You Lost Your Maps, You Lost The Plan

I’ve seen what it’s like for everything to fall apart. Sometimes. The experience of having seen things go really, really wrong really early on in life has left its mark on me.

But it has also led to love and kindness and tenderness like I can never understand. And so that’s why sometimes you have to throw all of the fudging plans out of the window. When I was 24 I wanted to have a plan.

It started a bit younger than that. But I was obsessed I desperately wanted a cure I desperately wanted to fix my seizures I desperately wanted them to stop. But there was no plan. 

I tried desperately hard - I tried to come up with something. But everything failed. Then one day after the toughest year I was in the back of an ambulance (for the umpteenth time that year alone) and we turned a corner and the light came flooding into the back on the ambulance through the back window. I’m serious. It was the golden hour. It was the Liverpool sunlight in June (or May maybe). The light was coming straight out from the sea. The sea where the wind turbines stood and this was where I fell in love with them. 

As the golden light flooded and rushed in, I thought “everything is going to be alright, plan or no plan” and I cried and it has been the biggest relief. It’s been over five years since that moment and I am definitely still recovering now but as I write it’s so so so much better and it has almost never been as bad as it was that year and the progress is looking really good. So never say never. I always knew that just as they onset suddenly they would go away one day.

So how does this relate to Software Engineering

Sometimes you have to throw the plans out of the window. I mean the personal ones. I can spend months planning and blogging and ask chat GPT to summarise every blog post where you have defined your new behaviours. 

But ultimately it’s just getting the work done that really matters. Ultimately it’s delivering work that matters. Ultimately it’s what you deliver that really matters.

I know I still have so much more to give and that’s all and I’m so sorry.

I know I have so much more to give to the world still.

P.s. the same thing had actually happened to me a year earlier although it took the second time to really get it I guess. I passed out in the corridor at my student halls. Someone’s mum was visiting and she stroked my hair and stayed with me until help arrived. The girl said something - I can’t remember what - to imply it was a chronic condition and to trivialise it (which is fine it is chronic). But the mum just said “sssh” and stayed with me while I was coming back round and in that sense showed me the kindness that no one that year had shown me.

In that moment I realised that no plan was important (although it would take a year for me to fully grasp that again). I realised that what mattered was to live with an open heart so that you can give to the world what they need in a moment like that. Because what that woman gave me to me in that moment changed my life and it stayed with me forever. It’s been six years since that one.

And I cherish that love and kindness still - and I can feel it…

Thank you