Imaginary Lives

For reasons I am too lazy to explain, I am currently reading and practicing the “Artist’s Way”, laid down by author Julia Cameron. The main idea of the book is writing so-called morning pages – three pages of longhand writing – each morning. The intentionally unpretentious form of writing shall help to unleash your creativity. Then, there are the artist’s dates. I already had some.

A little bit half hearted I also attempt to do the weekly tasks. Last week I was made to write down five imaginary lives. These are lives that I use(d) to dream about, but they never happened. Some of them I was able to let go easily. Of course I am okay with the fact that I never became an actress,  a singer or an accomplished guitar player.

Others linger in my mind and sometimes I am sad that circumstances did not work out for this path. That’s the case with my imaginary life as a scientist. After my graduation from my university I hoped to become a professor one day. Today, I do not believe anymore that being a professor is the coolest job on earth. But I still miss doing science. And being around scientists.

Now, nobody needs permission to do science.  This blog was supposed to be a logbook of my scientific endeavors and the home of some layman’s essays about whatever.  The problem is that my science happens every other YEAR! And if it happens I spend half of the time searching for my old code and trying to remember how to make it run. I know that this way I will never make substantial progress. Which means I cannot be a scientist.

Now, in the book “TheArtist’s Way”, it is not promised that you can actually live all your dream lives. But you are encouraged to take any little step in the direction of one or another dream. And in doing so you may become a happier person overall .

I have to admit that  my continued failures to achieve anything noteworthy in science drag me down. The biggest problem is of course that I do not do the work. An easy thing to do would be to just stop dreaming about it.

Then again, during the last years I really enjoyed all the tiny steps I made in becoming kind of an artist. I never needed to actually be an artist, but just doing the art and enjoying what happens on the way was already a great journey. The most important thing about this journey was for me to establish a habit of doing THAT THING. Regularly. It does not need to be every day, as this never works for me. But it should be at least every other week.

Maybe I can do the same in science? Maybe I should give it another try? My son Erik is doing one megalomaniac science or coding project after the other. I have to admit that I am very jealous of his youthful enthusiasm. He seems so unafraid of failure.  I still would love to do some audio processing. I also would love to investigate my wild ideas about machine learning.

Unfortunately,  I would need years to get a grasp of the current state of the art. Then again, I do not need to learn about the state of the art as I do not plan to write a paper on these topics any time soon. And not knowing the SOTA means also that you will do things differently as you have no idea how things normally work. And this means that you are set to make many interesting mistakes. Sounds like in the good old days. Hopefully it will happen.

BTW: I also wanted to be a writer, even though I hate writing. So this mimimi-article is just another tiny step. Doing it was very annoying, but being here at the end of this text really feels like an accomplishment.