What I wrote the other week I wrote in one week. When I noticed I’d recovered my 3GS so close to the day it was damaged a decade ago, I decided to write a story about it. I wanted to time the posting of that story as a nod to the moment the story started, to the minute, ten years prior. I knew it was all just numbers, but when the numbers line up in a particular way, why not indulge in some arbitrary yet significant observance of the occurrence?
The implications of this indulgence meant the blog was set to automatically post whatever was drafted at around 1PM that afternoon. I expected this deadline to help me get written what I wanted to write. What I didn’t expect was for me to write a little over 7000 words while doing it. For reference, some of my longest posts have been around 3000 words, and writing those posts would usually take a few weeks from start to finish.
So—with nearly two times the volume written in a third of the time traditionally needed to write it, how did I do? Superficially, I did an excellent job. There are many words, so many words, all of them appearing at the time I wanted them to. Marvelous.
But I’ve also logged over 120 revisions since the post was published, about ten times the amount there might be on previous long posts. Some revisions caught embarrassingly glaring and obvious technical errors. Others are more stylistic, catching things I would have changed after spending some time away from the work, time I chose to not have until after posting it.
There is no irony like contrived irony: I gave myself a week to write a story about taking the time to do things correctly, and I got one—but it was full of mistakes. It turns out the quality of the destination is derived from what means were taken to get there.
Or, perhaps with less subtlely: yes—we’re all going to die, so none of what’s here ultimately matters. But we’re all not dead yet; so whilst here, it sort of… kind of… does matter, just a little bit.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
I’ve talked a lot about the future before—along with my general distain for the past. It might have something to do with the time I’ve spent in a place where each day contains three nights, but I’ve since come to see the future and the past as part of the same thing. The apparent difference between the two of them seems to be an unfortunate behavioural illusion created by humans and their unnecessarily tiresome and obsessively relentless pursuit of control.
I was given some advice back when I was learning to ride a motorcycle: look where you want to go. It’s damn-near perfect in terms of its idiotic simplicity. Rather than lock eyes with an obstacle and proceed toward it, look at a clear path away from it instead. The motorcycle will generally tend to that direction and take the rider with it.
Then I started towing airplanes in the near-arctic darkness.
The straightforward approach of look where you want to go no longer applied when it came to clear paths away from obstacles. The successful towing of any aircraft required continual anticipatory awareness of what was in front of me as it related to what was behind me. A 34,000 lb ATR-42 (including up to 10,000 lb of jet fuel) will generally tend to the direction it’s already going regardless of the direction I happen to be looking.
The past is no different.
During the introduction to Repair, I noted how my motives for fixing things had changed completely since Reflow was written. With that in mind, it’s borderline painful for me to read the first few paragraphs of Reflow today. It’s obvious how much I missed the point of the exercise, and even toward the end, when it looks like I might be on the cusp of actually understanding why I failed, I gloss over the entire thing and blame my financial situation.
In Reflow, I was too fixated on the destination to realize I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and what I was doing to get there. That was my failure. That was why the repair didn’t work. It wasn’t the money’s fault—as much as I really, really wanted it to be—it was my fault. As much as I thought I understood the problem I was trying to solve, I didn’t. My intent then was not to identify the problem and subsequent solution, it was to admire the result of having done so, because of course I was going to succeed: it’s only hubris if one fails.
Correctly applied, the piece of motorcycle safety advice I was given would serve a genuinely aware rider well. But incorrectly applied, perhaps as the sole directive in destination-based thinking, it’s only a matter of time until the rider is reduced to a blood-soaked coat on the pavement due to a missed shoulder check.
As much as I chuckled at the spectacular failure of my repair attempt at the time, there was a chance I could’ve started a fire. But I hadn’t taken any meaningful safety precautions. I knew I had a fire extinguisher, somewhere. I had no way to exhaust noxious fumes, other than windows I hadn’t opened. And it wasn’t entirely my apartment either: it was also Luna’s home, along with the home of everyone else who had an apartment in the building. Honestly, I look back at what I attempted with an amount of disgust, both in terms of the unmitigated risks taken and my misplaced sense of self-grandeur after the fact.
Past a point, I cannot necessarily fault someone for what they don’t know about themselves or their situation. But once they do know, there’s an amount of responsibility, accountability, and obligation attached to that enlightenment—and if not, the exits are clearly marked. I mean, if I know I cannot relate what’s in front of me to what’s behind me, I have no business attempting to tow an airplane. But if I keep towing regardless, the inventible accident will be my fault and not the plane’s—a somewhat unfortunate situation for the aircraft as it will likely suffer the most damage as a result of my ineptitude.
The entire approach to repairing my PS3 was based on an assumption I’d made without any attempt to verify if that assumption was correct. I blindly ordered parts from internet tutorials, quickly made notes based on the success stories of others, and completely ignored the number of stories detailing anything else. In hindsight, my plan was absurd. I learned how to solder in Grade 7, and I hadn’t done any since, yet I was going to reflow a piece of precision electronics in one shot—using a kitchen oven. Why? Because I read somewhere online that it worked for someone. But where was the evidence to support it working for me? Maybe all I needed was a basic soldering kit, a few practice components, and some patience—I’ll never actually know. After botching the repair, any hints as to what really needed fixing vanished along with the console after I dropped it off as e-waste.
Nonetheless, all is not lost with Reflow. During the last few moments of the post, I start to understand the extent of what I couldn’t know about a situation: seeing that something is broken is not the same as seeing how it became broken. And in the last sentence, I start to piece it together.
…to repair something, to bring it back, there is an amount of understanding that must be gained first.
Understanding is a synthesis of learning and experience, of knowledge and practice. The pursuit of understanding is why I like repairing things now. I gave up on the destination long ago: I enjoy the path instead. From this viewpoint, I can see how it’s impossible to participate in the future without participating in the past. It’s also impossible to leave something unrepaired in one place and find it any other way in another. These observations alone are my hints as to the singular nature of past and future.
But I’ve also observed something else from my viewpoint: an additional human obsession, a misplaced want that is both yearned for as a solution and dismissed as an impossibility. Humans fantasize about being able to change the past, another curious manifestation of their sense of entitlement when it comes to control. Ironically, changing the past is not only possible, it’s decidedly easy: simply change the future. They are, after all, part of the same thing.
Just don’t forget a quick shoulder check before you do—never know what might be coming up from behind.