So I started off this year with all sorts of big plans – blogging every day, hitting the ground running at work – and it’s kind of funny to stumble so close to the starting gate. I missed blogging yesterday, and I missed today at work entirely due to bleah.
But things happen for a reason, I think; the world looks deterministic and impersonal down at the level of the laws of physics, but there’s a structure to it at a higher level which, if not real, is at least something we can take advantage of.
Case in point one: I’ve been pushing hard to finish a revision to the first chapters of my novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it’s slow going as I’ve had to rethink my whole approach to the book. Digging through my other Jeremiah material for inspiration, I found an almost-finished novella, which my obssessive-compulsive tendencies sucked me into trying to finish. (Procrastinating on one project with another project is worth further discussion, I think, but that’s another blogpost for another time, if I haven’t already blogged on it, that is). But I made myself stop after I took a pass, and tried to tackle my daily blogpost.
At which point a friend dropped by to talk. I was at Coupa Cafe, a hot spot for great Venezuelan coffee and Silicon Valley’s startup culture, which isn’t just about startups, but is actually a hotbed for intellectual discussion. In thirty short minutes, my buddy and I dove far into the intricacies of deep learning, something which affects me a lot at work – and just as that was winding down, one of his other friends dropped in, and started quizzing me about the mathematics in my urban fantasy novels. Turns out he’s an expert in precisely the same areas of mathematics that my young protagonist Cinnamon Frost is – so I see more conversations in our future.
Definitively, that conversation was worth more than the schedule of my blogposts, so it was the right thing to do to fully engage with the human beings right in front of me rather than sticking mechanically to my plan. It’s really important to take advantage of these opportunities and to capitalize on them when they happen. That’s what this world is structured for.
Now, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to capitalize on catching my wife’s flu and waking up feeling like someone pummeled me with a half ton of bricks, but I’m sure there’s some lesson or opportunity in there. At least I … uh, dunno, got to drop off my dry cleaning on my way to the local restaurant for some hot chicken soup? Not sure what’s the lesson in there. (Though it’s probably a sign that I need to sit down with my laptop and catch up on writing documentation, which I can easily do from home).
-the Centaur
