Reflections on a day

Started the day far too early to attend a meeting that didn't last long & I had no input to. But remembered the 'experiment" - the chance to see God in the middle of my workday.... & honestly wasn't much where I was actively aware of presence. Did have once incident though - was wandering through the office looking for someone (which seems to be what takes up a large majority of my days lately). While walking past one of the offices, I was struck with by the Edge's opening guitar riffs from "Where the Streets Have No Name". The music impaled me like a spear, piercing my abdomen & stealing my breath away. The sounds came like little ripples of joy on a carrier wave of beauty. (engineering note on the metaphor: The human voice, most sound, isn't at a frequency that will carry over long distances & so to transmit it over radio waves, they use funky math principles to mix in the frequencies of voice/music in with another wave, a carrier wave, that is at a much higher frequency & will travel those long distances. At the other end, the carrier wave gets stripped away (again through funky math stuff) leaving only the original sounds.... )

Anyhow, for a moment there had a flash of wonder & revelation similar to last nights (though completely unique & different if that makes sense - similarily overwhelming, total different experience). Had to choke the tears of being overwhelmed back for a bit, but managed to hold them in (crying at work isn't maybe as profession,
though I'm sure it happens).

(one more geek moment: figured out more or less how to convert a sequence of 4 bytes into the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970. Though I seem to be off by about 7 1/2 hours somewhere.)

There was another brief incident of 'encounter' on the drive home (so don't know if that counts). Because the car's got the wonky wheel thing going on, I've got the radio off so I can listen for the metal shearing & get a few seconds warning if the wheel falls of (yes, over active imagination coupled with being a professional worrier is a bad combination). To fill the silence was sort of singing (half way) U2/Green Day's 'The Saints Are Coming" & contemplating the lyrics & got thinking about the lines "but the shadows still remain since your descent" & thinking about the darkness in the world & was caught by two deep sobs while merging onto deerfoot. Managed to breathe them through & it stayed at only 2 or so... but yeah. (Another aside: was typing something today about 'Deerfoot trail' & instead typed 'Deerfoot trial'... which is maybe kind of accurate).

Tonight was really scattered. I had a night to myself. Lately I've had nights to myself when I've planned for it, chosen to take a moment to myself. Tonight it wasn't so planned. I got home, realized no one had called & I hadn't called anyone. Not a bad thing, but I didn't know what to do with myself. So surfed the net, put G.I. Joe's on the figure stands I'd just gotten in the mail. And sat down to some leftovers & some of my mom's homemade buns & jam. Mostly a filler meal & my tummy felt off afterwards. Sat down to watch part of the 'special features' of the Before the Music Dies video & ended up mesmerized again & watched through the whole shooting match. Lots of more great stuff. Feel strongly that the community house people should watch through Questlove's extended interview segment (if they haven't already). Think there's some great stuff in there.

In the xm radio interview segment, Joel Rasmussen said this which I found interesting:

"I think probably the single most surprising thing.. feedback that's come out of the making of this was when I was screening the film for a group of people here in Austin. There was a woman who came up to me afterwards who said, this film tells the story of engineering. And I just looked an her & I didn't have a frame of reference for what she was saying. And she said, let me explain. In engineering historically engineering companies looked at engineers as their assets. they would develop them, they were concerned about their long term careers & they would sort of guide their growth & their development. And then in the '80s and the 90's when engineering firms began to become consolidated and they became public companies, they no longer had the time or the interest & so engineers were no longer viewed as an asset they were viewed as a commodity. "

What struck me as odd is that I listened to this & as an engineer, I nodded my head in total agreement of what this lady has said. Companies talk a lot about personal development, career development, about their people being their biggest asset, and the stories are almost believable. You see that they have all these great policies & programs - but when you start to try to make use of them, there are all these catches & clauses & hoops to jump through.... and all the time you find you're being bought & sold just like any other slave.... (a well paid slave, mind you, but still...)

But what struck me as odd was my response. Just a nod, no tears. Here I am watching the stories of these artists/musicians & weeping either in sorrow at the injustices they face or with joy as they find their places of creative freedom. I grieve the slavery of the artist & celebrate any moment where the shackles start to fall off.... But yet when someone talks about my own slavery, I just nod in acquiescence that, yep, that's what's going on... this is just the way things are....

... so made me wonder what's up with that? Maybe it's that 'engineer' is a very secondary (or buried) identity for me. Maybe it's that I don't care about engineering. Maybe it's that I don't see hope for engineering. Maybe it's that I don't tie 'engineering' in with such a deep soul connection to people.

But made me wonder if maybe it's easier to fight for someone else's freedom than your own. For my artist friends, I'm thinking about all these strategies to 'help' them with their struggle & work to 'fight the man' on their behalf. Most I'll likely never do. Somewhat from laziness, somewhat 'cause I know I'll annoy my artist friends with the futile attempts to 'help'... but for my own 'bondage', I've got nothing. Didn't even take a moment to think of anything. Again, maybe it's just that I've been spending the last 4 months to 13 years trying to figure out how to get out of engineering, so maybe I'm not going to the 'well' for answers 'cause the well is dry.

But made me wonder again how content we (or mostly me) am with our chains & what stops us from reaching for something more....

... the rest of the evening continued it's disjointed pace. Hit the used CD store at 8:20, grocery store at 8:40 & then came home to cook which brings me to, uhm, now. Just waiting for the food to cool so I can pack it into little containers for lunch.....

... thinking about the last number of posts, the last few weeks of my life, I wonder whether I'm just making all this #$@% up... Maybe I'm not really encountering God. Maybe I'm not getting insights. Maybe I'm just faking this writing stuff... Maybe none of it matters. maybe it's all in my head & I'm just deluding myself that life is getting better, that I'm having fun, dreaming again... finding community... maybe the cycle repeats again, something new & fresh comes to my life, I obsess about it & pour my everything into it, then later get disillusioned, move on, turtle & hide by self til I drive myself crazy & then venture out one more time to try again....

... maybe the emotions, the senses of beauty/joy are just chemical imbalances brought on by years of not enough sleep. Maybe my ticker's bad & I'm living on borrowed time & will expire soon... maybe I'll die happy in this moment (or at least with an illusion of happiness)....

The wonky bits about life is that you're just never sure where you stand.... the sands of time keep shifting under you, sucked between your toes by the great undertow of a vast & endless cosmos filled mostly with 'nothingness'... you can't hang onto the moments of where everything feels 'right' (& thankfully the moments where everything goes to crap disappear that quickly, too)... and so we're left like every other person on the planet. You trust your eyes, your ears, the physical senses. You trust your heart, your mind, your gut & you rely on those things all the while holding all of them in suspicious knowing that your body is deteriorating slowly & there are sicknesses that could take away any of the things you trust in in a heartbeat.... maybe you just try to surf the whole thing, look for that one big crest, try to ride it as far as you can before it falls in on itself & you're caught in the washing machine of water & silt.... & then you try again on the next wave....

& so you try to trust that the moment you're in is where you need to be, where you're made to be.... you hope that the story so far has led you here & the author has some place to lead you next... You either try to choke down the fears or (as I just did) speak them into the wind, name each one &, in the naming, steal their power over you... Once they're named, they seem to be as fragile as you are and hence not such a big looming threat....

...and you choose, again, to get up the next day, stare oblivion in the face & say, "I will attempt to live today, I will seek love today, and joy, beauty, truth & hope.... and seek freedom in whatever that means" These are the days (to steal a metaphor from "Sleepless in Seattle") that you keep reminding yourself to breathe & hope for the day where you don't have to remind yourself anymore....