Making time for the inconsequential

I sit in a chair of my little bistro set, gazing out from the decking into the garden beyond. The morning cloud giving way to a colourful sunrise from the east which beams down onto the flowers of my garden. It is dawn, I am reading AI Engineering by Chip Huyen with my coffee; I am reading it not for work but for the sheer joy of having a deeper understanding of a subject.

A few days later it is the weekend and I am sat on a blanket on the grass in the garden beyond the decking. I have finished AI Engineering and instead I am reading a fiction book: A Song of Stone by Iain Banks. The dreariness of the book does not match the warmth of another heatwave that has bombarded my garden here in England.

Away from reading books and the heat of the sun, I am in my study preparing for an adventure. My mind is buried in a different type of book: modules for table top role-playing games (TTRPG). I am preparing an adventure for my players who meet once a month and play the TTRPG adventures that prepare for them – something that I am forever grateful for.

The sun has set and I am once again in my study typing away. This time I am not creating adventures and stories but instead to programming computer scripts. I find the warm glow of my lamp, the ambient music and the freshly painted walls of the my study compliment each other to produce a cosy atmosphere.

The scripts themselves are inconsequential. Some of the scripts help me plan the TTRPG adventures; some of the scripts assist in the publishing of the blog post that you are reading now; some of the scripts perform menial computer tasks; some of the scripts do very little at all. They are all private scripts – intended for my usage and my usage alone.

It breaks the hacker ethos that I have these scripts locked away privately, hidden from the rest of the world. The script’s privacy makes them somewhat inconsequential and that has made writing them cathartic. No one need scrutinise the work and I can find joy in hacking away, knowing that so long as the script fulfils my needs then the script is good enough. There has been pleasure in having my fingers on the keyboard, hacking away like the good old days, rather than chucking the task at an agent to perform for me.

The past year or so has caused me to push hard both within work and without. The reward for that has been the joy of completing a slew of long-term and medium-term goals. I have had massive successes at work; I have had massive private successes; I have recently released version 1.0.0 of my TTRPG Dungeon Planner side project. Of course pushing for so long can cause a certain malaise to set in; burnout by its very nature is insidious – and luckily I did not quite get there.

It is the start of August and the summer is beginning to wane here in the United Kingdom. After pushing, perhaps too much, for various goals, it has felt like a great privilege to be able to make time for inconsequential tasks and hobbies and a greater privilege to soak in the mindfulness whilst doing so.