How about this? "Always be happy, never be satisfied."
That's not my line, I got that from my middle school band director, Mr. Davids, which is absolutely not a made-up name since I always give you people's real names. We gave Mr. Davids a lot of shit, because we were kids and he was a man that was trying to teach middle schoolers music theory and manage a weight problem, of which he did at least one of those effectively. Mr. Davids was trying to do a lot with our young and mostly apathetic minds. He was teaching music and technique and discipline, sure, but he was also trying to instill passion. He wanted to inspire a certain level of work ethic and standard of practice, and all this other crap that was very ambitious knowing the kind of kids I went to school with. Some of us were in fact very talented, and even a few of us did care about rising to the level that he hoped we would. But c'mon, it was middle school, how many things do you know of that went according to the plan in middle school? We gave this man absolute hell, and I'm saying that as one of his better students in that day.
But I never forgot that idea he planted, about being happy but not satisfied. About continuing to build on what you've accomplished while always also looking forward to what else could still be done. Like a beautiful painting but the canvas would expand further once you finished painting the area that you'd been working on. One person would look at that and think, "this is bullshit, I'll never be done". Another person could look at the same thing and think, "I never have to stop." That's the way we tend to look at a lot of things in our lives, whether we realize it or not. We have all these things in our daily or regular life that we either look at as, "I can't wait to do this" vs. "I can't wait to be done with this".
I think about myself and the things I have thrown my focus into recently. This past summer has been an interesting one, seeing as I RUPTURED MY GOD DAMN ACHILLES TENDON. In case you couldn't tell, I was yelling that into the keyboard just now. Yeah, I did that this summer. So fun, having surgery and learning to walk all over again. I'll spare you the story of how I ruptured it. Basically because there's not even a cool story where I ran down some purse snatcher, leapt from a burning building, or scored a last second touchdown and was carried off the court by a bunch of adoring fans.
Nah, I was playing basketball by myself and blew the damn tendon during my process of warming up. As in, I was about to take a layup, and instead laid down flat on my face, thinking maybe I'd been shot. But I wasn't, and I had to limp to the car and drive back to our apartment using both feet (not recommended).
Recovery has gone as expected the past few months, but you have to understand that it has been maddening for me to sit still this long. I don't consider myself someone who is bouncing off the walls with energy at all times, but I very much like to change scenery when possible. So, spending the majority of the summer in our 2-room apartment, mostly in bed, has been a challenge. I tried to keep positive where I could, but one of the main things I used to do to get into a different mindset was just go for a run, or a drive, or go shoot some hoops. Even getting up and going up into the loft to play video games was largely unavailable until about August. It was not always so easy to accept new limitations, but it is always not easy to just get over surgery just because you feel like it.
So, what do you do? Well, if you're me, you obviously can watch a ton of tv and movies. We have the streaming services that make it impossible to feel like you've watched everything that you should have seen by now, so that worked for a while. And we had had plenty of people stop by our apartment to visit us (gawk at how my leg looked). And my wife did a wonderful job of trying to keep my spirits up after her full days of work. Also, there was wine. Wine helps get through blowing your Achilles tendon. I know it doesn't help the literal healing process, but still. Don't ever let them tell you that wine doesn't help.
Even with the wine, there was a lot of time in between that had to be filled. And I've had a lot of time to sit and reflect, which is probably healthy but over time feels maddening. So I've done my best to keep mentally occupied if I can't be physically anywhere else.
One thing we did, we finally digitized our DVD collection. Which, I had an idea of how many dvds we had but still, holy crap, we had a lot of places that we had just slotted and crammed dvds that we hadn't watched in a while. And it's not like there were ones we didn't care about, because we'd already done purges in the past. These were all the ones that at least one of us had been adamant of not parting with.
We started watching Grey's Anatomy from the start. (It's January now and we JUST got caught all the way up to present day. Oh, you didn't know that they were still making this show and hadn't covered every single thing that could happen to the body? Same here.)
I started reading more. I finished a book on Norse Mythology, which seems like a really strange decision in retrospect, and another one with a lot of interviews with jazz musicians, and the autobiography of Viola Davis, "Finding Me", and have now started the biography of Frederick Douglass. Viola Davis's book alone gave a ton of perspective, because her childhood had some absolute horror stories that I don't think I could ever compare any of my own experiences to. But it's also uplifting because she still finds all of these beautiful moments to bring focus to within the chaos and pain and humiliation that she and her family lived through. And while you're reading it, you can't really feel too much suspense because clearly, she makes it out of her upbringing and becomes the star that she is today. But it was still a vivid picture in a lot of the early chapters.
