Category: Writing

Buying stuff online is a wonderful way to learn many things. Particularly, if the said purchase is for a young lad, a belated birthday present.

After months of walking the neighbour’s dog and a couple of generous gifts from older friends for his birthday, my son has earned about three-quarters of the money needed to buy his ‘dream’: a DJI Mavic Mini Drone.  He has been researching online, the retail prices and the licensing requirements to fly the drone (I was very impressed!), and has been badgering me in the last few months about getting it for his birthday.

I finally acquiesced and ordered it online on Sunday. The website we bought it off said delivery within 1-2 business days. Today happened to be day 3, and it’s still not arrived. Neither has there been any update from the retailer (a poor CX for sure, but this post is not about CX).

The young fella has been learning about logistics and supply chains, information gaps, the Australian Postal system, and that oft-quoted virtue, patience. He even tried some reverse psychology on me today, saying the drone arrived at 445pm, to examine if I got excited!

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It was a beautiful sight on our walk too!

 

There was a brief rainbow this evening as we walked on to the beach. When we got home, our son cheerfully informed us that it bucketed down for a short time, and wondered why we hadn’t gotten wet.

Might be stretching it too far. I couldn’t help thinking how the same event creates multiple realities in as simple a thing as rain, just a couple of kms down the road. Both the realities are true for those in them. It’s easy to dig in and argue that ‘my reality’ was the true and competely miss the possibility that ‘your reality’ might have also been true.

Heading back to work next week, and the lesson is worth remembering when inevitably the challenges begin raising their multi-dimensional heads to people who won’t see alternate yet true realities.

 

Rishad Tobaccowala’s most recent missive “Six Ways to Be and Feel Better” made for interesting reading, particularly the way he phrased his first one.

“Accept the 3Ls of loss, love and learning.”

The first thing that came to mind when I read the word loss was death, and almost immediately followed by loss of friendships. The worries and news of the last few days/weeks is likely just below the surface of my consciousness, and the associations are lightning fast.

I spent much time today learning too. I found myself in the zone doing code exercises with CSS, feeling instinctively the syntaxes there – and struggling really to compose them into the actual stylesheets. Accepting that I didn’t know what I was doing, and then taking a few steps, first in one direction, and then in another wasn’t as paralysing as it has been during previous attempts.

There was a lot of reminders about how much love is around me too. Accepting it exists has been something I’ve had to learn over the last couple of decades. Not only romantic love (didn’t the Greeks have names for various types of love?). Noah, our 8 month-old neighbour, has been the latest addition to the mix. His big blue eyes as he stares wondrously at the little world around him, especially when his mum walks him through our garden. His cooing I hear through my window while they amble around after his feed.

Hope is powerful, even when everything appears to be diabolically desperate.

Life – capital L Life – hits you with curve balls when you least expect it. Everything you’ve built your life around, everything you’ve looked forward to, suddenly is no longer certain.  Memories are the only thing you’re really left with. Time is short.

I could only lend a patient ear and listen to my friend describe how their family’s life has abruptly changed in the blink of an eye. The resilience that they all demonstrate despite the unimaginable pain that they’re going through is incredible.

Words fail me today. The skies are dark.

I like to think I am open to meeting new people, and experiencing new things. In most instances, I am. Socialising, as much as it’s ‘socially’ important, is one of the most draining things I am required to participate in.

You can take a person out of <insert place here> but you cannot take <insert place here> out of the person, is an epithet I’ve heard often. The exhaustion today stemmed I think from the reminder that most of the folks I had to politely engage in conversation are very similar if not alike to what drove me out of my state – both of abode and of thinking.

There were two exceptions that caught my attention: one, a golden retriever and two, a 4 year old boy with an unique name.  Both were in new circumstances, and adapted the best way they could. One stayed close to its master, and ignored everyone else while managing to look cute. The other called the world as he saw it, and managed to embarass his parents when  they were within earshot.

If holidays are meant to be refreshing and relaxing, then choosing who and how to spend that time with deserves attention.

2021 ends in a couple of hours. The sounds outside are a mixture of kids squealing with joy, loud music and yelling, frogs croaking, and sirens blaring every so often.  The rest of the family is watching Harry Potter, while I type out the >95th post here since consistently from September the 24th.

I’d like to think of this year as another one that taught me a lot about what was truly important. Whether it was through illnesses and trauma of close family, the undescribable and unforgettable support of my friends around the world and down the road, my own ill health, the joy of helping people succeed, the heartbreak of watching several good ideas get crushed through politics, the never ending uncertainty thanks to CoVID’s still continuing destruction, people moving on from their roles, people leaving the the world of the living, getting to meet new people halfway around the world, discovering the amazing strengths of those around me… I could go on and on. It’s been a wonderful year of learning about myself, and of rediscovering a small circle of true friends.

