/** SOMETHING I WROTE ALMOST HALF A DECADE AGO. SHOULD HELP IN A CHARACTER STUDY. **/
Have you noticed that when you are deeply involved in something, you start seeing it all around you?
Well I have, its my disease. At least one of the many..
When I'm thrown into something deep enough and long enough, I start drawing parallels with the world outside with my work. My work involves coding, lots and lots of coding. If you have worked hours as long as I have and have tried to make sense out of as much gibberish as I have then you'll surely be able to comprehend easily what I am talking about.
I have talked to, dreamed about, eaten, spit out, killed, birthed, begged I mean BEGGED, slept with, fell in love with, screamed at, cried over, laughed with, wrestled, kissed, reasoned with, cursed at, played hide and seek with, driven with and even proposed to Java.
As time passed on like this I try to write life in code. Conjuring up a program that would launch my life on running the main() method. Sometimes I even compare God to a coder, a very efficient coder I am sure; maintaining an enormous project by himself or herself I don’t know. I think of how life and civilizations are basically written in while or for loops and all human choices probably listed down in extremely long IF-ELSE IF control statements.
Let’s just say these hallucinations are stuff that kept me relatively sane. I won’t lie, it is my doing more than anybody else’s to has landed me in this soup, don’t mistake me I am not complaining far from it actually. As I was saying, the stuff that goes on in my head to keep it from sinking can be labeled somewhere very close to insanity I am sure.
Then of course there are the moments when I think I can’t take it anymore and start breaking down, and then I always look into my past to keep me going.
I was around 19 when I realized that anything is possible in the world, that if I put honest effort and myself completely into something then it can be done, come whatever may. This realization as most of you would have guessed was not from a book or even from my family people who have taught me almost everything I know; it came to me while I was doing CODING. Imagine that.
One thing I knew from long ago was that I am not exceptionally bright. So when my class was given an assignment to do in college I was apprehensive and tentative. It sounded like a lot of gibberish to me, alien even. Everyone around me was copying from someone else and frankly I was tired of xeroxing someone else's work. It was OK in the beginning and all but as I did it again and again and again it felt not right. Excuse me, I am not defacing Xeroxing assignments by any means, no way, they are what got me my graduate degree. But still it didn't feel right that day. For some inexplicable cause I started to do it myself.
Got fed up in a day was putting it in a mild way, but for an even more mysterious reason I didn't give up and strangely started losing sleep on something for the first time in my life. Each time I solved a problem, ten new problems cropped up but I kept at it day after day. Magically each problem got its solution in its due time but not before taking a good chunk of sleep and social contact out of me.
Finally after a lot of swearing and red in my eyes the work got over. It was an original piece of work done by me and I knew it worked and it felt great. It didn't hit me immediately that I have learnt something from that experience, there was a change in me that came over without my knowledge, well at-least in the bud. I started taking up more challenges mostly failing but some precious ones who captured my attention strong enough were never left unfinished.
Then one day a classmate of mine came to me and described me a really tough project and posed me a question, Would I like to join him to do it as our project. Guess what my answer was
"Sure I'll do it. Anything's possible, let's try."
I meant it too. After getting home it got me thinking, realizing a year ago my answer would have been a nervous apology for my ignorance and pointing out someone better than me.
The train of thought finally found the source of my transformation, what the first thing I actually 'did' did to me. All abstractions flew in soon. That there was nothing magical about the solutions that came to me in those days, they were the children of the hunger to do something and the hard work that followed.
You see, that day when I decided to do something against all odds with no historic or empirical evidence that I will succeed and I was as clueless as I could ever be, there can never be a time when I will be more doubtful and yet I came through.
Without any apparent reason it gave me the will to live and taught me not to be afraid.
Even today I love that CPP program.
