Personal note warning: what follows is the fruit of some personal observation and thus doesn’t really pretend to be of any particular use to anybody but the writer. You can still freely borrow, re-use or comment it at will
A couple of small enlightenments I came across this week while waiting for my soul to finally reassemble after landing in London.
One year is what it takes
to do what? To “get” things, at least for me. It may seem a lot. It is, from some points of view, it is not, from others. It is what it is, in the end.
But maybe I should explain better what I mean for “to get”… I mean get a 360 (well, at least 90) degrees understanding of a concept. By this I don’t mean “owning” it. That’s different and probably takes a lifetime and more. It’s more like “grasping”: first you see it, then you look around it, then you go away and get close again, then you grasp it, eventually either you loose it or you own it.
It takes me one year to grasp things: I randomly stumbled and started playing with the net in 1993, but it wasn’t until late 1994 that I got my mind blasted with its universe of possibilities, similarly I get my first linux box running in 1994 but it wasn’t until the year after that I spiralled down(or up)wards in the deep waters of unix and opensource, and just totally burned the bridges behind me.
It doesn’t happen just with technology of course: one year after I begun university I had this crazy moment when maybe for the first time in a lifetime I really studied hard, and just to demonstrate how useless that whole circus was. A week later I had a job in another city and kept uni as the “pet project”.
It took me one year to fall in love with theare and japanese, and speaking of japan it took me one year since my first tasting of Japanese cuisine to eventually appreciate it fully (so much so that it’s now one of my favourites).
Same thing with people, blogs and all. On sunday, exactly one year after my first attendance, I understood Reboot.
As I said, one year is what it takes.
People are spaces too
You know the way you move in different spaces… a road or a bar, an airport, or an office or a church… it’s very different isn’t it?
There are spaces that are made for interaction, other for waiting, other for movement, some for introspection and some for production.
People are the same: some are good… no, not only good, they seem to be made for, putting you in a productive mood, some are fun, somebody say there are even boring people around (but I don’t buy that).
The thing with people is that they change (that is, they change so much faster than spaces) so often it’s difficult to notice this attitude (especially since it’s a 2 way shifting landscape we have here).
And there is so much more to say here, but let’s keep it for tomorrow ;)