I keep losing myself. A couple days ago a student asked me what I'm doing with my life... because his mother kept asking him. I laughed, because I know what they both mean. And I tried to answer.
But I admitted that I'm kind of lost. There's a lot I'm working on, and I'm trying to get it all to come together. He said something about "a trusting the process thing" and I said "It's very much a trusting the process thing." Except that's a half-truth, because mostly I don't even trust my own process, and that's the biggest problem.
So yeah, I talk about uncertainty being so important and it is, but I recognize that confidence is also important—and even faith. Always have seen that, at least in part! But I don't necessarily talk in such a way that you'd know. And maybe the way we talk changes how we see.
This wasn't exactly the point I started out trying to make here. There's a particular concept, or nucleus/vortex/nexus of concepts, that is so important to me that it's almost who I am - even though it's just ideas, and ideas aren't selves. But when I forget that this nexus is what I'm about, I lose myself somehow.
It's the first thing I studied in graduate school - complex systems, how simple things create amazingly complicated and even living patterns.
That's an art and a science and it's what I'm about. The simple things could be shapes and letters and words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and life stories. They could be pulses and sounds and textures and music. They could be bits and you know all that IT stuff.
That's what fascinates me. Something from nothing - or almost nothing.
It's why black holes fascinate me. Even the slight chance that they could be universes on the other side - it's the most intriguing thing imaginable. Something from nothing - or everything from one point.
It's why I wonder at games made of plastic tokens or digital bits, movies made of film grain and magnetic crackles, albums made of air made of fingers on instruments.
Does what I'm interested in make sense? It might make sense to no one except me as a single thing, but I see a single thing in that, and that's my life's work. That's what I'm doing with my life, or trying. And what am I going to do but keep trying? Moth to flame. The flame is everything.
