growth

2023: Personal Things Learned.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

My normal perspective on the ‘New Year’ is that it’s just another day, and in that regard tomorrow will be the same. Yet there is plenty that I learned this year that is noteworthy, and today is as good a day as any to be thoughtful about it.

Friendships.

I’ve seen friends come and go, and old friends rise from the ashes of time to return. Good friends, you see, do not disappear – they simply go on their own paths a while, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll eventually meet them again and it will be as if you had only seen them yesterday.

I lost friends this year to death, to their own character, and to different paths. The ones I lost to death I am fortunate with because they left behind people in their wake that are of worth, and who bear the mark of their own friendships. That’s the way of things, and there is no better or worse about it.

When it comes to those lost to their own character, there is little to be said about it. Perhaps I am too set in my own ways, but when people show me who they are with their actions, I do not ignore it. I generally ask a few questions or observe a bit longer, but some people aren’t friends anymore, and sometimes they never were. Those are the ones I celebrate leaving because they free me to meet new and interesting people.

The different paths aspect is a constant in my life. In some respects, I am a traveler and the people I have met over the years are generally also travelers; I have more in common with those that explore ideas and thoughts than those that stay in one place, comfortable in accepting what is around them.

One thing I have taken to saying this year is that while people may be traveling in the same direction, their destinations may be different. They must chart their own courses, and while you have them learn what you can from them.

Imagination

My imagination and I have reconnected, though this world conspires against it. Part of it was related to sleep. Part of it was related to mindset, part of it was related to some of the wrong people being around me and filling my head with their static drudgery.

You know the sort of people. The ones who age even though stuck in time, not having grown and depending on the growth of others to pull them along.

This has opened up worlds of possibility in my mind which I have been researching and writing about using some groovy new software. The act of buying software itself was a leap, it was actually more feeling than rationality. I dreamed of what I needed, I took a leap, and I got lucky and I must say that the words are flowing much better than they once were.

A lot of this has to do with the present state of artificial intelligence, too. While it’s all mainly statistical models and probability that gives us what we want, what is being marketed as artificial intelligence is allowing me to connect things in new and interesting ways, which I hope to publish more of either on my websites or in books.

Personal Growth.

Any actual adult that has been adulting for some time will tell you that being an adult is not very fun. It isn’t. Because of the way I grew up, I only maybe had about 10 years of childhood before I was working and dealing with things that are commonly problems of adulting.

In that, I picked up some scar tissue along the way, as we all do, but this year my former psychologist told me I wasn’t insane. Granted, that’s not quite the same as being sane, but I’m of the firm opinion that no one is actually sane. Questions I had about myself that I couldn’t really fathom I did get some help with, and I was fortunate to have found a great psychologist who was good at gently nudging me along my introspection and empowered me on some things by allowing me to say things out loud that I never knew I needed to say out loud.

Oddly enough, bonsai was a large part of my personal growth as well. There are a lot of metaphors in bonsai that apply to life, and you don’t learn it in a class. Some things need to sit in a clay pot to get back to them, some things need more trimming and attention than others, all need different things to grow and, most importantly, you cannot make something do what it cannot do.

My first Barbados Cherry bonsai.

You can, however, do amazing things by letting things tell you what they want to do, and what is possible.

And so, from the regular readers and subscribers to this blog, I would like to thank you for showing up and reading. For those that just stop in, I hope you found what you were looking for or even better, found things you didn’t know that you were looking for.

2024 will not be better or worse, really. We can make ourselves better, and I’d encourage you all lean toward becoming better versions of yourself, as we all should aspire to.

The Umbilical Cords.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

unlikely parentsEarlier this week, a friend of mine and I were talking on the phone and somehow we got to what happens after our parents die – when we come into our own, able to identify biases our parents instilled in us without the constant reminder. When my father died, there was much to unravel and I had to do it quickly because of the way my father handled some things that I inherited – and when it came to my mother, because of the way I grew up, there seemed less to unravel because of the way I grew up, and yet to this day, I’m still working on that.

We realize at times that the parents we had were basically children when they had us as we grow older than them. For some people, the parents did the best that they could with the tools that they had with the experience they had at the time – and if we were fortunate, they grew because of it.

