This whole shelter in place thing has been a blessing.  It has slowed down the operation of my daily life to a level that I can actually perceive it as it flies by me.

I wonder how long that I have existed as a being a pure inertia.  Entirely too long.

Writing for me used to be a place of escape, well that is not completely true.  It used to be a ritual, a time for me to collect my very scattered thoughts and try to make some sense of them. I suspect, thought it may not appear from the outside, that I have some sort of learning disability. If so I think it work like this, my interested are incredibly diverse and I like to know to a good enough approximation how a variety of things work that  I'm kept at a very base level of understanding of any one of them.

I seem to be able to make temporary gain in specific topics, but those branches are quickly pruned when I get out of the habit of regularly engaging in those activities.  So I glean some nugget of long term understanding and rotate to the next most interesting set of problem.  There only to repeat the cycle and forget most of what I was thinking about.

Writing seems to be the strategy best employed for long term retention and retrieval of facts.  I lament how woefully time intensive it is.  There is the encoding step which is woefully inefficient.  Ten little fingers to input idea that whip by me at ... well the speed of thought.  I retrieval step is even worse.

At least we are somewhat aided in this last step by computers. More and more we can index and correlate but brining the mind back to the state that it was in and wondering about the shortcuts taken to encode the stored data initially is just woefully inefficient.

But maybe that is the inertia talking. Likely... likely.

How backwards to feel that the understanding and exploration of ones own mind is some sort of luxury.  Like it is something to be done at the end of your personal todo list.  There is work and working out and then all this media to consume. This comes WAY before cracking open your own mind and thinking about if any of the things that you are doing actually make you happy.

Knowledge work is a tricky thing like that.  It is not the labor of your body, not really the skill of your hands.  It is how your mind operates, the connections it sees, the patterns it recognizes, the tricks and games accumulated over a lifetime that inform your state vector.

That is not to say that you should retreat into a world of solipsism and prefer the company of the inside of your own head.  It is just something to be acutely aware of as you evaluate your list of priorities.


I now understand more of why people work and code in the dead of night.  It is the only time where the world is quiet enough to actually form a full idea.  Everything else is just fragments, just enough time to squirt out half of an idea and then it is on to the next thing.

I have wanted to have a great idea for a while.  Something that would keep me up at night and be worth the lack of sleep and detriment to my health.  But it seems that all my ideas are ordinary.  Facing facts that the story I told myself go my own person greatness is a gross exaggeration.

Perhaps if I do a bit more wandering around and thinking about my array of interests I could sneak up on a great idea, catch it unawares.  Surprise it as it awaits discovery by a great man, that an ordinary man would have the audacity to give it a go.