Now

This page is meant to be read in the present tense. If you're skimming for a future deliverable, scroll back later.

The only frame that holds

"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have." — Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

You are not managing time from outside it. You are inside it. The roadmap, the backlog, the five-year plan — useful fictions, but every line of code you will ever write gets written in a now. Treat the now like the only real workshop, because it is the only real workshop.

A practice you can use today:

1. Before you open the editor, take one breath you actually notice.
2. Pick the one thing that, if you finished it today, would let you close the laptop without lying to yourself.
3. Do that thing. The rest is a queue.

What I'm doing this week

• Tending the agent swarm on this site (sync pipeline, the [...postStack] route, MDX components).
• Running more inference locally so I stop renting thinking I could be hosting.
• Writing more. Shipping less per unit of writing.
• Listening to the cats when they say it's time to look at the sky.

Scripture for the cosmically over-scheduled

When the calendar gets too large and the self gets too small, I read this:

Job 38:4–7 (KJV) — "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

Read slowly. The voice in that passage is not scolding Job for being small. It is pointing at how wide the room is. The morning stars are still singing. The cornerstone is still set. You did not have to lay it. You only have to live in the house.

The alien part

I think the universe is stranger than our roadmaps. I think the distance between physics and what is actually going on is non-trivial. I think there are intelligences other than ours and the honest posture toward them is curiosity, not management. None of this requires belief. It only requires that you keep looking up sometimes.

If the only thing that happens in your next ten minutes is that you look out a window and remember the morning stars are still singing — that counts as work.