Two days ago, I saw one of my neighbors that I had not seen in a while. She had been skinny, to the point where I wondered if I should take her food now and then, but now she was rounded out, her cheeks filled out pleasantly. We exchanged pleasantries, and it came to mind that I had helped her father, a few years my senior, with changing a tire on her car. The reality is that I simply did it because, as I found out in the conversation during, he had focused on his guitar while I was being indoctrinated into pragmatism and self sufficiency. I inquired about him, because he was a fun person, and she told me he had died last year.

I was shocked, conveying condolences and at the same time wondering how. He had seemed in good health. The local medical examiner, after an autopsy, said it was cancer in his lungs, while she was describing a sudden onset. Her mother, who I had also met, is presently fighting cancer with mixed success. I couldn’t help recall that earlier conversation I had with that other friend. This explained her weight gain, which I did not find bad or unhealthy yet, and I mentioned it and told her to take care of herself.

We have this tendency to forget about ourselves when we’re worried about people we love and in doing so, we sometimes lose our own centers. I speak from experience.

Yet another friend, whose wife just beat breast cancer, is now dealing with her mother and the ovarian cancer that is inoperative. There’s just a lot of cancer around me right now, for some reason. Maybe it’s my age group, and as I like to point out, modern medicine has allowed people enough longevity to get cancer in the first place where they may have died of other things before – which makes sense in the elderly, but not in the young.

We gain from our parents, even if we gain the wrong things. No parent is perfect, no relationship ideal, even in retrospect. It’s a part of life, and though we don’t want to hear it when the sting of loss is fresh, it allows us to find our own potentials and to grow beyond our parents. This is a deeply personal part of us, an intimacy that few share. It’s when we stop comparing ourselves to our parents and begin disregarding those that continue to compare us to our parents that we truly grow beyond.

We don’t talk about it, perhaps because of some taboo, but I had one cousin when my father died who told me that now that my father had died, I would grow in ways that I would not yet understand. I did not understand at the time, and even now, almost 17 years after his death, am I truly beginning to appreciate it.

This is a part of being human. A horse, in contrast, becomes a horse within moments of birth in almost everything but size, walking and finding it’s footing. We humans take longer, and we are born into a world of artificial constructs, fictions, about who we are, what nation we belong to, etc, which requires a lot more time to grasp and work within. Horses and chickens don’t need to worry about credit ratings or paying the rent, or which football team to support no matter how bad they are.

Unraveling ourselves, we either find our way or choke on the umbilical cords of our world.

Growth

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

In between reading and writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we grow as people. There’s the biological process, cell division, etc – we come with our own blueprints in this regard, and through the Human Genome Project, a few on the planet understand this to a degree well beyond the average person’s – but the basics are there for all to understand. But other sorts of growth defy us, and I have found nothing in all my reading and exploration that sufficiently explains things to me.

I suppose it’s a peculiar thing to think about, but perhaps it seems that way because we don’t think about it enough. Or, perhaps it’s just a fool’s errand, the universe trying to understand itself through the self study of a collection of molecules that defy mathematical probability and not reality, which seems pretty consistent with reality defying probability at every turn. And through all of this, somewhere on a planet in this otherwise uninteresting part of the Universe, someone sitting in a chair idly twisting their toe on the ground is thinking about something highly improbable.

So this is the background noise of our growth. It is the background noise of what we perceive as growth. Perceive? Why yes of course, because we can’t truly measure our growth, and we can only assume that it is growth because of changes in ourselves – if we bother to even take the time to assess ourselves.

That which we perceive has it’s own tempo. In cities, and around other human beings, it is a matter of the tempo of others, of that which is artificial, of our own collective creation. In more rural settings, nature’s tempo is more dominant. In the quiet of solitude, we choose what is dominant – we choose our backgrounds as we select a music playlist to read or write to. We color our world in this way with our choices, and what allows us this flexibility, brittleness or firmness of choice? Is it our experience coupled with some DNA and RNA settings set at our birth default. Then we interact with our world, twisting and turning our matrices, folding in on ourselves, in extreme circumstances the result becoming as tortured as the path to becoming tortured.

