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Due to a fundamental change in my daily routine, I've been more productive lately than I've been in a long time, as watching my three year old during the day and working at night has a suppressing effect on my desire to produce anything.
Since the beginning of summer this year, I've been doing things long relegated to the 'someday' to-do list, including summer-long yard projects, programming a game I hope to release at some point, applying final touches to a book I finished in 2007 (in order to upload it to Amazon), and more recently, finally getting back on the music production bandwagon with two friends in other states. In the last few weeks, I've also been implementing a long-delayed culling of my immense book collection, which before culling, occupied two full walls of my family room. I can't believe how many books I'm discarding. For example, on one entire shelf of mind/consciousness volumes, I'm keeping one book. The same thing happened on one of the theoretical physics shelves. I've clearly turned a corner in my life. I'd been clinging to the idea since I was about 30 that someday I would integrate all these books and formulate a synthesis or new theory no one had thought of, thus making me 'famous.' Ha! Indeed. The truth of the matter isn't that I gave up on some noble quest; the truth is I finally acknowledged how unimportant e=mc2 and theoretical speculation are to the human experience. Could the human race have existed and thrived without nuclear bombs and power plants, ultra-precise clocks, 'uncrackable' codes, GPS, quantum computers (which are specialized and have no bearing on what most people use computers for), microscopes for atoms, biological compasses, and endless speculations about how the mind works with a questionable agenda of applied artificial intelligence? I think I can say yes to that without acquiring Luddite status. Reverse engineering our reality is nothing more than an exercise in pride and vanity, and irrelevant to our aspirations of making the best of the one life we all have. |