I rarely feel compelled any more to write about personal things any more. Partly because there’s little value for in writing about them, but mostly, because I don’t really have much of value for you to spend time reading. Best if I focus on helping you learn about SQL Server 2005 and .NET 2.0, right? But maybe I do have one nugget of personal wisdom that might help somebody.
Life spirals. You decide which way.
Last night, a lot of the stress-factors in my life finally blew up: Job change, new house, moving, health and the passing of my mother (her birthday would be coming up here a couple of weeks, making me miss her all that much more). It caused me to realize that no matter how much our conditions change, and no matter how much we think we’ve changed, our lives go in spirals around some set of basic factors. For me, that’s the social environment I grew up in, being a perfectionist, nearly intolerable self-doubt and the desire to be “better” tomorrow than I am today. These are things that I can’t control purely by intellect no matter how hard I try. In many ways, these are “features” of my “Operating System.”
But what I can do is control how I how I react to them – and how I draw “angular momentum” from them. If it is true that I’m going to be forever caught in orbit of these factors, I can at least control my climb or decent pitch relative to them. And every pass, I can decide if I’m going to fall into that gravity well or try to stretch my orbital path out from them, even if it is just barely any progress – its still progress. The source of the energy to do that is within those problems. It is simply a matter of directing the way you want to go.
It is like I’ve said a couple of times this week to somebody that’s really started to earn a whole new level of respect and maybe in friendship from me from sharing his struggles with me. “Wins or losses don’t matter, it’s what you do with the wins and losses that do.”
Time for me to take my own advice.