To make matters worse, we are conflicted – each person, to some degree, wants to belong and thus will try to fit in with some – maybe because they are what they wish to be, maybe because that’s all they have, maybe because they know better, maybe because they don’t. And yet, every human being also wants to be individual, independent, and someone that stands out be it for reasons of procreation or less biologically rooted reasons.

So. How does one measure growth along these lines?

Well, we can’t as far as I can tell.

And yet we talk about personal growth as if we could stand next to a post every year or so and draw a line to measure a physical attribute. Our experience of growth is subjective against a flowing canvas that we do not yet understand.

But we change. We learn, hopefully, some faster than others. Physically, we grow until our body decides that entropy deserves a fighting chance, and I cannot help but wonder if perhaps emotional and mental disorders, unrelated to our biology, are not our minds letting some of that entropy in.

And then what is entropy? For this context, a means of explaining disorder within any system as applied to ourselves, but then this leads to question what disorder is when considering what we have learned from Chaos theory, that chaos – disorder – is likely just order we do not recognize yet.

So the reality is that we don’t know enough to measure ourselves. So why do we try? Why do I try? Isn’t it somewhat egotistical to measure our own growth? Isn’t it sort of like killing the Buddha?

And there we are, full circle. There is personal growth, we all understand that, but when it comes to actually demonstrating it, measuring it…. we do not have metrics, we do not have anything that is truly objective, and even the opinions of others are flawed by their subjectivity.

Breached Walls.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

BoredomLast year, I did not publish much – I wrote a lot – by design, largely because I gave myself a period without the constraints of self-imposed deadlines or goals. There was introspection, there was extrospection, and nothing measurable in terms of what I accomplished.

It involved me slamming myself intellectually and emotionally against the walls of my own narrative and the narratives that defined me, a messy internal process where I questioned everything I could about myself.

I’d decided to do this because I found myself writing in so many voices that I could not recognize myself. Gigabytes of text were written and deleted during this period of growth in range and depth which I believed were necessary to push myself just a bit further. Here and there, I broke through borders of myself, oozing into new territory, and embracing the wild experiment of something that we all seem to forget in the narratives imposed on us and we impose on ourselves.

The wild experiment of truly being myself. Whoever that is.

Snorkel Depth

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Fountained.I haven’t published anything online recently. I write that without apology and most certainly without remorse.

Simply put, I did not feel like writing. I’ve been adjusting to the new prison of my life, where I now no longer need worry about what comes next as much as paying attention to the now and also reflecting on the past through different eyes.

It has been sort of like the tilt-shift photo here at top. It looks nice, but that lack of symmetry of the plants is not quite right.

Not long ago, I almost broke my silence to write about the experience of using up a bottle of dish washing detergent in my new home – my first permanent home – and the feeling of permanence it gave. But that feeling past, and therefore wasn’t permanent, which in itself is irony. The litany of bottles of dishwashing detergent that I have used since has become the norm, and that becoming the norm is itself the change.

Most of my life, I gauged the size of the bottle of the dish washing detergent I purchased to how long I expected to be at a place. I do not do this anymore.

There are other small things that cropped up like these, novelties to me, but I imagine so normal for others. That the way I am now living is closer to what most consider normal is actually a collection of small treasures and poisons for me.

Most of my life – why does the phrase ‘natural life’ get used, as if an unnatural life were possible – I have effectively lived by what I could carry to the next place, and the next place.

That affects how you deal with everything. If you’re constantly on the move, you compartmentalize, always ready for that next leap, always ready to jump at an opportunity regardless of geography, or relationships.

Part of the latter, too, is that what I do at any given moment has always been more important than the people. My life has taught me that people leave, that we leave, and that nothing stays the same no matter how strong of a connection.

The last season of ‘Ray Donovan’ on Netflix was great writing this way. “Forgive yourself” was a large part of it, but then, if and when we do forgive ourselves, what is left? If we forgive ourselves, what happens to us? And in my own way, I’m finding that out too. Brilliant writing for that show, by the way, worth watching. 

Maybe he knows a different way of doing the same thing. Should be interesting.I’ve been reading as well, of course. This book, while not an original thought to me (similar to some things I have learned over time), was also an enjoyable read.

