thorhammer said:
although it will never be the love of my life like Hermann and Zan
Yep, that's us.
You know, last night I watched the movie "Julie and Julia" about a young woman who becomes spiritual "friends" with Julia Child by challenging herself to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook over the course of a year. While cooking, she talks out loud to her, complains to her, and truly feels as if Julia is there watching over her.
It's kinda like that with Hermann and I. Of course, when undertaking one of these kinds of relationships, its important to remember that, in my case anyway, the Hermann in my head and the real Hermann Haindl out there somewhere are two distinctly different people. To me, Hermann is the grandfather image I always wished for. He's warm, but stern. He's wise and spiritual, and speaks with an accent that comes with speaking many different foreign languages. He watches over me, and enlightens me, and keeps me cool when I get frustrated.
The movie really hit home to the feeling of undertaking a project, a commitment, that isn't always easy and isn't always fun, but you keep at it and you don't allow yourself to give up. We start this commitment, this
intensive study for a reason; maybe you fell in love with a particular deck; maybe you want to grow into a better reader; maybe you're using this IDS as an allegory for your whole life, proving to yourself that you can
finish something.
But how can you manage to finish something if you never really even start it? If you just say to yourself one day, "I think I'll do an IDS now", and you go through your decks and pick a pretty one, and come onto this thread, and announce, without another word, "sign me up!" and get to see your name added to the list, and that's the end of it, then what have you really accomplished? You use other decks in the Reading Exchange, come back here occasionally to announce that you're switching your IDS to a different deck, and then use yet a different deck for something else.
The point here is sticking to it, and not giving up. There are a lot of decks out there, and there are a lot of people here on AT who will be happy to tell you how wonderful, and beautiful, and
meaningful they are, and to go buy them, and that the very idea of an "IDS" is silly and something they would never consider. But you (the royal "you" that is, me included) didn't start this IDS because someone told you to. You started it (hopefully) for a purpose.
Find that purpose. Reclaim that purpose. And enjoy, love, grow with the ride that that purpose will take you on.
Of course there's nothing wrong with buying, loving, and enjoying a bunch of different decks. Just look at my profile. I've only been buying for six months and I've got nearly 50 decks. But I buy them because I enjoy finding decks I'm interested in, and it warms me just to have them on the shelf.
In the six weeks since I asked to join this group, the idea of stopping my Haindl IDS or changing decks hasn't even crossed my mind. Why? Because I committed to studying my deck exclusively and intensively, and that's what I'm doing.
Please don't get me wrong-- who am i? I'm certainly not in charge here. I'm just another happy follower of the IDS cult of Kat. It's possible that I'm seeing this thing from my own delusional perspective. But when I signed up for this thing, what I thought I was getting into was a group of people who wanted to seriously talk about their intensive, exclusive study of a deck, and everything, the highs and lows, that comes with that.
I hope that everyone here in this thread is on the same page.
-zan
