I would like to fling myself into the study of the ancients and classics. I’m curious about Odysseus / Ulysses. I’m curious about all the grand books I haven’t read. Catch-22.
I suppose I should start with the books that are already on my shelves… but I’m not sure what I’m excited about and what I’m not. I need to do some sort of audit. I’ve been thinking and talking about doing some sort of audit for a very, very long time.
I need more focus and clarity of mind which means better sleep. I slept late yesterday… though that felt like an anomaly. I do intend to sleep early tonight. That should make a difference.
But okay back to thinking about the audit. What exactly do I mean by audit? What exactly do I want? What’s the end-goal? How long can I reasonably expect a project like this to take?
There are so many ways this line of questioning can play out. Is it better for me to develop a good sense of the whole, or should I first carve out an immediate little piece that I can chew and swallow?
I used to always lean towards the former, but now I’m starting to lean towards the latter. I imagine this would surprise quite a few of my old friends. [1]
But ruminating on this a little longer makes me realise- it’s not like I’ve changed what I fundamentally want, I’ve just awoken to the reality that my old ways of doing things were limited and not quite helping me. And I think I always knew that this would be the case. That’s part of why I kept writing. Right? [2]
I guess I’ll never know for sure. But certainty is a sucker’s game- it exists only in classrooms and thought experiments. So I can know to some degree. And even if I’m making all of this up- it’s not like I actually need to be 100% right about everything. I just need to make sure that I can survive whenever I’m wrong. (Which reminds me, I ought to reread Taleb’s books… I had written “I need to read this again” in the margins.)
So. Small pieces to bite off, chew and swallow. One thing I’m doing is tidying up the photos I’ve taken since 2014. I want to check off an old work task which was to upload photos of my colleagues. It’s a low priority task that doesn’t really affect anybody but me, but it’s been bothering me for so long that I simply have to do it.
Not sure why I have been waiting for so long to do the things I say that I want to do. It seems like- to some degree, it really does boil down to an unknowable amount of waiting time. It’s like my brain is an organisation (technically it is) full of stupid people who don’t really know how to follow orders (also technically true…?). Once I decide that I’m going to do something, I still seem to have to wait for some unknowable period of time. So far the longest this process has taken me…. I want to say “is a couple of years”, from the time I make the Decision to the time that it comes to pass.
Doing an audit would help me with things like this- seeing and studying when I first talk about things, how I talk about them, so on. I realise this would be a very specific sort of audit, with the intention of uncovering very specific sorts of information. Meatbag management data, focus/priorities, context management data. How have I fared, what have I wanted, how did I get or (more often than not) deal with NOT getting what I wanted? How would I deal with it now? How would I do things differently?
What else do I want to know? Cheesy as it seems I guess one thing is that I don’t know what I want to know, and I feel like doing a scan will help me find out. So I guess I should first list out all the information/data I have and then set a schedule for going through that info.
I’ll stop here.
[1] I keep thinking about old friends recently. There was a group of people who knew quite a bit about me and who I was- they heard my opinions and perspectives on a lot of things, and I bared myself to them. And then I left, I moved on. But I suppose you never truly move on- because I’m still here, aren’t I? You just remix and remix until your latter mixes are a significant departure from the source material- but departing from the source material doesn’t change the fact that you were still influenced by it, dependent on it. There is no real getting over or moving on, in the simplistic sense. The most you can do is choose to focus on other things.
[2] Sigh, I realise firsthand that… If you’re determined to believe that a person is trying to rewrite history, there is nothing she can do to persuade you otherwise. So there will be some people that you’ll never be able to win over- or the cost of winning them over will be criminally high.