards. One begins by chasing the wrong tail, discovering distinctions by first failing to discover them. The deeper the initial disappointment, the greater the resulting realization and, perhaps, the greater the appreciation for the eventual discovery.

I declare this after once again discovering that an object of my desire more likely lies well south of my recent course, and without yet understanding just what a more proper course might entail, just that my former course appears to have represented another BassingAckwards experience. I should not be surprised by this discovery, for this pattern seems to have held true in every significant search I've ever engaged in. Back when I attended university, I really needed to find a job. Even then, forty-some years ago, attending university in the United States tended to be quite different from what the glossy brochures promised it might become. Rather than a cloistered life spent studying in gothic buildings, it was an adjunct experience supported with some part time jobs. One might carry a twenty credit hour class load, but balance that burden upon a twenty or more hour workload, too. In the curious university calculus, this produced more work than hours in the standard week, but sleep tended to be optional then, and outside activities, i.e., a social life, was something reserved for after successful graduation. One kept one's head down and worked their butt off in hopes of achieving the opportunity of entering a career that might only expect sixty hour work weeks from you; a relative vacation.

Not having yet graduated and feeling terribly unqualified to hold even the most menial job, I decided to set up a few practice interviews before really getting down to finding a job after a discouraging visit to the university's student employment center. I carefully selected as my first targets, companies that I would never willingly work for, and showed up at a prominent local insurance company to beta test my strategy to hone my interviewing skills. I surprisingly interviewed well and was immediately offered a position that would easily flex around my class schedule. Should I agree to invest twenty-five hours per week in that work, the company would even agree to outright pay for my books and tuition above paying my salary. I stayed with that company for the following fifteen years.

I had unwittingly engaged in an act of BassingAckwards. Who in their right mind would ever advise anyone to find their first real job by "practice" interviewing with companies that they couldn't imagine ever actually working for … and then accepting an entry-level position THERE? A proper strategy would more likely advise to focus solely upon those companies the job seeker sincerely wanted to work for, to stretch more skyward than BassingAckward. I have not been paying close enough attention since, or I might have noticed before now how prominently BassingAckward has influenced my life. I still tend to imagine some logical path to gaining satisfaction before finding that my successes have emerged more from the non-rational side. On reflection, I believe that effectively BassingAckwards requires some deliberate rejection of reason before it will work. I'd first considered finding a job the old fashioned way back when I attended university, but had rejected that strategy after that disappointing visit to the student employment office. I might have found work as a lowly-paid waiter or dishwasher through the student employment office, but never stumbled into the unlikely position I actually found. I believe that such good fortune might only be found by BassingAckwards.

I'm still no good at contriving any genuinely BassingAckwards strategy from a cold start. I seem to need to first disappoint myself before an effective counter-intuitive approach can emerge. Disappointment seems to condition my mind to accept any backwards approach. I need a failed positive in order to discover a potentially effective backwards entry. I have no advice to offer on this subject, for advice carries altogether too much prescience and certainty to prove much good in any genuine, real-world search. Approach it incorrectly first, I council, humiliate yourself good, for only then might one of those brilliantly insane strategies which might actually deliver ever emerge. I'm still in early days with this insight, and it might be that I'll need to reverse course several more times before I stumble upon a truly workable BassingAckwards. The very search for a workable BassingAckwards seems an example of BassingAckwards, a reminder that the very best things in life, besides not actually qualifying as things, tend to emerge from sincere, dedicated, and inadvertent BassingAckwards.

©2020 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #SmallThings, #PureSchmaltz