I was brought to tears while walking to work this morning. I'd been overtaken by a wave of emotion, the source of which was, at first, completely unknown, and then, immediately and completely obvious. The beginning of Chapter 10 of The Soul of a New Machine rang out in my earbuds, but it fell on deaf ears as I contemplated the introspective remarks at the end of the previous chapter. Tom West, the enigmatic leader of the team charged with the task of creating the titular New Machine's 'soul', had mused about his reasons for embarking on such a project in the first place.
"I always wanted to do something like this,” West said of building [the New Machine]. "To build something larger than myself."
West said he had heard that IBM had canceled plans for a certain new computer, because the machine promised to be so complex that any given engineer would need more than a lifetime to understand it fully.
"Among those who chucked the established ways, including me, there's something awfully compelling about this. Some notion of insecurity and challenge, of where the edges are, of finding out what you can't do, all within a perfectly justifiable scenario. It's for the kind of person who likes to climb up mountains."
One night, while West sat fretting, sick to his stomach over the slow progress of the debugging, he said, "I'm sitting here burning myself up, and doing it because I like it. You wouldn't have to pay me very much to do this."
I felt an odd sense of camaraderie with West in this. Odd, because on the whole, my attitudes are a fair ways off from his. I had certainly never led a team of computer engineers in a do-or-die corporate environment. But I, too, had felt the motivation he described getting from that sense of unknown. I had felt the anticipatory held breath before embarking on a project I didn't know if I could complete, one which was too complex for me alone. And I, too, had sat there burning myself up debugging a computer, just because I liked it.
And then, it had sparked a thought. A thought that would seem at its surface quite mundane given my personal history and my profession, but a thought which I had not had for a long time, and the one that had moved me to tears. It went something like, "computers are so freakin' cool. I love engineering them." Indeed, throughout much of my adolescence, this kind of thought—in more rudimentary form—was not only mundane but an extremely important part of my identity. The core of it is a fire that originates deep in my soul.
As a young girl, that fire pushed me to rip the covers off any bit of technology I could get my hands on, childlike wonder sparking in my eyes and brain whirring at a mile a minute while I tried to map out how each piece fit together to make the thing work. It lit a fire in my heart when I found Scratch and experimented for hours and hours on my own, making little games. It pushed me to again force my way out of the boundaries of Scratch and venture off towards Flash, then C++, Ruby, and Objective-C (and my first forays into open source, at an age I probably shouldn't have even been legally allowed to have a Git Hub account... 😅). It compelled me to dedicate as much of my free time as I could towards my middle school's FIRST robotics team, and to figure out a way to program the LEGO Mindstorms NXT "brain" with C instead of the supplied visual programming environment... I justified this by saying that it would give me more control, which is true, but if I'm being truly honest, I did it simply to find out if I could, because finding out was fun!
That spark of inherent wonder and fun stuck with me throughout middle school and high school, though it slowly faded and morphed as I explored other interests. In university, the embers still smoldered and occasionally burned hot. I found and fell in love with Rust, which came with a whole rush of excitement and learning. I discovered the wonders of graphics programming, combining computers, engineering, physics, math, and extremely importantly also with art, the thing I now studied at university. As the end of my bachelor's degree neared, though, my workload increased and life stressors closed in around me in a way I'd not experienced before. I pushed and pushed and in the end I made it through, GPA intact, a degree and a job offer in hand. But not without scars.
One of those scars was a sense of over-all flatness in my soul. Burnout, I suppose. Those embers I talked about previously had burned too brightly and now lay cool and dormant. It wasn't just the spark for computers, though. The creative drive that had been rooted deep inside of me, to the point that I had once confidently described that my entire purpose in life was to create things, had been tempered. The life in that core piece of my soul was withering from the lack of a careful and caring hand to nurture it.
Still, I plodded along. I had a job to do now, after all. I still enjoyed programming, in some sense. I certainly never hated my work. My colleagues at Embark have been truly a joy to work with, and the project I've been working on has had no shortage of interesting pieces to chew on. Occasionally, something would alight me in inspiration, but it would last only a fleeting few days. I did only what I had to, for the most part, for my job. Programming and computers and engineering had become just that, to me. A job. Something I did to pay the bills. The sense of wonder from pointing myself at a problem and asking, "can I do that?" was no longer there, or if it was, I tried to tamp it out.
The parts of my soul which were still freshly tender from being burned recoiled at the thought of being stoked again. Those parts pushed me towards the (mal)adaptive thinking that things were better this way, anyway. If work was just work, and not at all passion, then that passion would no longer be vulnerable to being burned unsustainably bright again as it had before. But something in there was still alive. It yearned to be brought back to the surface, to be alight with wonder again.
A little over a year ago, I stumbled on Oxide and Friends, a podcast which is ostensibly about "a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour." This is certainly not an inaccurate description, and indeed it was the insightfulness of the content of the first episode I listened to that hooked me. It was a discussion about best practices for businesses doing open source. The little spark insight of me alighted, a bit. I continued listening. I got treated to the unfortunately rarely passed-down "spoken history," as Bryan likes to call it, of first software engineering and then computer engineering as a whole. I was exposed to people discussing the engineering of systems, the solving of problems, and all the trial, tribulation, and joy that came with it. The embers inside me continued to spread.
In parallel to feeling burnt out, I've been learning a lot about myself through the lens of romance and relationships in general. One of my partners is studying philosophy; she has the best reading recommendations, which I learned by way of her suggestion to read bell hooks. hooks' All About Love takes the reader on a tour of her insightful and incisive thoughts about what it means to love. The form in which I have written it here, i.e. to love, lends to her key insight: to treat love as a verb, not a noun. By hooks' definition, love is
to nurture the growth of one's soul, [together with your own]
By this definition, love is not a simple "feeling," a pattern of chemicals and neurons firing in the brain. Instead it is conscious action, in a way that is caring and true both to oneself and the person being loved. The knock-on of this definition and the book in general has had wide-sweeping effects on the way I view many parts of life.
I think that more than any particular topic, the thing that endears me to Oxide and Friends is the same thing that endears me to The Soul of a New Machine: the absolutely infectious love that permeates. Love of software, of computers, of computer engineering, and of the people and everything else that surrounds these pursuits, in all their messy, technical, social, and philosophical glory. Indeed I believe this is in many ways the purpose of a shared spoken history passed down through generations. We have community roundtables and congregations not just to share knowledge, but to instill a sense of wonder, to nurture the growth of the souls of all who participate.
Certainly, it has helped to nurture the re-ignition of the little piece of me which longs to create; to solve problems; to dive in head first and ask, "can I do that?"; the computer engineer inside me.
The part of my soul which wanted to tamp out any notion of passion in the things I do for work was indeed effective at its goal: protecting itself from burning too hot. But in its haste to not burn too bright again, it prevented me from being honest with myself—a prerequisite to truly loving myself—and I was thus failing to nurture my own soul. That little ember inside me was becoming dangerously close to burning out; not from too much heat, but from too little.
In order to open oneself to the potential of experiencing the true benefits of love, it is a necessary prerequisite to open oneself to the potential of harm. By showing yourself authentically to another, you leave that part of you vulnerable. But if you do not show yourself authentically at all, you cannot experience the full benefits of being loved in return, only a facsimile of it.
It is the same in regards to loving pieces of oneself. There is a part of my soul which is alight with wonder, and, indeed, love, for computers, for engineering, for programming. In order for that piece to truly heal, I must be honest with myself. I must allow myself to be truly caring and careful with it, to encourage and nurture its growth, and not just to protect it from burning.