That is why they call it the present.
Today is my birthday. I use these blog posts like open time capsules. They capture a moment in time at a specific time. Up to this point, birthday's always felt like they were building up to some greater event. This year I feel like my birthday finds me in the middle of execution. That is glorious and frustrating.
In middle and high school, I used to scribble a little saying that went something like, “I learn the past to look into the future but I am resigned to live in the present.” Those days I always felt like I was living for the future. The future was going to be better.
When I joined Microsoft one unit test for copy and paste in Word with a particular saying. The test ran in the middle of the night so I didn’t usually see it (I didn’t work on Word). But one day, I came in and accidentally pasted what I expected to be nothing into a line of code and this came out.
This moment is a gift. That is why they call it the present.
That line became my new scribble. Not because I believed it but because I wanted to believe it.
Fast forward 12 years to today where I feel like that I am almost living in the here and now. I am doing a lot of work that should all bear fruit this year. That is glorious and frustrating.
Glorious in that hard work is good. Execution is what matters. Frustrating in that it is taking so long to get the work done. Some (possibly too much) is maintaining legacy. Of course, that legacy comes from success so I can only complain so much.
I expect this year to be an exciting year. By the end of the year, I expect we will know how well it really went. And then I will be one step closer to living in the today.
In the meantime, keep coding! You know I am.