reliability and presence

What i don’t want to lose, coming back from Nowhere, is the openness. The openness of my days, which makes me feel truly alive. It’s hard to associate that with the reliability and availability i always wanted to offer to my clients. At the same time the creative freedom proved to be just too important to me in order to just give it away.

I feel like there is a tradeoff, but i don’t have many cultural tools to explore it. Using discipline is just too dry.

Among other things, i feel like i should drop the time tracker. In the last months the barrier between work and not-work has blurred, the time tracker is the last formal act currently dividing work from not-work for me, and i don’t like that barrier. It’s kind of arbitrary and does not make much sense any more.

The time tracker is a superficial issue in comparison to the initial topic here, the tension between reliability and freedom/creativity … still the two issues are interwoven for me so i have to do some detours in the time tracker issue while tackling the deeper issue.

So about the deeper issue, i will call it the “presence” issue. We could say that there is a tension between reliability and “presence”, where the latter is kind of a new concept for me, a term chosen to designate the feeling, or state, i achieved at Nowhere.

That state is described in a suggestive way by this video about supernatural experiences. It’s a state of mind where the ego counts less, but also the rules count less. One of its features is “richness”. This is the kind of creative and productive attitude i want to have for most of my life, including work. Maybe it’s not by accident that, since when i started getting more serious in my personal and professional research, the boundaries between professional development and personal development blurred until becoming hard to spot.

Now, discipline and rules personally disrupt my ability to be present. For example when i was a full-time employee, i was forced to daily spend a fixed amount of hours in front of the computer doing “my job”, even when doing so actually hampered my capability to actually do the job properly, or to the best of my possibilities. In my experience, the more rigid such rules have been, the more damaging their effect at a level that could be called emotional, motivational, inspirational, creative.

I experience this also about studying. It took me many years to shift from a dry, discipline-based approach to study which was rather destructive to an enriching, deeply fulfilling and productive personal approach based on interest, curiosity, and passion.

such a shift in a school of engineering has been especially difficult, but this is also what keeps me positive about the possibility to successfully mix personal presence with reliability. For once, as an engineer the reliability of the systems i build is more important than my reliability as a person. On the other hand, i think that i know how to achieve personal reliability even keeping personal presence, and the solution is: it comes at the cost of performance.

Freely create in a reliable manner takes more time, or resources, more or less like in the “cheap, good, quick” triad, where one can only pick two. I had concrete experience of this during my years of university: i did my bachelor degree in a disciplined, reliable way, and it took more or less the time it had to take. I did my master degree in a reliable and free way, and it took double the time it was supposed to take. Dropping reliability has never been an option as an student engineer, as failing to perform a test reliably would have caused to miss the test.