the timboucher experience

Skills inventories are awesome! I have seen about a half a dozen at this point and they are all really inspiring and in some cases revealing. They offer windows of insight into people as characters. Having so much of our communication mediated through the internet is - let’s face it - weird! A skills inventory is a nice way to show people what you’re all about, what value you add to the world - of what service you can be to your fellow man. Civic duty almost, but beyond that: your responsibility to other God-realized beings, you could think of it as.

After the skills inventory I wrote my now imfamous “What The Hell Happened To Me?” in which I reveal that I was struck by lightning while riding a unicorn up a rainbow staircase to a waiting UFO - that and I talk about how I stopped suffering recently. I just spontaneously gave it up. I decided I didn’t need it any more.

What? We can do that?

Yeah, totally. Didn’t you get the memo? We used to not be able to, but then we decided that made for a stupid game, so we changed it. Pretty cool, right? It’s like amending the Constitution!

What is a Constitution though, anyway? It’s a contract, right? What’s a contract? An agreement between members of a shared value community to share value in a particular way. These agreements may be explicit or implicit.

Sorry, I am side-tracking myself here in an effort to stitch a lot of elements together. Forgive me if the broad picture does not yet make sense. I am groping for the words…

Let me start over:

My skills inventory is a self-contract in that it is an agreement with myself. That agreement has three parts:

1. I love doing certain things (and may even be good at them).
2. Because I love these things, I derive pleasure from sharing them with other people.
3. I would like to have more of that: more love from actual doing, and more pleasure from actual sharing.

That is a pretty good set of agreements to have with yourself, don’t you think? Makes for a pretty solid contract for you to stand upon when you then go out and offer to make agreements and contracts with other people, with other I and I’s, with other sovereign entities and confederated corporate micronations.

Now if you take that agreement and begin publicly start sharing the script and saying what’s on your mind, you have removed the majority of stumblingblocks which I find most people have to genuine happiness, and you make ready the way for Joy!

If you’re clear with yourself and clear with other people, misunderstandings begin to vanish and you see when other people are trying to manipulate you consciously or unintentionally pull you into their own emotional projections. It becomes like a game almost, like Pitfall, or whatever that was for Atari where you swang with the vines across the alligators and jumped over boulders. What was once annoyance becomes joyous!

So I’m trying to find a clear bridge between all this back to the musical: one which you can take all the way to the bank (the skills bank). And I think that vehicle is by way of the classic character description. Ted Heistman has begun playing around with this idea consciously. The clowns (literally) I used to live with had business/trading cards which essentially communicated the same thing.

I’m thinking the character description could be another good kind of self-contract to initiate with yourself, for people who want to go “that route” and explore these ideas further. Make your skills inventory and seriously look at what it says about you. Pretend somebody who doesn’t know you is reading it. What would they think or maybe assume about you because of it? Would they misunderstand or “not get” anything? Is there any way you could give them a fuller picture of how it all fits together?

Speaking of which, how does it all fit together? What are you really about? It’s time to stop lying and pretending like you don’t know, that you’re still searching or still healing or some shit like that. Everybody knows who they are. And they also know who they want to be. I see the character description as a self-contract because you can write it about the character you want to be, and make an agreement with yourself to become that. How else are you gonna know when you’ve succeeded in life if you don’t have something to shoot for? A character description acts as an ideal and a benchmark. You can say to yourself: here is what I used to think I wanted to be. Then you can have a “by myself meeting” and see if it really worked (make sure you give yourself a reasonable amount of time - a month should be perfect). Was it what you thought it would be? How could your performance have been improved? Then you can agree to revise it or keep trying to become that character. Also, look at your character: what skills, traits or attributes are you going to need to acquire in order to become the best possible person to play the role of you?

Gonna work on my character description over the next few days. Will post what I come up with online.

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