Self Exploration (day 3) – Commitment

My adolescent and young adult self (and even now) was advised to not share much personal things. Need to know basis. Finances, health, relationships, dreams, goals, even poetry… it’s been quite a journey for me to start talking and sharing these things. Even me. Sharing me.

When I used to think of success, I saw a business man in a suit hacking away at an office with a glass desk in a high-rise building. This man doesn’t share his life story. He becomes anonymous and vague with only a number to represent his accomplishments. He celebrates with lovely fellow employees at Christmas time, maybe drinking a little bit too much of the company wine while cheerfully talking about things nobody is really committed to.

Commitment, it’s a tricky subject. What silly person speaks of what they’re committed to, lest it be taken away from us or our skill isn’t up to par with expectations? We sure are silly folk to think our own commitments can be validated by somebody else.

Over the past years I’ve redefined what I know as success. Sure, there’s definitely some of that business man in a fine suit in there, but what I know now is it’s also something aligned with commitment. No commitment is right or wrong, just like my fingerprint cannot have a truth and untruth. But commitment has a truth only I can hold myself up to.

I’m still trying to understand what money has to do with this, but I understand it does play an important role as I am living in a society built upon and around it. My own lack of monetary fluidity frustrates my commitments, something I practice meditation to find qi and peace with.

I am committed to being an artist and an engineer, my efforts continually try to bridge the gap. Right now, because I am of each breed, I feel no matter what I do can’t help but have a bridge. I write poetry about love and get abstract, I take photographs of naked people and flowers and architecture, I paint and draw things my Grandmother calls scary, I married my guitar when I was 13, I code in Python, C++, C, PHP, (my)SQL, Machine, I solder, I’ve deposited layers of a thin film solar cells and broken some too, uControllers, 555 timers and H-bridges turn me on, so do fuel-less batteries, sensors and actuators, alternate energy sources, and wireless communications.

I am not simple to understand, and I spend a lot of time trying to make my message simple so it’s better understood.