What have you screwed up lately?

I mentioned a few posts ago that I have a fear of failure. I hate the idea of screwing something up because I wasn't thinking or was unprepared. I guess it's the Tech nerd in me that strives to have everything in a logical, well thought out sequence. I catch myself standing in the middle of my office at work doing this goofy robotic cha-cha going back and forth between my desk and my printer. I'm stuck there because I'm trying make sure that if I get up to get what was printed that I don't need to do anything else while I'm up and that I've printed all of the reports that I need and not just the first one in the sequence. I usually snap out of my trance with the thought, "What the hell is wrong with me?" Who cares if I forgot something, get up, get the stuff and get back to work. In my mind I seem to play a huge chess match with life, always trying to plan what might happen two or three steps down the road, instead of just dealing with what's right in front of my face. I paralyze myself and become motionless just because I'm not sure of something and I don't have a plan. This whole cancer thing has helped me to wake up a little bit and I seem to have more of an attitude of, "How bad can it be?" Not much more, but some. But, it's still there. Like this morning. I decided to go running in the neighborhood instead of on the treadmill so I can get used to hills as I try and prepare for the Peachtree. Of coarse I already had my wife drive me around the neighborhood on a predetermined path so I could see on the odometer exactly how far I was going and what route had what hills and how I could make the most efficient loop and end up back at my house without too much back-tracking. But while running this morning I realized that the route I planned was farther than any distance that I've run to date. So my mind got to thinking. What if I get way down the road and I give out and have to walk back? That will take waaaaay too long for the time I have allotted for exercise this morning and I might be late getting ready, which will throw off my schedule completely. Then what would happen? So, I adjusted the route based on the time I thought I had already been running. I did this by what song I was listening to on my iPod. I always seem to hear the same song in the same place so I was able to gauge my time, make my adjustment and get home on time and all in one piece. And just to make sure that my timing and my distance matched up, I drove the new route I had taken checking the odometer the whole way before I left for work so I would know exactly how far I had actually gone. I'm such a nerd! And the weird thing is, all of this stuff seems very rational at the time. Only upon further review and a quick check in the rear-view mirror of life do I realize that I am nuttier than a rat turd in a cashew factory. So, with all of this being said, where am I going with this? I say all of this to show you that I am going to organize myself into oblivion and I am going to fail to seize the moments that are constantly around me. I am so scared of screwing something up, that a lot of times I end up just doing nothing. And doing nothing, while safe and a sure bet, gets me just that - nothing. I need to learn to screw up more. And no, I don't mean that I am going to charge through life with a false bravado and a kiss-my-ass attitude with no regard for personal responsibly or unintended consequences. It means that I need to take more risks. I need to live life a little more. I need to be more spontaneous and adventuresome. I need to have more failures in my life that I can look back on and say that I learned a great lesson from them. Greatness was never achieved on the first try. Horizons are never different standing in the same place. And looking back on my life, I have been shaped and blessed the most by lessons that I leared from my failures and the failures of those around me. I am writing this blog today because of someones screw up. And I have thanked God for it so many times. But that is a story for another day.......