We all know the routine: you go at it full of enthousiasm, and some stuff fights you all the way to the finish while other stuff just naturally seems to go along with your objectives. But sooner or later, in the world of work, you run into that dead end where all is finished, or at least cannot be completed until you’ve had your needs met by others….

Same here: I finished building the installers for the Publisher, and immediately returned to my writing of the test plan, figuring it would keep me from the Void. But the very next line I wanted to write had me needing to verify some stuff in an old version of the program, and running that required a license which I didn’t have… And since the rest of the story was based on that outcome, leaving it blank and continuing also was no option.

That license will arrive soon enough, but in the meantime there’s not anything that I can work on as far as work is concerned. That’s where this question came from: how do we deal with that? I used to see such intermezzos as the Void, that vacuum which leaves you uneasy because you are not sure what to do with it. Untill that point where you realize there’s no need to do anything, just a possibility of doing things: Your boss would have made sure you had a stack of work waiting, if it was his objective to keep you totally occupied. And then you’d know what to do, so there wouldn’t be a void.

But in every profession, and certainly in computing, there are frequent moments where you just have to wait, simply because the computer and the job demand it. In due time, I came to call it dreamtime: my own internal processor is always ready to pick up any of my excitements, either great or small, to have them planned on or executed, whatever is doable: right now, getting a mug of water beats waiting, so water it is. And of course typing this story…..

The moment you begin to look at everything as an excitement, that is what you get: even having to battle against an unwilling piece of software becomes a kind of online chat between you and it, a chess game. It gives you perplexing hints, and you have to correctly interpret them, to unlock the route to success!   Sounds pretty similar to Life, although I find the clues there even more cryptic. But that no doubt is my computerized mind, for I grew up with them as the closer family than my own….

And pretty soon, Void becomes Vortex, and you get flushed into a world where things become easier than apple pie.  Not because they are any easier, but simply because you are easier, not seeing adversaries and adversity, but opportunities and challenges! I know, I’m the guy who used to hate challenges and competition, but the fun inherent in it is slowly returning to the surface….

Live your challenges, or love them. I don’t mind (because care feels less positive)

Dré