 

Where I live now – allegedly a community – there are people at different levels of the social structure of society. Some are great, some are annoying, but I have the luxury to contemplate them all in the solitude of my new world. Each a character, each with their own stories. And, as I fall into place in my own world, water filling a depression, I cannot help but love the fact that not caring as much about them leaves me understanding them better. Their passions and loves on their sleeves, they run amok.

And I see pain, and sometimes I feel that pain, which is yet another reason I stay to myself. Buddha was on to something, and maybe Buddha did right by himself or not – we will never know.

So I don’t know exactly what is coming next. I am slowly returning from my submarine view of myself, my life, and the people around me.

Sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not, and without anger or regret, my tropisms will lead me to what is more pleasant to me. That, in and of itself, is a new novelty…

Define #Home.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

homeI stayed my first night in a place that I actually own and pondered what ‘home’ is. I’ve worked decades toward this end.

‘Home’ is an ethereal concept for me. In college, in the military, at work, people often ‘went home’ for holidays.  I was already, I thought, ‘home’, because where else would I be?

Sitting in the new place, I wondered why I did not yet feel comfortable. There was a feeling of incompleteness, a void yet not an emptiness.

It was quiet and still and new. ‘New’ has never been a problem for me, my life has been about ‘new’ – change has been a constant as I wandered from place to place, living out of bags,  adjusting here and there. I always knew where my towel was.

Yet in that first night I could not understand why it felt so different. I slept well, and when I awoke it still seemed un-home.

Weeks later, having almost completely settled in, I know what it is – because it is home now.

It isn’t the things I moved in, it isn’t the furniture. It isn’t the people who come over because no one has and very few will. It’s because I did not have a writing nook, a place where I could sit and feel right enough about the universe to write what was on my mind. It was also the quiet, and the lack of intrusion on my thoughts by some incessant noise, and more importantly, the worry of it happening.

It was an anxiety of sorts, a feeling that the other shoe had not yet dropped – and the last place I rented on the ground floor certainly had a lot of shoes dropping above.

Home.Home is where I can write, where I can read in peace, and where I am comfortable – and the latter has taken me time because there’s no disruption. There is privacy, an air of security that I’ve never had, and a feeling of standing on solid earth where before life required sea legs. I worry a bit of this last thing, but venturing out in the world allows my sea legs to maintain themselves.

Home is where I don’t need the metaphorical sea legs, where the noise created is my own…

And where I finally finished this post I had begun writing 2 weeks ago.

You Never Know Enough

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

New Smyrna Beach Dawn (09/05/2016)It’s easy to simply stop, to ride things out, and stay at the level that you’re at. It’s the most common of mistakes and also one that so many embrace; it’s embraced because there is more to life than growth; there is more to life than growth otherwise we would be no more than cancer cells – and likely as damaging.

Yet, life requires growth.

Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.   – Charlton Ogburn, The Maurauders (1959)

To stay alive, growth means moving forward. To be alive, one has to grow.

At any point in time, where we are is determined by who we have become.

Where we will be is determined by who we become.

Who we become is determined on by how willing to grow beyond where we are.

How bad do you want it?

Reboot Stages

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

ReBoot SpriteIt’s happening again.

At times in life, things change so much that a re-evaluation happens – or should. I suppose for people considered normal in society, such times might be when they are getting married, or when they’re having a child. For me, it almost always  seems to have to do with supporting myself or some new knowledge that requires a re-evaluation of everything that has happened since.

References

It’s a minefield. We remember things sometimes not as they happened but as we want to remember how they happened – a fact that keeps lawyers and psychologists gainfully employed, where objectivity is as subjective as our memory. This is where objective notes can be of worth, disciplined writing that requires one to report to a piece of paper or other medium what happened in sometimes annoying detail. Writing logs in the Navy and with the Marine Corps prepared me for that, from security logs to SOAP notes in medical records.

Writing notes is important. Recently, someone griped to me about how their manager required full reports from them and, 2 days later, would ask them again. This has been happening for years, and he reported to me a conversation where the manager said, “I don’t remember 90% of what you tell me.” My thought was – think it with me, don’t say it out loud – “Write that shit down!“.

I have found in writing things down I do remember things in detail without referring to my notes; though admittedly if I write things for other people they read through a filter of their own reading comprehension if they cross the threshold of their willingness to read. You can’t document for people who don’t RTFM. Or, on the internet, follow hyperlinks or actually read the posts you share. Fair notice: I mock people who don’t do the latter 2 things openly, viciously, and with a great deal of annoyance.