I’m blessed beyond measure – my wife and kids, my colleagues, and the community I live in have all made 2021 one to be cherished.

Happy New Year to you, my 2 readers. I hope you too can count your blessings and look forward to more in 2022.

The 100 day experiment has given me some useful systems, habits, and insights into my own emotional cycles. I’ve done retros a couple of times about this.

The consistency of writing a blog post, practising calligraphy, and ending the day with journalling, and the actual time it takes to do these things have been a pleasant surprise. I’ve become the type of person that does these things consistently.

I began thinking of this post as a way to review how I’ve lasted 100 days. Time to celebrate, or some such thing. Just after I opened a tab to start writing here, I made the mistake of turning to Twitter a couple of hours ago. And so two hours later…

It was a stark reminder that habits – or distractions – are powerful forces. Unless I’m deliberate about them, and clear about the boundaries I chose for myself with distractions (it’s a fine line between education and crass entertainment online!), I will rue wasted time.

There’s a list of things I wrote a couple of days that have been on my mind. These are broad themes in my nightly journaling. I’m going to attempt a fortnightly sprint, tackling one every fortnight or until I’m comfortable that it has become part of my identity.

I will invest time tonight into building a plan for the first sprint, and learn to do it in a tool called Notion that I’ve seen my daughter use. Identity based, process driven and outcome-expected are all getting some attention.

The close of the calendar year. Time for celebrations, perhaps.

I remember, as a child, the effigy of an old man being burnt at midnight by youth (perhaps inebriated, I was too young to remember, but I’m pretty sure that was a thing!).

When I got a bit older, I would hang out with my ‘friends’, for a very few years, at a ‘ball’, watching enviously as the more hip guys danced with the hot girls, while I sat behind the band in my well-worn clothes, and borrowed shoes. I remember the distinct pleasure of getting my own shoes, and the distinct pain of the shoebite when I wore it for the first time to one of those ‘balls’!

For a couple of years after we got married, we stayed up late the last few nights of the year, watching a movie or having people over in celebration of the ‘new year’. The desire to stay up late disappeared when the kids arrived, raised its head when we moved continents, disappeared again until local friends’ showed up wanting to celebrate new years at our place, generally inviting themselves and counting on our polite non-reluctance.

I suspect we’re going to have ‘guests’ over again this year, but for the next night or so, I’m going to enjoy blissful sleep 🙂

I’ve been slow to realise how much of a beneficiary I am of the Open Source Software community for a while.  The operative word for me being community. What gets people to contribute to a project that doesn’t seem to have a discernible ‘leadership’ team that drives outcomes?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asking my colleagues how someone like me could get involved in such a community. After all, I can barely code, I am certainly no developer, and the extent of my programming skills focuses on identifying the big problems worth solving for in the context of where I work. So for all practical purposes (read excuses reasons for not getting involved), I have nothing to offer.

I do realise that writing is something I can do reasonably. Translating tech-speak at work I am not too bad at. Could I use these skills in the OSS?Yes, is what I’ve been hearing a few people say. It does require me of course, to understand the tools of the trade, and source control software such as Git/Github are some I ought to learn how to use.

So that’s what I have been up to the last couple of days. Thanks to a video I found by ‘amigoscode’,

I’ve been discovering the magic of how these things seem to work in practice. I learnt git init and git show and git status and git add and git commit and git push and git pull and how these little bits of code work.

I’ve struggled with learning how to code – the mental model I have of learning other things hasn’t translated well into code learning.  I tried Dr. Oakley’s technique: 20 minutes of watching video and following along, then taking a break to think about what I did, and then doing it on my own. It’s become quite useful already. I did get stuck when the instructions didn’t match the problems I was facing. Having to figure out what the problem was and then fixing it on my own has been quite satisfying.

It’s day 5 of the holidays.
No structure required or in place.
It also means that there’s nothing I have to tick off a list.

I woke up earlier than I’ve done in the last 4 weeks, to the sounds of rain and birds chirping, and  the sounds snores of the kids sleeping in their rooms.

The hardest thing to do is to switch off from a mode of always on, always doing something to just being. This idea of just being is a struggle for me.
It feels like laziness to me. Just be? What does that even mean?

We went out for a walk on the beach when the rain paused for a bit this evening. My second walk this week, and it was still tiring.

Just as we walked back to our car, the skies parted, and the sun, very briefly, poked a finger or two through the clouds. And into my soul. The promise of brighter days is enough to keep going. I can just be…