KODA

It’s 11:50pm of the last night of spring break, and for some reason I have the urge to write here.

I feel like I need to make up for lost time. I’ve let things collect dust here for the past term, so it seems strange to be trying it again on the eve of the next wave of school. Yet right now, I want to. That’s all I’d like to say. I know am rarely interested in reading other peoples’ apologies for not writing on their blogs. So I’ll try to keep things topical from here on out.

Tomorrow will bring Popular Culture and Intro to Operating Systems, in the lovely city of bridges. I am very much looking forward to it, even though it feels a bit deadening to go back to school after merely a week’s break. Even so, it seems every time I get a break I see the alternative — diddling — which makes me wish for the linear deadlines of the school year. I’m kind of concerned that this is what it’s coming to: preferring force-fed work instead of real projects. It’s hard to be both productive and self-motivated.

I wonder occasionally if someday I’ll look back at these years and wonder how I had all this time and managed to choose this as what to do with it. I simply have not found something better to do. In his Stanford commencement speech Steve Jobs said:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

And that’s where I’m at. I feel most purposeful when I am aware my time here is limited; when I remember things are temporary. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that this feeling passes as soon as the thought leaves my mind. The problem is remembering. There’s the existential concept that as hard as we try, we’ll inevitably fall back into states of unawareness in our daily life. The challenge is keeping the context stored up somewhere. So that when it’s needed, it will return.

Once for a little while I became interested in lucid dreaming. I programmed myself to achieve consciousness in my dreams by training myself to constantly ask myself “Am I dreaming?” while I was awake. My process was linking this idea to as many thoughts as possible; so that many actions, feelings, and thoughts reminded me of the dreaming test. I reasoned that if this worked in my waking consciousness, it would when I was dreaming. It did. After some time, I stopped keeping up this mental practice, and the dreams stopped. Nowadays I rarely dream lucidly, or even remember my dreams.

Perhaps this can be applied to Jobs’ self-test as well. By linking the question of purpose to as many ideas as possible, I think I could remember to ask the question more often. The only tough part is remembering to get started. This sense of context is something that I’m so looking for… and hope for tomorrow, as the drone of school starts again. I want try it. Yet for now, I must be dreaming.