Why Write "Tidy First?": Personal Coda
One thought & I can go enjoy my birthday weekend. I was re-watching “Halleluah: Leonard Cohen, A Song, A Life” the other day. A quote hit me & I started crying.
Leonard had just had all his money stolen by his business manager. At the age of 70 he was flat broke and, as he put it, not in old age but definitely on the foothills of old age. And so he started writing songs again & performing again.
Here’s the quote: “That urgent invitation to complete one’s work is very much in my life. And it’s more urgent than the economic necessity. That the two coincide is just a coincidence.” (This is at 1:36:10 if you go to Netflix.)
I feel that. I see something in programming, in the practice of it, in the consequences of it, in the joy & frustration, in the lure of solitude & the necessity of human connection, that I don’t see reflected in the people I talk to about programming. I think they are missing something. I want to crack open the shell. To give them a chance to glimpse what I see. Whether they choose to look is up to them.
Along the way I expect to learn. I expect to earn. But I feel an urgency to the calling most of all. Time is all I have & it’s ticking away. One second every second. I feel the urgent invitation to complete my work.
Peace.
Kent, it is a pleasure to wish you a belated birthday.
Lovely post. It reminds me of a conversation with my brother Steve and a David Hussman presentation.
In 2011 my brother and I were talking about writing. I told him that I wrote in small chunks, as the ideas hit me, saving some chunks to flesh out later. Steve, always being the observant one, asked if that was how I wrote code.
I told Steve that writing code was like writing poetry and that good code has a sense of rhythm like a poem or a song. Good code reads like poetry and there is a joy in writing and reading it.
Interestingly enough the next year I attended the Keep Austin Agile conference where David Hussman gave his keynote address on rhythmic systems and how good code and good song lyrics have a similar structure and pattern.
Really beautiful. Thank you for sharing this