When I was younger, especially in my twenties, I thought having a “busy schedule” was positive. If the open spaces on my calendar were filled with commitments, it meant I was doing something right. Perhaps it even made a statement about my importance. If I was rushing from one appointment to the next, I was doing so because of my value in the world.
My wife and I had five children in our thirties. Suddenly I began working hard to reopen my schedule. I started saying “no” to personal and professional opportunities that demanded more time. “Busy” became something negative. Open hours were spent with family, at home, no distractions. Instead of busyness making me feel important, it made me feel I was neglecting something important instead.
As our children grew they began filling my calendar for me. In my forties, they were making commitments of their own in music and sports and work and academics. My wife and I encouraged many of those commitments. We developed a more balanced view of busyness then, understanding we had to sacrifice time to help our family develop skills and character.
Today, three of our children are away at college. Our family of seven became a family of four and our schedule changed. Slots are open now that we didn’t fully anticipate. Just this evening I was home alone – not busy at all – for several hours!
I don’t know how my views will change in my fifties. Perhaps I’ll find myself hoping for opportunities and looking for ways I can prove to myself I still have value. Or maybe I’ll embrace my free time and learn to get more rest. Only time will tell now.
I want to do a lot more writing. Publishing around 500 words every week would be really helpful. That is my goal.
While I already have an online home for my photography and writing, not everything I want to say fits there. I wanted a place, instead, for experimentation.
That’s why I came back to an old friend.
Textpattern is built for content publishers to Just Write.
I may also add an image to each post. This will allow me to work through a massive catalog of previously-unpublished images. But that’s all. Words and images only.
Some of the essays published here will later wind up (in one form or another) on my main website, but many will not. Most are not ready. They are just a fraction, perhaps, of a larger thought I still haven’t formulated.
I’ve chosen to call these fragments dispatches. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word this way:
to send something, especially goods or a message, somewhere for a particular purpose
I am sending my something (these messages) to somewhere (the internet) for the purpose of accountability. Not just to readers. Also to myself.
Since the internet has been my natural habitat for writing since 2004, it only made sense that these dispatches would wind up on another personal website.
Because I am a user (almost exclusively) of open source tools in this work. It is my open source workspace. Welcome.
A number of years ago I came up with a pretty good business idea. I was confident it would work. Unfortunately, I told myself, I was not in a position to argue for the plan before my company’s leadership. Getting the meeting, establishing the need, and making a convincing case would be hard. Too hard, I decided.
I passed the details of this scheme along to a coworker. He liked it. I think he loved it.
Just a couple of years later, after we both moved on, I spoke to this (now former) colleague again. He had news. His new company just debuted the very strategy I proposed. It was working! He said after discussing it with a few other guys in the office, the ball just started rolling.
While I never received another update directly, the details remained on their website until I stopped checking a year or so later.
To be clear, nothing in this story made anyone rich or famous, it was just a good idea that added another option to their already strong portfolio. And I think some of their customers were big fans.
When I discovered my idea worked, I was happy. Soon after I began to feel it was “stolen.” This was not true. It was just an idea; an idea I never fought for myself because I thought it would be too difficult. And maybe it was difficult, but someone else was willing to endure the hardship to make it happen.
Perhaps ten other people in our industry had the same idea somewhere in the world. I have no way of knowing. I just know that one person, at one company – not my friend, but one of the other “guys” apparently – chose to do the hard thing. And it paid off.
I don’t regret my decision to drop it. My life took an altogether different turn soon after. But I do regret avoiding difficulty. People who make a difference embrace it. I try to keep this in mind at all times these days.
Shipping containers can be found in various stages of decay and disrepair all over our island. We see them in parking lots, between houses, at the side of roads, and in the jungles. Their often peculiar locations prompt questions about their origin, relationship to the surroundings, and contents.
These 20 or 40-foot steel boxes don’t arrive by accident. They are delivered by ship, transferred to a semi-trailer, and dropped carefully in a designated area. Whether filled before embarking or emptied and refilled on-site, someone had to organize and load the cargo.
Whoever spends time and money to make all this happen doesn’t intend to neglect or abandon their investment. But it does happen. The items inside, clearly fragile enough or valuable enough to be protected and remembered, are not.
I don’t own a shipping container. There is no rusty steel box in my yard waiting to be reclaimed by nature. But I do have some forgotten valuables in storage. Many of which recently came to mind when an old desktop computer refused to boot up. Its primary and secondary SSD’s contain files I want to preserve, but rarely open.
There are words and images in that archive I intend (eventually) to publish. Few have been processed in RAWTherapee or revised in gedit. None are ready for release. That’s why I used a few days off this summer to remove the padlock and pry open the double doors!
Most of those RAW photos and text documents have a new home in the cloud thanks to Filen. Items I no longer want are in the trash. Others have better labels in more logical folder structures. Everything was opened and reviewed.
Digital storage should be active storage. Important things filed away for years at a time are no help to anyone.
“Everyone is talking about it.” “All the people in our office use it.” “Soon, every employer will require it.” “It’s industry-standard!”
When we are among the people not talking about it, not using it, never intending to start, and remaining non-standard, we can feel a bit isolated. But most of these claims are made without supporting evidence. All-inclusive statements can be pretty hard to prove.
People who try to convince others they are “unusual” or “out of step” often just reveal their own insecurities.
Trends “sweeping the nation” don’t sweep up everyone. In fact, a quick web search may reveal others racing full-speed in the opposite direction. This is not to say the contrarians are right, but they do exist.
Using or doing or thinking something a little less common is – most definitely – quite common. We live in a world of individuals who choose for themselves.
I just watched an editorial program that described one new technology as “a runaway freight train.” Saying anyone “not on board” would be “run over.” Ignore the fact freight trains don’t carry passengers and focus on the “run over” portion. What are they trying to tell us? Embrace it or be destroyed? Balderdash.
I know people who don’t own cars but still live productive lives. Celebrities, well-known for not using smart phones, make blockbuster films. And photographers advertise their use of vintage film cameras to earn enormous commissions!
We should make technology decisions that are best for us, ignoring the “everyone’s doing it” crowd. Their attempts to make us feel alone must not succeed.
And if we are among those who seek to isolate non-conformists ourselves, we should try something different. Talk about merit and usefulness and value and effectiveness. Admit there are drawbacks, mention potential trade-offs, and acknowledge alternatives.
Doing something different “just for the sake of it” is a bad idea. But some of us may be doing something different on purpose. With knowledge. Understanding what it means.
