He That Observeth The Wind

Ariel's document is now nineteen pages and he added a section on Tuesday.

It is a good document. That is not a joke at his expense; it genuinely is. Anybody reading it would understand the decision completely, in all its dimensions, including three that most people would never have thought of. He has been rigorous about weighting. He has flagged his own biases in a separate subsection, which is more honesty than most people manage anywhere.

And he is further from deciding than he was at page four.

This is the pattern and he has seen it before in himself and has never solved it. Every new consideration he adds is real, and every real consideration makes the picture more accurate and the answer less clear, because the world is genuinely complicated and a sufficiently accurate model of a complicated thing does not resolve, it just gets more detailed.

He knows this. He has said this to other people about their situations.

He is forty-one and it has been about seven months, and the thing he has not told anybody is that he has begun to enjoy the document. Not the decision. The document. Working on it is satisfying in a way that living with the unresolved thing is not, and he suspects, on the bad evenings, that this is why it has nineteen pages.

You may know that document.

Maybe yours is not written down. Maybe it lives in your head and it is just as long. And maybe you have noticed that every time you understand the situation better, you are less able to move in it.

The farmer who watches the sky

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is aimed precisely at this, and it does not soften it.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.Ecclesiastes 11:4

Read who the man in that verse is. He is not lazy. He is not ignorant. He is a farmer who is watching the weather, which is exactly the correct thing for a farmer to be doing, and he is doing it well.

The verse does not say he is watching wrongly. It says that watching, done past a point, replaces sowing.

And notice that the writer does not offer a method for knowing when the conditions are right. He does not say sow on the third clear morning. The next verse goes on about not knowing the works of God, and the one after that says sow in the morning and in the evening, and withhold not thine hand, because you do not know which will prosper.

Which is not a recommendation of carelessness. It is a statement about the limits of forecasting from inside the field.

And your analysis was accurate and it was never going to resolve. The written word puts the observing and the not-sowing in a single causal sentence about a competent man, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody nineteen pages in.

And you are not required to forecast before you can act. The word says thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all, and the Spirit is the one who makes not-knowing survivable rather than negligent.

Nobody is telling you to think less

Let me be plain about that, because you of all readers will be checking for it.

Nothing here says the document was a mistake or that rigour is a vice. The nineteen pages contain real work and the three considerations nobody else would have thought of are real considerations, and a person who decided this quickly and badly would have been worse off, not better.

The correction is not dilution. It is direction.

What has happened is that a faculty which is excellent at understanding has been asked to do a job it cannot do, which is to terminate. Analysis does not have a stopping rule inside it. It never has. That is not a defect in your analysis; it is a property of the activity, and no amount of being better at it produces an ending.

The ending has to come from somewhere else.

And what you are looking for is not another page. The word offers wisdom rather than certainty and puts it in the hands of the one who asks, and the Spirit is the one who supplies a thing that no further section produces.

And nothing about you is under review for seven months of it. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has begun to suspect he likes the document.

The thing you have not told anybody

Now, the bad evenings, and the suspicion.

I think you are right, and I do not think it is shameful.

The document is a place where you are competent. The decision is a place where you are exposed. Of course you have spent seven months in the first one. Anybody would; most people do it with something less respectable than a nineteen page analysis.

And naming it does not make it stop, which is why I am not going to tell you to simply stop. But an unnamed refuge runs the whole of a man's calendar, and a named one has to at least argue its case.

And you are allowed to be exposed and it will not be more than you can carry. The word says God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than an assurance.