Just Breathe
I've not wanted to post a blog entry here for several reasons, no one particularly more important than another. Sometimes, I like to load this blog page and see, on a single web page, with a single transit of the vertical scrollbar, life and death, high and low. A spectrum of emotion published for easy perusal.
I am afraid to write new stories in this space because they will push the old stories off the front page. I have often felt perfectly at peace with the last entry in this blog being my mother's eulogy, publicly posted as a signpost on this ever cliched information superhighway.
Truth be told, I have had precious little patience for new stories. Why? to do so would mean life has resumed and I am most certainly not yet OK with that resumption.
So I've buried myself in work. Leading projects. Taking graduate classes. At a recent superbowl party, I holed up in a corner with a protective layer of Microsoft Project schedules in a semi-circle around me. It was not my (or the Bears) finest hour.
My brief time at APL has given me the chance to work on some incredible things, from spacecrafts to prosthetic limbs. I've written research papers and won contracts, led teams, and chaired groups. It hasn't been a bad 3 years...
Most importantly, these were things public enough, and accessible enough, that my family could digest and appreciate their technical merit and social importance. Those are two characteristics this particular software geek rarely gets to bring home together.
Yesterday, I started unpacking some of the Christmas gifts that my mother (via my sister) purchased for me. One such gift was a paper weight, from Glass Eye Studios, labeled "Pluto":
On it was supposed to be engraved the phrase:
For all you have done; For all you will do
We never actually got it to the engraver, which is fine, because the sentiment has been etched, instead, on my heart.
Imagine, if you will, waking each morning to say "this day is for all that I have done, and for all that I will do".
We are all standards bearers, in one way or another. For ourselves, for those who have gone before us, and for those still here who need a friend, a mentor, or even a warning. So often and so easily, I think, we shoulder these roles without admitting to their existence. We are confidant that they are side-effects of our natural, situational behavior. We do this because such a view absolves us of the obligation to be vigilant.
It has been a hard thing, of late, to shake this recognition. And it has been harder still to live up to it.
-Ed
I am afraid to write new stories in this space because they will push the old stories off the front page. I have often felt perfectly at peace with the last entry in this blog being my mother's eulogy, publicly posted as a signpost on this ever cliched information superhighway.
Truth be told, I have had precious little patience for new stories. Why? to do so would mean life has resumed and I am most certainly not yet OK with that resumption.
So I've buried myself in work. Leading projects. Taking graduate classes. At a recent superbowl party, I holed up in a corner with a protective layer of Microsoft Project schedules in a semi-circle around me. It was not my (or the Bears) finest hour.
My brief time at APL has given me the chance to work on some incredible things, from spacecrafts to prosthetic limbs. I've written research papers and won contracts, led teams, and chaired groups. It hasn't been a bad 3 years...
Most importantly, these were things public enough, and accessible enough, that my family could digest and appreciate their technical merit and social importance. Those are two characteristics this particular software geek rarely gets to bring home together.
Yesterday, I started unpacking some of the Christmas gifts that my mother (via my sister) purchased for me. One such gift was a paper weight, from Glass Eye Studios, labeled "Pluto":
On it was supposed to be engraved the phrase:
We never actually got it to the engraver, which is fine, because the sentiment has been etched, instead, on my heart.
Imagine, if you will, waking each morning to say "this day is for all that I have done, and for all that I will do".
We are all standards bearers, in one way or another. For ourselves, for those who have gone before us, and for those still here who need a friend, a mentor, or even a warning. So often and so easily, I think, we shoulder these roles without admitting to their existence. We are confidant that they are side-effects of our natural, situational behavior. We do this because such a view absolves us of the obligation to be vigilant.
It has been a hard thing, of late, to shake this recognition. And it has been harder still to live up to it.
-Ed
Labels: Mom
posted by Ed at 1:29 AM
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