Opening a chapter

I enjoy writing. I often cannot for the life of me type a single character that I don’t instantly regret and delete. And then suddenly, a single sentence makes its way onto a paper or a screen and the ideas are given life through words. And another sentence joins it, and then finally it’s almost hard to not write. I have to find a pace that won’t bore the reader, yet express what I want said.

I’m heading into a new episode in my life, one where I’ve resigned from my job to relax for a while, to contemplate what I could be doing next. Writing here is a tool for that purpose. To box in some thoughts and tuck them away in a storage where they’re available when I need them. And to try to write thoughts down so that they could be good to someone else too.

In case you’re curious about what I’m thinking about doing next, I have quite some ideas. The first thought is to slow down to speed up: I’d like to hike, cook, read, trailrun, bike, draw, write, travel slowly, and visit friends and family more. All without the limitations of two days of weekend.

The second thought is to work on some things that might be helpful in my future career. I have had thoughts around auditing of Go modules, Go test output handling, deriving per-user per-context secrets, making another version of a command-line application to send SMS, and about a gazillion other half-finished projects. While I don’t have a goal to finish any projects per se, it would be fun to spend a little bit of time to get the ideas together and a bit clearer for sharing with others.

The third thought is to study. I’ve filed late applications for a couple of part-time courses. I’ll see if I end up getting in to either, if so that might end up taking quite a bit of time.

While all of this might sound like a lot for slowing down, well, yes, it is. They are ideas, not commitments. There’ll be commitments that I won’t be able to shrug off during this time, for both external and internal reasons. And some months from now, time’ll have me look for a new commitment that can pay for future bills. But for the time being, I won’t think about that. Mississippi kan vänta.