People as Lights
Recently I caught myself thinking of people as light. I spend a lot of time reading programmer weblogs and have recognized just how focused some people can get. I was getting a mental picture of how that type of focus makes them like lasers: powerful, narrow, and concentrated. When I thought about it and started making the parallel I thought of how others are like spotlights - football "Friday Night Lights" spotlights - powerful as well but so far reaching that they encompassed a massive area; without the ability to cut deeply like a laser, but retaining the kind of strength that doesn't allow a person to look at them directly with the eye.
By this point I'm thinking of all sorts of lights: headlamps of cars, street lamps, flashlights, desk lamps, candles - moments like this are when my mind is wandering and K asks "What are you thinking?" and I can't really articulate it well and say, "Oh, nothing."
Because I'm at a point where I'm recalibrating a lot of my life I'm extending this whole idea of light to myself, wondering what parallel I would draw and also what kind of person I'd like to be. I admire lasers a lot; if I could talk to someone who has a PhD built around George Eliot's writing I'd be giddy, but I couldn't focus so heavily on something without intellectual infidelity like wondering about things like planets, geopolitics, insects, or computer languages.
I think flashlights are admirable too, so light and portable, going from place to place showing the holder what's there. I'd think of someone like Malcom Gladwell as a flashlight; he's able to write about sports (I love that he loves basketball), pensions, homelessness, business, human nature, and a myriad of other subjects. I love reading Gladwell's pieces in the New Yorker and elsewhere, but I wonder if such a big range has the penalty of being too broad and generalized. The point of a flashlight, however, is to show us something we couldn't see, not to light things up like a stadium light.
I know some people who are content to be desk lamps: confined to a specific area, very useful for the space that they are in, without the need for excessive luminescence. I envy people who are willing to draw a boundary around themselves and stay, doing what's necessary without venturing. I not jealous of the boundary; my curiosity cries foul on that. I envy how easy it is to be happy when you don't extend yourself. When you have an instinct to extend yourself, it's very difficult to be happy because there seem to be an infinite number of directions to go.
I could flog this notion of people as light more with street lamps, headlights, candles, and other lights but it will break down with big generalizations and become more tiresome to write and read. I guess it's about what kind of person I want to be when I grow up which, at thirty-one, is a strange question to ask myself. Recently I made a failing bid to go back to school and I'm finding myself in a pensive mode a lot, trying to figure out where I go from here. I'm going to return to some old things in the meantime - writing in this blog, learning how to use my camera, and working on my craft by making little software applets.
I have a friend who always thinks of things as a dichotomy. You could say something like "Wow, I like the red in that picture" and he'd respond with "No! Green is better than red!" I like him enough as a person, but that's downright annoying. Everyone is different and every light has its different uses. More than anything it's about the evolving process of who I am and where I place my identity than "becoming a better person" or "advancing myself." The journey continues.
9:32:04 AM 
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