So I have notes, scribbled into Moleskine notebooks, documents in manila folders, documents on computer systems (no cloud; it’s insecure, silly)… and I find myself perusing  these things and looking not at the way I wanted my life to go but how it actually went, from the sources of meals to friendships that lasted to those that did not, from ideas that are now rejected to ideas that have survived decades. I’ll gratuitously link Moleskine notebooks I use on Amazon.com because they have survived decades. 

Well written notes from other people can be awesome. Poorly written notes from other people should be printed on toilet paper and used appropriately. Must I draw it for you? 

Re-evaluation

Meditation in the Deer-ParkIf you have good notes, the hardest part is re-evaluating… everything,

Everything that happened. Everything affected. How it affected you. How it affected others. How everything was affected between then and the now. Everything.

This requires the hardest thing of all: Honest reflection. Being hard on one’s self, being realistic about results, and being able top hold multiple conflicting ideas in one’s head at the same time. It is, by no stretch, easy. It takes time, energy, time, introspection, time, questioning the introspection, time and… did I mention time?

Growing is hard, painful and has no patience for ego or dishonesty to one’s self. Being dishonest means atrophy or stasis – really one and the same – and dooming one’s self to the failures of one’s own history. Doors will remain disguised as walls, walls may be disguised as doors like a cartoon.

This part gets harder every time, I’ve found. The volume of what you have to process increases with time, and, if you have learned anything from previous re-evaluations, means a more assiduous process every time. Worse, as we get older our opinions can become more hardened and more difficult to change, making the introspection more difficult. Sure, someone out there might write a book about how it gets easier – maybe they know something I don’t – but it’s harder and harder every time for me, but more and more necessary as I grow.

Paths open, paths close, plans are experimented with… some make it through this process, some don’t. Which leads us to…

Decisions, Decisions

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

– Laurence J. Peter

“Whee do I want to be next? What do I want to do? What’s the next set of goals?”

Such questions were easier when I was a child, even as a teenager when I knew everything and felt the confidence people seek in politicians. More experienced, having put my hands on the stove burners of life a few times, it’s harder every time – and easier at the same time. As we grow older, we’re supposed to have more questions than answers but we’re supposed to be better at asking the right questions.

Or, at the least, we think so. In talking with people who seem to have their lives together, I’ve found that when they are honest they don’t feel that way. Life is a floor of banana peels, plans are order we try to push onto a canvas of uncertainty – misunderstood order we learn about as we grow, or we break. There are skeletons against the walls of Life, broken bones apparent – we see them in life as those that we somehow outgrew.

The rare ones we know are like us, figuring stuff out, maybe even leaning on each other. Statistically, I think that it’s fair to say that as we progress there are fewer and fewer people in these Halls of Life still navigating their way – some ahead, some off to the side.

We don’t really know what we’re doing. We just know what we’ve done and tried to learn from it – some better than others. Some have been afraid to get bruised and fall, they stand in place or even dare sit down in life as we trundle by. Some even grab our feet, drowning in their stagnation they try to hold us. The angry kick them, the strong pull away easily, the fearful slap at them and attempt to run away. Some might spend the time to convince them to get back up and face life.

Yet we must move on, and even undecided, we make our decisions with the best of intentions and hopefully with the best information and sincere re-evaluation, or as close to them as possible.

Slide.

In time, you will realized that’s all anyone is doing, no matter how far ahead or behind you think they are.

Grief

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

GuiltWhen we lose someone, we feel varying degrees of sorrow. There’s no real scale; it’s the common wisdom of counseling that there are varying scales of sorrow and that some who have a mental illness feel things more… but that’s all based on how we react to emotion and is hardly an empirical measure across different people.

We all feel things differently.

Here’s my thought: When we lose someone, we lose everything that person meant to us – consciously and unconsciously. We grieve this loss, sometimes without even understanding the losses involved, and now and then we are reminded of the loss. It’s only when we come to terms with what was lost that we can move beyond grieving. The things that remind us are the things we need to address – not necessarily to forget, but to understand what exactly was lost.