Also, I dove into this gigantic book about machine learning. And I gotta tell you, I thought I had at least kind of a handle on how intense machine learning and artificial neural networks could get, and I didn't know shit. I'm about halfway through the book and I just started to feel like I can actually think through how I would set up some of these ideas for myself. But I also feel ridiculous trying to explain it to anyone, let alone people that have a good handle of coding in Python or people that have advanced understanding of mathematics. I attempted both with family members and could feel the stares growing with every layer of the explanation that wasn't, which made me feel like I need to just go back to the start and rebuild my understanding of all of it. But hey, diving into something new and very different feels...great? And scary? And humbling?
Yeah, I said scary. It's kind of scary diving into something like Machine learning. For those of you unaware, what I mean when I say machine learning is that I want to be able to write a program that takes a large data source and reads into it to find patterns within the data that humans likely wouldn't be able to on their own. I have already read two books on the subject and I am nowhere close to feeling like I know what the hell I'm doing. It's one of those situations where I thought I was in the middle of a forest 2 square miles, and as I learn more, I keep realizing that the forest I'm in is growing exponentially. I knew there was an insane amount of stuff to get through, but for some reason, studying has not only lessened those fears, it has given those fears steroids. And not even for reasons that make a ton of sense to me.
One thing that blows my mind, the more I think about it, is the sheer amount of data being collected on us, by us, for us, against us, and several other 'us's all at once. The internet continues to be a terrifying place, full of a whole realm that isn't even being readily advertised called the dark web. Not that the 'light' web is particularly friendly either. And it's just constantly expanding, more people using more content at a faster rate with more gadgets and greater impunity, to the point that we ran out of places to put stuff on the internet the way it used to be addressed before. If you weren't aware, ip addresses used to be enough so that there were 4,294,967,294 possible IP addresses in use. It doesn't so much scare me that they had to change with the times and expand the possibility of something, because that happens all the time. It scares me because we're now to the point that we have 7.5 billion people on the earth, so there are a lot of really stupid people out there that probably have multiple websites by now. I know a lot of smart people, and I feel like not very many of them have websites. So that's even more websites that may have been started by complete idiots.
It's probably a symptom of getting old, but more things are starting to scare me. I'll tell you another thing that scares me now. This damn Viola Davis book, it's a wonderful book and I flew through it, but it felt like it brought out a lot of older ambitions and desires in me and I don't know what to do with a lot of them. I had kind of lost touch with my creative side for a little while over the past few years. Not completely, I still write every so often, but I feel like a lot of it was more labored and was being done to make a specific point. I really wanted to write something during the pandemic about the current climate of racial strife surrounding the killings of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery. I had a specific set of events in mind and I had a distinct picture of where I wanted it to go, even though things always seem to shift slightly once I start writing. And there's nothing wrong with that except that I never used to write like that, per say.
I mean, I used to just need to write. I used to feel like I was going to explode if I didn't write. If I didn't sit down and just let some of the most top-o-the-head instincts spill out onto the page or through my fingers and onto the screen. That's the difference. I now occasionally feel like I want to write. I used to know, KNOW that I didn't just want to write, I HAD TO. I wasn't going to be productive in anything else unless I got at least some of my energy out in this specific way, a way that I could come back later and try to make sense of whatever I had been brewing at that point.
Now, part of me wants to believe that it's still there, and I just have better control of it. But part of me also wonders if I have the same need to get things out of my head the same way as I used to. So it's only kind of scary if I start to need to write again. What if I dig in for something, and nothing comes out? What if I have nothing substantial to say?
But then again, shit, what if I had never really said anything before? Is it possible I have put my previous writing on some illustrious pedestal that it didn't deserve in the first place? Or better yet, who even gives a shit if it was or is good writing? If I recall, the whole point of this blog was that I wanted to write and I wanted a place to put said writing. I never promised anyone, not even myself, that it was going to be good. So what exactly is my hope of proving here? Do I have anything to be afraid of? Or, do I have everything to be afraid of, but it's the fear that I actually need to lean into a bit more?
...where the hell was I going with this?
Not sure that I have some profound lesson to draw out of this one, if I'm being honest. More a question I pose to myself, and therefore you, the one that chose to keep reading this. What is it that has driven this whole entry? Is it fear, or nervous energy, or excitement to basically be back mobile again, or boredom, or mania? Or is it just another spot on the same road I've always been on in the first place?
As for what to do with fear, use it, don't use it, I have no idea at this point. I feel like I would have told people in the past to not be afraid to fail, to try new stuff and grow, blah blah blah, maybe being afraid isn't so bad. Maybe fear is right for you some of the time, maybe it's wrong other times. In the unlikely event that you have been using this blog for actual advice, don't do that here. Go out into your life and use fear the appropriate amount of the time for what you are facing, and then throw the rest of that shit away. Maybe Gustavo Fring had it wrong when he said "I don't find fear to be an effective motivator." Fear, when used effectively, can give a man wings. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Gives you a pen? Pick it up and write something. Life gives you fear, and you channel that fear into getting your ass up out of there! (wherever 'there' is)
Yep, that's what we're going with. I'm happy with that thought. Happy...but not satisfied...?
