Stepping out from the umbrella

I looked up and it was March. The last few weeks have been intensive, writing code as if our lives depended on it. Actually it does, it's an unpaid internal project so the faster we can get it off the ground the better. It's pretty much 24/7 except the breaks to do the family duties. Unfortunately, I'll still be grinding away for quite some time.

I do miss blogging, both the reading and writing. Driving in the rain this week, I realized two things. Firstly, it is important to be networked both from a social and informational point of view. Blogs do both wonderfully and very efficiently too. It's like reading a gigantic newspaper with different reporters every day. Being tapped into a cloud of human thought is privilege we take for granted, that is the power of the unseen collective.

Secondly, you have to step away from the umbrella we often create for ourselves. If each word of each blog is a drop of rain, let it fall on you and immerse you. Read blogs that challenge our thinking, our prejudices, our biases and surely we would be better human beings. Our umbrellas are often created by our culture, our schooling, our friends and our jobs. And if you step back, it shields us from so much. Being exposed to the rest of the world through the Internet, both good and bad, at lightning speed creates dimensions of thought we would have not had in any other way.

I know this to be true, because I feel soulfully poorer today despite the thousands of lines of code I have generated. I wonder if those would wander by my blog and who wait to see my comments on theirs have thought that I have left the building. The reverse is true, I'm really stuck in the basement.

Having wrote this I do feel better already.

But I do think of all of you every day