JonnyTran

The Flavor of a Tech Breakfast

kyle-burton:

I think there is a distinctly different flavor to the conversation you have if you meet colleagues for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or drinks.

I find that lunch conversation is colored by what you’ve been focusing on in the morning and leads towards your concerns for the afternoon.  This feels natural - you’ve been working on something all morning and sharing what you’ve done or the challenges is a hard thing to steer the topic away from.  If there are members from two teams or groups there is often clustering of conversation along those dividing lines.

Dinner comes after a full day spent progressing towards a goal (or not).  I find it often leads to reflection of the day just passed, venting or decompressing, or a shift completely away from all things vocational.

At breakfast though all participants are fresh, they may have things in mind, but their minds seem more often open to new ideas and topics.  No baggage has been built up from the days experiences.  There is a sense of much more energy.

Each of these has its values, recently I find that I’m enjoying the difference that breakfast meetups seem to bring.

I wish every meal were breakfast.

Time Running Slow

Sometimes I feel like moving to the suburbs was the worst choice I’ve made in the past 3 years. But that is the ungrateful bastard in me talking.

I originally made the choice because I had become disillusioned with the city. There is nothing here. But that’s exactly the point. I came here to leave all the crap behind. And I’ve made some friends. This is the first school or job I’ve had where I don’t feel like an outsider.

It’s nice to just be able to say that: I’m not an outsider.

This is thanks to them, but thanks to me also. Because I was always the one preventing myself from being one of them. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To be normal.

…How pathetic. But honest. This is what happens when you get old. You get tired of life’s dead-ends. And almost every time, it was a dead-end because I wasn’t being honest with myself.

For a few years now, I’ve been taking a week-long retreat every fall to be more honest with myself. If I do this instead of a regular vacation, the weight is lifted for the entire rest of the year (as opposed to just a few weeks), making up for it 10-fold. In fact, things have changed so radically since last November that I feel like it’s been years.

When many things in my life change, like the first few weeks of a school year or getting a new job, time always runs slow. A couple weeks go by, but it feels like months. The entire landscape of my life is so dramatically different from a year ago, I couldn’t have predicted it. If it weren’t for the calendar saying 2009, I would have said it’s been 4 or 5 years since November of ‘08.

Sometimes it feels overwhelming to have to handle all that life hurls at you. Ultimately, all I want is to age without aging. So this year has been a huge success.

The reason so many things in my outer life have changed is because my internal landscape changed. Beliefs dictate our lives. For example, because I believe that underwater basket weaving is important, I’m going to have the thought to practice underwater basket weaving when the guy next to me won’t. And if I have enough of these thoughts, it’s likely that I actually will practice underwater basket weaving. The belief is the source from which everything flows.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to change your outer landscape to try to change your life. But will that change anything if your internal landscape follows you? I relate it to the thought-experiment where you take the country’s wealth and divide it evenly among everyone. In a year’s time, will the people who used squander their assets suddenly change? Or will they squander it again? making those who used to be rich, rich again, at their expense?

Beliefs are the root cause, and they hide in plain sight. When you step on these butterflies, the effects can ripple through your entire life.