I woke up this morning feeling more “whole” than I have been in a very long time. I think the reason for this is that on Friday when Sandra and I went out for a walk, I popped into my favorite fantasy and sci-fi book store in town, called White Dwarf Books, that I hadn’t been into in a very, very long time. I decided I wanted to indulge myself in getting another book to read, as I haven’t read anything in while (with my last book being Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which I had read out loud with Sandra). Anyways I decide to grab a book with a myriad of titles to it called Scion of the Serpent, the first volume of Anok, Heretic of Stygia, part of the Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures series (which will also be a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game next year), which is set within Robert E. Howard’s mythical world of Conan of Cimmeria. Anyways, obviously I enjoyed it because I finished it Saturday night, only a little more than 24 hours after I bought it.
The interesting thing that I noticed though after finishing this book is all of the other memories and interests from my past that swelled up into my mind. It was as though this book became a beacon that illuminated many of the thoughts and interests that lay hidden and forgotten in the dark recesses of my mind. It also illuminated the fact that I have been way too focused on my research and work related to the Web. There is nothing wrong with being passionate and focused about something but there is a lot wrong with being so focused that you become blinded to all of the other things that make your life enjoyable and interesting. In a sense, I had become very monolithic in my outlook which is the very thing that I’ve been communicating to avoid by emphasizing diversity. Thus I, myself, haven’t been practicing what I’ve been preaching.
Therefore, with all of these thoughts and feelings within me this morning, and feeling more whole than I have been in a very long time, I sat down and scribbled out my diverse interests that I believed made up me. What I found very interesting in doing so was that my interests themselves almost formed an ecosystem in themselves as many interests interconnected with other interests and were interdependent of each other. Of course when I started seeing this, I laughed because my life itself and everything within it almost seems like one large ecosystem with many different sublayered ecosystems all interlinking within it. It was kind of like looking at the universe as a whole with all of the galaxies within it then zooming in to our galaxy to our solar system to our planet to my country to my province to my city to my neighborhood to my house to my body to the organs that make up my body and then to the very molecules that make up my body parts. In the end, all you see is everything interconnecting and interdependent upon everything else around it which makes you realize that everything is connected, be it physically, mentally, or even spiritually.
So now I have these scribbled notes in front of me showing my diverse interests. Again, interestingly enough, while initially drawing my interests down I noted that certain interests bordered others. With this in mind, instead of writing out a vertical list of interests, I instead created a diagram more like a sun with a circle in the center being me and my interests radiating out from it. As I drew in my interests, I placed them strategically so that the interests radiating out were almost like a circular prism of varying colors flowing from one another. Yet in drawing this sun-like diagram, I realized it couldn’t be just two dimensional but needed to be three dimensional as well. No matter how well I placed my interests, certain interests still wanted to border upon others. Then I realized what I was looking at and how it related to a common expression I had been using in the past.
That common expression is “this interest is a facet of my life”. And therefore, what I was looking at was a gem that represented me with each facet being a different aspect or interest of my life. Even more interesting with this approach is other strange comparisons you can make from it. For example, research in data storage is pushing the boundaries of two dimensional storage mediums to three dimensional ones through the use of holographic data storage. And therefore, when you look at you yourself (or your life) as a gem, it allows for immense complexities and depth as you aren’t just looking at the surface of the gem but through it at many different angles. In effect, each corresponding angle or reflection of angles makes up a different aspect of your life.
And yet even in realizing all of this, one major problem still remains. How the hell can you easily represent all that I am, all of the diversity of who I am, on a single website which is what I would like to achieve? For some reason Seth Godin’s idea of a lense somehow seems to relate, as each lense that Seth describes is in actual fact just a facet of me or my life as this gem. By turning the gem in my hand, I can look through each different facet of it and see something totally different each time. And yet at the same time, all of these different views all comprise me as a single person. Oh to be able to design like nature with such simplicity and yet such infinite complexity at the same time! 🙂