Contemplating the Next Adventure, Part V
I recently had someone send me an email asking if everything was ok.
They were concerned that I had ‘gone dark’ as they had not seen me at any of the tech events that happened this fall. This was hammered home when I ran into someone on the street and they asked me about when I was going to get my ‘follow up posts’ published to Medium, covering the bigger topics I mentioned in Contemplating the Next Adventure #3. They also asked if I was ok.
I have some drafts started (Education is Broken, and Venture Capital is Broken) but these have been taking a back-burner to my own extracurricular exploration into total geekdom.
So this will perhaps serve as an update to a lot of people who have wondered what happened to me (or what I have been doing) — but does have some ‘contemplating’ stuff in it as well.
The short version is that yes, I am ok.
The wordier version for those that want to understand why I have ‘gone dark’, be assured that I am ok, and instead of attending community events, I am actually just hanging at home, working in my garage, using my free time to things that, for the moment, are important to me, for reasons that I don’t really need to justify to anyone but myself.
I have been working to be more present, to live more in the moment. As part of my ongoing exploration, I have been trying (hard) to be present, to be thankful and happy in the moment, with the belief (faith?) that if I can cultivate and find happiness everyday, that every day will be happy, and my worries about the future will sort themselves out, and since I am in the moment, and content with the moment, that all future moments will be good.
I am experimenting with an inversion of my schedule. I used to put everything and everyone else first, a combination of the ‘give first’ philosophy combined with a ‘do your chores first’ upbringing. I have been trying to be intentional about self care, taking the ‘put on your own oxygen mask’ advice and putting into action.
It all started when I started working on my ‘hobby’ projects in electronics and LEGO. I have been putting off my own hobbies until my ‘chores’ were done (the chore being the work of ecosystem building). I needed to stop doing that, as the strain was taking it’s toll. I was feeling depleted, and I very much felt the need to recharge my batteries and find ways to do it without draining the battery to zero and then rushing to find a power plug to get me back up to 20% — only to rush back to depletion. I needed to, as Jerry Colonna put it, to Reboot and update my Operation System.
So this indulging in my hobbies has been part of that process.
I finished my classic race car and posted it to LEGO ideas
I am up to 942 supporters as of this writing. I need 10,000 to have LEGO consider it for production (this is not going to happen).. but I am happy that at least 900 people appreciate my work. (a note, it would be great to get enough support to get me over 1000 supporters).
I got some notice, and was asked to include my model in a museum https://blockstobricks.com/ and was recently commissioned to build one for one of the LPs of a fund by a VC friend of mine.
I geeked out a bit on LEGO engines, and this then led to me working a LEGO platform based robot, and then I took the red pill-
and allowed myself to go down in a rabbit hole. I called it an indulgence as this was not connected to a new gig, not part of a career move, not part of anything other then me enjoying it. I am allowing myself to enjoy things, things that are just for me, and allowing things to just go wherever it took me.
I have joked to a few about my ‘robot army’..
here is a picture of a few of them. From left to right -
A ‘TekBot’ — that I picked up at a garage sale.. electronics on it were toast, so I use it is a test platform for whatever I am working on.
A pair of Parallax SumoBots — I got these on ebay after doing a ‘make offer’ for a ridiculously low price (less then a 10th of the price you can get the set new).
a Zumo 32u4 — this was another ebay ‘make offer’..
My birthday gift this year, a ZUMO with a Arduino Leonardo and a Pixy 2 camera —
they start my own creations, the next one is a self balancing (Segway style) bot made out of LEGO
my two in progress bots (MoBot and Mini MoBot) that will feature headlights and cameras — these are more ‘models’ for show and won’t have all the sensors that the others do.
as part of this, I am also doing a bunch of small circuit construction (here is a picture of my workspace) to make switches, flashing lights, and other stuff with hardware instead of code, as well as playing around with PICAXE chips.
I started coding again, which has been fun. For the first time since 1981 I am actually enjoying writing code.
I have been contemplating this a bit, and as near as I can figure out, back in the day (high school), I think there was an expectation of me, that I go to engineering school and learn about software. I grew up around it, and got into a bit in the late 70s and early 80s, but I never caught the bug, and some of this has become intertwined with me resisting the pressure of what I felt were expectations.
I, for whatever reason, was struggling then, and possibly still struggling now, with the sense that I was not in control of my own destiny. As a teenager, the pressure to learn a skill.. specifically coding, was something that I felt (rightly or wrongly) was something not that I chose, but was chosen for me — and that I rejected, and mostly because I was not enjoying it — and yes, there is the possibility that I was not enjoying it because it was chosen for me and I did not choose it myself. I think this is the pig headed part of my nature, and the part of me that desires some control of my life.
Which makes the fact that I am now ENJOYING writing code such a wonderful thing. It is actually fun, and there is no expectation that it will ever be my job, or that anything I am doing need to be good, or useful, or even seen by anyone but myself, it is a vehicle to bring about my own amusement, my continuing need to challenge myself in different ways, to learn, and to just keep growing. But now it feels a lot more ‘pure’, or at least it seems I have disentangled it from all the personal baggage of whatever I was dealing with regarding the expectations of others and my generally rebellious nature.
And I have chosen it. I kind of walked into from the side, as it was the hardware tinkering that lead me to the path of code creation — and now that I am literally going ‘to the metal’, I have a much deeper understanding and appreciation for it. Making electronics — actual circuits — is fascinating — putting them together with ICs (integrated circuits) is like a history lesson. I am walking through the past to see the evolution of chips, the first simple algorithms committed to silicon, upon which so much was built.
As I mentioned in previous posts, I stopped making art over a decade ago. I think there was something about art being my ‘job’ that took the joy out of it. Me needing to be at a certain skill level, to know certain tools and techniques — it became a chore, a requirement, all the joy got sucked out of it.
Drawing with my daughter has reawakened the joy of making art in me. As with the robots, there is no expectation of me producing anything, getting better, or having to have it be anything other than what it is, and right now, this is spending time with my daughter and helping her to improve here art skills.. in these drawings, I am just working with her to understand basic construction of objects in simple perspective, and how to approaching ‘blocking out’ a drawing and doing thumbnails.. and getting her to treat things as a ‘study’ and not have every drawing need to be a ‘finished’ piece.
I am sharing the knowledge I have gathered, and sharing it with my daughter — passing on the skills I have — I cannot quite capture in words the feeling, the joy of knowing that a part of me will live on beyond my lifetime, and perhaps some day she will transfer all that she has learned to her children, much as I am channeling all that I learned from my father about electronics and mechanical engineering. My memory of those times keeps him alive in me, and in that way, although he is gone, he has a chance for part of him to live forever. In passing what I know to my daughter, there is a chance I will achieve some sort of immortality (at least for a generation).
Thanksgiving just passed, and I am so very thankful for this past year.
I have spent the last year exploring and pondering what my future will hold. This year was a gift, a time to explore who I was and what makes me go, and I am a better person for it.
2019 was a year of reflection. 2020 will be a year of action and big life changes. I am more ready now than I was at this time last year to face all the challenges ahead. More secure in who I am, and more at peace with whatever my future holds.
in closing, to everyone that was wondering, yes, I have gone ‘dark’ — but have not succumbed to darkness. I simply traveled down a rabbit hole and discovered a private little wonderland to play in, and for a bit longer, I think I am going to hang out there.