As they say, you do not know what you have until it is gone – but the depth of that is lost in a two dimensional expression, and is impossible to communicate to others without the context of that loss. The more complicated the relationship, the harder to communicate – the more commonality, the easier.

In a way it’s very strange to me that it took me all this time to figure that out, and in a way it makes sense that it did.

And it was a great lesson from a candle that burned fast and bright in my own life, and one I shall not forget – and shall cherish.

It’s only when we learn the lessons we need to that we evolve beyond grief.

What Dost Thou Do; What Hast Thy Done?

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Attempts at Self Portrait (6)Invariably, people who have reconnected or just connected with me have gone through the Q&A with me that I used to find painful.

Whether I’m married (no), how many children I have (looks around), what I’ve been doing with myself (where do I even start?), what I’m doing…

These questions have never made sense to me, particularly the last two. Whether I’m married or not is no gauge of completeness or even content – I have empirical evidence on both ends of the spectrum. Whether I have children assumes that I would want to try to explain the mess of humanity to a little human without having to apologize all the time – and nevermind the biological requirement of said little human having a mother who I would have to put up with, and more importantly, she would have to put up with me… I’m sure I don’t know. Absolutely sure.

The last two, though. Now, all of these questions are related to how people view the world, their lives, and what a life is. In that, the last two are bothersome.

So here’s how I’ve come up with my new answers.

What have I been doing with myself?

How many times have I thought to say, “that’s a rather personal question… what have you been doing with yourself?”, but opted not to?

I’ve been living. I’ve been growing.

No, really, I’ve been living. I’ve been growing.

See, as a kid, when everyone was being asked what they wanted to do, and the answers ranged from policeman to fireman to doctor to lawyer… I wanted to be an oceanographer. And then life happened.

I ended up working with electrical motors, then offset printing, then computer programming, then software engineering (there is a difference, kids)… In college, I started as a EET, then went to CIS, then dropped out. then I joined the Navy as a Sonar Technician, switched over to Naval Nuclear Propulsion, then switched again to Hospital Corpsman.

Then life happened again; I worked at a blood bank where I trained phlebotomists and made custom furniture for mobile blood drives – then went to Honeywell, where I got to play with Inertial Navigation and GPS stuff, then went to…. well, I did a lot of things. And then somewhere along the way, someone started paying me to write, and I picked up photography and people paid me for that, too. Then I inherited some land, and I applied a lot of what I know about learning to learn more about agriculture, land management, and generally, how to get results without confrontation.

Just a few days ago, a lawyer sat across from me and said, “You don’t need me, you do all of this stuff by yourself.” No, no, of course I need her. I just think her talents are wasted on the mundane things I can solve myself by simply not being a jerk and working with people. It’s a novel concept that most religions were centered around at some point – we see how that went. But I digress.

And all this time I’ve been reading, thinking, exploring the world as much as I can in all ways that I can – not just physically. So what have I been doing?

The answer is looking for something. It’s looking for some sort of answer to gauge where I am in society. Am I someone who wields influence? No, not really, I wouldn’t like to think so. Am I rich? No, my bank account is something that I have a detached relationship with. What sort of car do I drive? How big is my house? How much tax do I pay?

So yeah, I’ve been living and growing. I might as well tell people I’m a nomad.

“I’ve been nomadic.” Leave that right there. Give them the hand wave with it and look at them as if they should know what that means. It should be fun.

And…

What am I doing?

Well, to be honest, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. No one wants to hear that. The truth is that no one knows what they are doing. We’re all winging it. Some are on the beaten paths, though, so that’s what’s really being asked: “Which beaten path are you on?”

Well, I’m not. Truth be told, I never really have been – a few times I tried them, but they just didn’t suit me. They smell wrong, they make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and the authoritarianism within them fills me with dread. Beaten paths are boring, too.

Meanwhile, I’m the sort of person who just pops up out of the brush now and then to see where everyone is.

Clearly I need a better answer than that. Clearly people want me to impress them somehow, tell them how awesome what I’m doing is, but they won’t see the value in not knowing and figuring it out as I go along.

One of my initial thoughts to answer this question was, “Avoiding answering this question”, but that just seems a bit too… jerkish.

I don’t have an answer to this other than moving stones, and I think that’s the answer I’ll go with.