Thoughts

I recently embarked on a plan to learn to draw. I’ve done this a few times, in a few different ways. This time feels different. The lessons I’ve begun start with some very basic ideas, no home run or get rich quick schemes here. Rather, I have a daily exercise of drawing basic shapes, holding the pencil, and just getting experience trying to see what I want on the paper before I touch the pencil down.

I don’t make a habit of watch the Olympics. But I remember a moment back in 2018 when I happened to turn on coverage just as they were televising a gold-winning snowboard cross run by Red Gerard¹. He blew out all the other riders in his group to take the gold. Silver was significantly behind him. What stood out to me watching him ride, however, was how keyed in he was to the whole thing.

I try to keep notifications in my life to a bare minimum. I get tips from friends or co-workers about making sure notifications on my phone are disabled while I sleep. I disable them all the time. The one thing I allow are text messages to vibrate my Garmin watch, and I’m on the fence as to whether this is truly necessary.

There are people who’s professions wont allow this. I get that. But I also know that most people build narratives about getting a late night text about the health of a loved one to justify always getting pinged when Facebook needs your attention, or a new email comes in. These are largely untrue, or at least building a process into your life for events that may never happen.

When people say “I can’t do that” most of the time, they’re actually saying “I can’t see myself doing that.” When I started running, a lot of people said they didn’t know how I could run so far, or that they could never do that.

When I started, I didn’t imagine I’d run marathons. I just started with 1 or 2 mile runs. Those 2-mile runs were hard, and sometimes they still are.

When running, you will sometimes come to a path that, for whatever reason, is difficult to read. While the incline may go up, your eye and, subsequently your mind, says it’s going down. Such visual tricks are called trompe l’oeils, literally “trick of the eye” in French.

Personally, these tricks often have the effect of letting me run harder uphill than I otherwise would, revealing the incredible amount of mental power that goes into distance running. If my mind does not believe I’m going uphill, I run faster, even if I am in fact going uphill. Most people would consider this a cool trick to get you to run faster. Unless you didn’t want to run faster.

I discovered Nethack for the first time this weekend. Well, I knew it existed for a while, but I had always sort of poked around at it, generally unimpressed. But on Friday there was a lobste.rs post about a speedrun of nethack that totally captured my attention. The runners used the inventory at the start of a randomly generated map to determine which seed was used by the RNG to build the dungeon. From there, they had a general sense of what would work. This resulted in an ascension, as victories are called, of sub 8 minutes. The previous best on the most popular nethack server, nethack.alt.org, was more than 90 minutes. Crazy.

After an angsty 25+ years of my life, I’ve come around to love running. This is obvious to anyone who knows me. I discovered it as a great hobby when you live in a rural area and can’t get together on a regular basis to play sports. Combined with the ability to track running with technology, it has become a hobby that at this point I would even if I couldn’t track, or had access to regular sports events. I just love being out on the road, listening to nature (or music) and feeling the air and precipitation.

The idea here, cribbed from Bryan Cantrill’s talk on oral traditions in software development, is the importance of making as clear as possible your intentions when you do things. Often I feel as though intention gets a bad rap. The road to hell, and what-not. But the reality is that, if you are doing something, it is best to do it with intention. God help us the things we do impulsively or emotionally. Sometimes they work out alright, but it’s usually best to go back and see if we can learn why it happened. That’s still applicable when doing things intentionally, but because there was forethought, we are already a step ahead.

The way I was raised, certain people were simply wrong. If they didn’t share the same enthusiasm for science, they were incorrect. If they believed in a benevolent (or even malevolent) Christian god, they were wrong. There was very little gray in many of the positions that were espoused to me. One of the great aspects of humanity is that we are given the opportunity to raise our children with our values and beliefs. But, of course, there are responsibilities there too.

What does it mean to encourage others towards spiritual growth? At a recent board meeting, which included a fairly contentious issue, a number of friends and myself certainly did not encourage anyone towards spiritual growth. The root of the problem, as with many problems, lies with differences; differences of opinion, experience, and expectations. As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we espouse the seven principles, which are as close to dogma as you’re likely to see in UUism. One of these seven “pillars” of behavior as a UU calls us to accept others and help them towards spiritual growth. How can we do that when we’re so different?