Be careful what you ask for

From just across the Sabine comes this interesting little pondering...

Pot stirring

One of my favorite movie quotes comes from the movie Igby Goes Down. "Good things come to obsessive compulsives who fixate."

Fixation is a tricky thing. It can certainly be productive. When you can totally immerse yourself into something and concentrate on what you're doing, you can sometimes surprise even yourself with the results. I'm an obsessive compulsive perfectionist, so fixation is part of my natural territory. I may ignore everything else in order to devote myself to one thing for a while, but it leads to stellar, detail-oriented work and satisfaction in other areas of life.

However, fixation has a less appealing side as well; the side that Katie likes to call "stirring the pot". This basically boils down to letting your curiosity get the best of you when it comes to things that you probably shouldn't really mess with. It's kind of like a train wreck or a bad soap opera. You know that you should look away and you don't particularly want to be involved in the situation by any means, but you still have a morbid curiosity with the outcome. We want to know what happens. We sometimes go out of our way to find out what happens, when we should really just let things lie and allow the drama to spin independently of our input or involvement.

Kelly
http://pureserendipity.com
2/08/2005