Conversations-With-Myself

Attempt no. 4 at restarting blogging, acknowledging the march of time and turning 40. Ten years ago I said here’s to the next, so I guess… I’m still here(-ish)! Bit Stories is the reboot to my personal site that I’ve been carrying with me for years. The file which has the logo was dated 2008, for cryin’ out loud. I just didn’t do it for so many years. This is completely different - I’m off Wordpress, I’m getting used to the idea of blogging in a completely different framework, I’m getting onto modernisation of my pipeline by going backwards to a non-CMS setup. It will be interesting to see if the lower weight of the setup helps or hinders. ...

How time flies. You’d think if you’re counting the weeks, and you’re counting up 38 of them, you’ve got so much time. That’s 38 x 7 days, which is… (mental maths) 266…ish days? That’s a decent number of days! The secret you learn after finding out is that these dates are approximations. No-one can quite pinpoint the starting or ending date, so there’s a rule-of-thumb that is applied, and it only lands on the actual date about 5% of the time. Now, if you’re clueless like I was 38 or so weeks ago, what I’m talking about here is pregnancy. I’m about to be a father. Indeed, any day now, it would seem. As of this week, from a medical standpoint, the baby is good to go. No one asks the parents-to-be if they’re good to go, because frankly speaking, I’m not sure we are. There’s no textbook, no accredited course, no licence, no piece of paper they’ll hand you to say it’s ok, you can probably handle what is coming. We’ve done our best, we’re doing the classes, we’re working through everything we think we need, we have all the advice we could hope for & then some, but how do you actually know you’re ready to be a first-time parent? I’d posit that you just don’t. It happens and then you figure it out. Kinda like life, only even more so, because now you’re doing it for yourself as well as for another life that’s entirely dependent on you. ...

Change one thing at a time, and hold all others equal - ceteris paribus. It’s a core of science - to do an experiment, you look at cause and effect by making a cause happen and observing for effect. Except, just about anything that happens in the real world is not easily explained by a single cause, and so we work backwards from effect to try to puzzle out the causes, because that’s the way that gives you the most truth - the effect is observable and known, but the cause isn’t always clear, not until you repeat and retry and figure out how many strings you need to be tugging on at any one time to get the puppet to dance. ...

It’s the end of another week, and then I look at the calendar and realise it’s the end of the month. But then it’s not only that, it’s the end of March, marking the end of the first quarter of the year - yes, I think like a banker now - and in a way it’s what marks for me the end of the summer, where you know now that the seasonal change is truly underway and the hope for warmer days fade. As if right on cue, it’s also the end of daylight savings, so the days become darker and shorter, and the mood shift sets in. It’s well and truly 2017, and the steady progression of the planet around the sun continues apace and the one thing you can never negotiate on feels like it passes faster and faster, time ticking away. So many endings coming together brings a certain focus, a certain reflection on the time that has passed thus far, and an ever-regretful mood that recalls how things were left incomplete, a reminder of how much there is to do. At the same time, there’s a degree of celebration in that reflection, understanding of how many things that were actually achieved in this time, and recalling that for all the things I can look at negatively, and all the things that preoccupy my mind disproportionately - events around the world that I have no influence on and conversely have no impact from - there are those things much closer to home that I can be happy with and draw satisfaction from. Recently inspired by a passing conversation I happened to hear, I will be devoting some effort to reflecting weekly on the achievements and progression, noting the positives and ensuring a very practical focus - personal, local, stuff that actually matters in my personal world - is recorded in some way. I realise how much of my memory is driven by things I’ve written down and things I’ve taken photos of, and how many things and events that I just don’t recall because I didn’t do that. Everyone has their focuses and quirks - some recall conversations with ease, while others recall images; all have their own ways to work through these things, so I hope that through writing and reflecting I’m better able to keep my memory going on these small events and build up a better picture through time to know that life isn’t wasted. So here goes. ...

Wow, wait, I’ve been writing on this blog for nearly 11 years now… The thought came to me while fiddling with the sidebar images. If you’ve not noticed, there’s a rotating roster of images that changes with each refresh. Some are more readable than others. Some are my own images, some are from Unsplash, which is a pretty neat resource for royalty-free imagery that also happens to contain some amazing photos to boot. ...