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Holding On For Too Long
I’ve always admired Linus Torvalds. Thus, I found this slashdot.org article, “Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions“, fascinating. Particularly, this Q & A struck a chord in me:
Q: You must of been burned out on Linux kernel development multiple-times over by now… how do you deal with it?
Linus: Oh, I really enjoy what I do. And I actually enjoy arguing too, and while I may swear a lot and appear like a grumpy angry old man at times, I am also pretty good at just letting things go. So I can be very passionate about some things, but at the same time I don’t tend to really hold on to some particular issue for too long, and I think that helps avoid burn-out.
Obsessing about things is important, and things really do matter, but if you can’t let go of them, you’ll end up crazy.
I’ve found that when I can’t let go of something that “shouldn’t be like it is“, the world suddenly stops. I get stuck; immobilized by a stagnating cesspool of circular thoughts and wondering if I’ll ever get unstuck.
The key for me to getting unstuck and moving forward again is to realize that I can’t control or fix everything to “my” liking. As hard as it is to accept, the world doesn’t exist to accommodate “ME“. Thus, when I can remember it (which is a challenge in itself), my favorite prayer is:
BD00, please grant the “other” BD00 the serenity to accept the things he cannot change,
The courage to change the things he can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
How about you? Do you ever get stuck? What gets you unstuck?
Brain-Bustingly Hard
Unsettlingly, I admire the cross-disciplinary work of William L. Livingston because:
- It’s difficult to place into a nice and tidy category (systems thinking? social science? philosophy?).
- It resonates with “something” inside me but it’s brain-bustingly hard to absorb, understand, and re-communicate.
- The breadth of his vocabulary is astonishing.
- He doesn’t give a shit about becoming rich and famous.
- He digs up quotes/paragraphs from obscure, but insightful “mentors” from the past.
As the boxes below (plucked from the D4P4D) show, Gustave Le Bon is one of those insightful mentors, no?
A lot of Mr. Le Bon’s work is available for free online at project Gutenberg.
Human_Being:preserveSelf
As the UML sequence diagram below shows, an “unnamed” Nature object with an infinite lifeline asynchronously creates and, uh, kills Human_Being objects at will. Sorry about that.
So, what’s this preserveSelf routine that we loop on until nature kicks our bucket? I’m glad you asked:
Have a nice day! 🙂
So-Called Reality
Peace And Despair II
What causes your “delta” to increase? Decrease? How does your delta vary with time? Are your delta’s mean and variance both close to zero? What do you think the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Jesus’s deltas were?
Problems, Symptoms, Solutions
I haven’t done a stupid-poopy-pic in awhile… uh, since yesterday, so here’s one fer ya:
And here’s the follow on:
It’s a good thing I have 5 different poopy clips in my plagiarized BD00 graphic toolbox, no?
Spiritual Google
Wow! I can’t believe I stumbled upon this. What’s “this“, you ask? It’s a video of a talk given by Eckhart Tolle at Google. Yes, Google.
I know that religion is a deeply personal issue, but if you’ve never seen Eckhart Tolle in action, please indulge BD00 by at least watching a few minutes of the video with an open mind. Lemme know if it tickles something inside of you. If you get a “meh” feeling, then that’s OK too. Do you think he’s the real deal or just another Swaggart/Bakker clone?
Glide On The Peace Train
The other day at work, while diligently plying away on an interface design, I just happened to notice that I was singing the (artist formerly known as) Cat Stevens’ tune “Peace Train“ to myself. Not out loud (thankfully), but to myself – in my head. This is just another example that reinforces the fact that “we don’t think; thinking happens to us“. No?
It may be scary to some to discover that thinking unconsciously and automatically happens to us, but the saving grace is that at least we can consciously choose how to react to those thoughts. Well, most of the time. Well, some of the time?
What was the last song you sang to yourself?
Change In Behavior
“Change your thinking, and your behavior will change.” How many times have you heard or seen that sentence? Of course, it’s true, but as ever, the devil’s in the details. In my case, I’ve often fooled myself into thinking that my thinking has changed when it really hasn’t. So, the question is, who are “I” and “myself” in the previous sentence?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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