This morning there is a humming noise going on in my head. Okay, this is not that heavy humming that may go on all night and still is pushing on when morning comes. It is more like a sudden summer wind. I sneeze, and I long for my allergy medicine. My humming concerns all these habits that I have grown over the years. I refer to those that once made life easier but they do not any longer. Now, they have an adverse influence on the life I want to live. – Bullshit! Now, I am moving back into wining over how things are. – ”Shut up, put yourself on the mulch and wait for better times.”
What do I want? – No more attempt to blind me for old and not so adequate decisions. Or, as I heard someone say: ”invent yourself out of this hurricane of early decisions, not so appropriate”.
The first example of such a wrong decision jumps to my mind. It is when I decided to work on developing cutting-edge technology for an employer in Sweden. To my young eye, this seemed possible. But, the circumstances at this place was not the best. There were deficits in the social environment. But I did not bother.
My desire to maintain a relationship with a particular female influenced my decision. Behind that, I think there was some emotional dust on my side. At that time, I thought I would not be of interest to anyone of the opposite sex. But, one girl did show that interest. My relation with her became important. I know that at that point this feeling dictated my actions. But, I did never inspect this feeling. I was too afraid of falling back into a state of non-existing. A feeling that has been my share, all through life. My feeling might have been enhanced by a particular event at the age of 1 year. I believe I felt deeply hurt at this event. But, enough of that.
My decision did have the consequence that I needed to invent a way to learn my subject of interest. I also needed a personal style of working. No one existed that was able to mentor me. Not even acting as a raw model. In consequence, I exposed myself to many scientific articles. They gave me an image of what I was to achieve. I invested a lot of time in reading such material. I could have gone deeper, or put a limit on my scope of interest, or analysed the works presented more carefully. But, I did not.
A few years later the use of computers influenced my flow of incoming material. Our library offered a support called ” Selective Distribution of Information”. When using this tool, I exposed me to an even richer flow. Many articles passed my eyes. They came from a wide area of subjects. I must have drowned myself in incoming data without knowing it. My ability to derive information from received data has a limit. This way, I blinded myself for the social conditions at my working place. I avoided the obvious conclusion: ”this does not work for me. I do not want to use myself to compensate for a surrounding that is not supportive”. In my naive youth, I must have believed, that this did work good enough, but it did not. I felt as if my early attempts to act competently did work all right- But, in the end, they did not. At that time I did not have the capacity to scrutinise my illusions.
During these years I learned a way to relate to written material. I follow this method today. The subjects have changed. Today I do come into contact with far more data than in those days. I must admit my ability to extract information is still compromised. I must be looking forward to some golden bird whispering in my ear how to do this. Mean time, I fill my hard drive and book shelves with loads of material. When I read the abstracts of any material, I believe the article or book would be interesting to read. But I do not have the time nor the lust. If I do nothing, I will drown in data before someone has prepared me a coffin.
Where does a solution hide? Throw out the books? Delete and reformat the hard drive? Enter a monastery and become a monk? I need to focus on something that has a shorter time to payback.
This blog entry is open ended. I wish I could tell you more, how it goes, or my next step but I cannot.
Göran Stille
Göran Stille 