Coming back to myself

It had nothing to do with writing, though yet, in a way, it did. And nothing to do with the stories I tell, except for the stories I might still tell myself in the long and the quiet of the night.

For I was a teacher once, a trainer, an instructor. I spent my days shaping minds to see order and sequence - and to realize (in the sense of making ‘real’) such seeing in code so a computer could go about the business of…well…computing.

Later, not formally teaching, training, instructing, I led others, in two different startups, to imagine order and structure laid upon the realities of business. We described the world, people, skills, and commerce, in abstract terms, in diagrams, in information encoded in database structures.

And I taught people to write code that brought these together and made something useful of it all. I even taught some to imagine how such might be wrought again.

Today, this afternoon, I got to exercise that part of me again. To imagine. To seek an innovative approach. To even seek a radical approach. To allow my mind shape theory out of imaginings and to have the result hang together and make sense to another.

The writing will be done by this other. A short paper, with her own ideas and experience brought to bear.

But I mapped out a road, placed the signposts, sketched the destination.

It felt good to stretch.