The older I grow, the further away my goals seems, for the older I grow, the less time remains, despite certain progressions towards the arbitrary goals which define my career.
Today was a dreary day at work, involving the entertainment of many conversations regarding decisions outside of my immediate control. Also, it's Friday night, and I was just going to repost
last Friday night's story, but on the drive home, I thought about where I am, and arrived at the following concept.
Two-and-a-half years ago, I began seeing someone in an intimate sort of relationship. It might have been a him or a her, but that shouldn't really matter, so for the purposes of this retelling, I'll just refer to it, as it. When it and I got together, I had no realestate (I preferred to rent), no car (I preferred to walk), and no steady job (I was a contractor, about to drop a client whom I had been servicing for 22 months). Whereas at the time, I had some cash savings, and clear, long-postponed, intentions to take a year off to focus on certain career interests: the studies of computer programming, mathematics, and statistics, within my broader interest in machining intelligence itself.
As things progressed it appeared that differences in our interests, some material, some otherwise, were generating friction within our relationship. I never took a full year to purely focus on my career interests, nor did I completely stop pursuing them during this time - instead I attempted to juggle my various studies while patching this relationship.
In the world of computer programming, these might have been referred to as "monkey patches" - localised fixes within a broad system, fixes which might even have contradicted each other, thereby behaving like a nation afflicted by guerrilla warfare.
In the industry slang, "guerrilla patches," mutated to "gorilla patches," and then to "monkey patches."
So I spent time trying to close the gap, taking jobs for cash, obtaining a car, and once getting a car, beginning the legal hoopla of purchasing a piece of realestate which I could afford. Over this time, these, and various other stressors resulted in the consumption of my cash savings.
Over the course of these years, I treated its happiness as a indicator of performance, which sometimes I was more, and something I was less successful at maximising. It never seemed truly happy, except in the first few days of this relationship, and those were the days which became my benchmark for success, within this project. Well today, for the first time since I became deeply involved with it, I received a message that it had discovered a new avenue, with significant potential for achieving what I would consider success within this project (as my project, not its). I felt tremendously relieved. This is now a portfolio I now consider frozen, until further news emerges.
I now have minimal cash savings, a mortgage to fulfill, a cash job that promises to be fairly dreary (while providing a nice complement to my career interests), a car I don't really want (except that I need it for my job), certain progression in my career, and no ongoing relationship projects. I then think of this all as a game. I think of my resources, projects, and interests as cards that were in my hand. Various cards have been played over time and some, including it, have left and returned to my hand, over the years; any cards may yet leave or return. I hold a different hand of cards from what I held two-and-a-half years ago. I wonder what will next come into play.
Also, I wonder if I should have less frequently played the cards of earning money, owning a car, and owning realestate, and more frequently played the card of reading it bedtime stories.
On with the game...
