Over the last few months, I have been in a sort of stasis, living from bank withdrawal to withdrawal, and working on some scant projects, while keeping myself entertained and fulfilled.
My life is going through some changes: I am separated from my spouse, but not yet divorced. I am working on improving my art, but not yet selling anything, I am spooling up some engineering projects, but have nothing to release. I do not yet have a job. I have savings, and I have some minor investments, but both are not large enough, nor are they setup to provide subsistence.
In short, I feel as though I am going skydiving for the first time, with only an emergency parachute to deploy. I know things however. Arcane knowledge gleaned from various sources, some savory (school, internet, research, dev, etc) and some not so (random tidbits from novels, internet, life exp, etc). I know that if my emergency shoot gives out, I can hold my shirt open, and it will slow my descent. I will also get very cold, and my shirt will be open. You need about 9” square feet of material to slow your descent to a non-fatal speed. It does not mean you’ll be “A-OK!” but it does mean you’ll live (taken as gospel from a Dan Brown novel, so like, it must be true).
Above me, I see those with real parachutes, gliding serenely above me, some gliders in the distance zipping around, making little more sound than the air currents surrounding them, and below me, I see the unlucky souls whom did not have the luxury of an emergency shoot. We are all falling. It is the nature of our existence in a universe governed by matter, wherein matter has gravity. There are a few neat tricks, like realizing that if you are on the ground, you only have to put up with your own body. Another one is observation of physics, and air currents, allowing for lift. The physics of lift are somewhat opposed from the metaphor, as a greater distance to travel is not usually a lower pressure situation, but this can be remedied by flipping the objective: a shorter effort to completion on the underside puts us right back to where we were, metaphorically speaking.
Anyways, that somewhat morose metaphor is to say that while I could be doing better, I am making progress, and developing strategies to help achieve balance, and maybe even produce a little lift — it is at least something to do whilst falling.
Some years ago I realized I feel as a ‘whole person’ after having the opportunity to make art. As you can read in the about page, I took a long break from art besides doodling throughout my high school and college academic career. After rediscovering art, I dove in - taking classes, drawing, and painting. More recently, the same thing has begun to happen with music, albeit to a lesser extent, I think probably due to mechanical acumen not given by every day activities (e.g. writing positively effecting implement usage, whereas music’s only analog is keeping a beat, which I suppose I do while listening to music so idk).
All of this is to say that chief among my projects, is one concerning hierarchical multidimensional path finding for project management. Uh, yeah that’s a mouthful, but the long and short is that I want to do things with no clear route to completion. I’m not ready to make a formalized post about how it works, but suffice it to say that if you take a jira backlog as a graph rather than a list, and assign dependencies to axis, you can achieve some interesting plans, and use vector / tensor math / logic to obtain some even more interesting results / insights. Think of working on a project, and having your pm tool tell you that similar projects have suffered from X, Y & Z tickets, or getting different estimates on expected completion based on different optional dependencies, etc. Think of it as a tool to help you reach, and maintain a stable position in space and time, where space includes aspects of your project, rather than a traditional location. Whatever, this is simpler:
this smudgy mess is a manual implementation of a fantasy representation of my life / plans — mystic balance crystal included
in the middle, there is a' “balance crystal”, often used to display related by isolated aspects of a character in video games, I am using for myself. The primary difference being, a video game is usually concerned with maximizing stats, whereas, living is not at exclusively about maximizing, e.g. exercise, and sex are two things you want to have balance with. Maaaaybe, your sense of balance is different than mine? That’s ok, about an inch out from each vertex represents a stable, positive position, whatever that means for you. Farther from the vertex, the less effective I am. If you look closely, the chores, social, and exercise are all just about on target, and that is a result of those consisting of tasks I am capable of myself. The next 3 have external factors, such as sex, feels, & work. Reviewing and updating this display is helping remind me of what is important when all my brain provides otherwise is a sense of limbo, and overwhelming ennui.
To the left is a wizard sprinkling ‘todo dust’ and the corresponding list (not up to date! I totally have done some of that stuff!), and in the middle foreground rests a feasible path, first at a campsite, where I must learn react native, and maybe work on a side project. Further down the road is another large project, I feel will reflect well on my resume, and finally a house / small village, wherein I may find a job, love, life, a home, etc. A visual representation of ‘earning your keep’.
To the right, you see a floating island representing possible career options, and a shifting safe haven that I can certainly reach with effort. Random important one offs I want to highlight, I draw in the form of random encounters (like the air-ship offering to consolidated my loans). Once I feel my position has changed, I redraw the scenes that have changed (like a single player turned based rpg):
updated with my ‘current location’
Anyways, visualizing where I am, versus where I want to be has been helping, and I am going to work on transferring these ideas into a digital format, or at least buy a bigger whiteboard :) Anyways, writing about this has made me want to play a character rpg lol.