So this week is Yahoo!’s 10th birthday. As a part of their celebration, they’ve posted their homepage, circa 1995. I loaded that page up and suddenly I was sitting in the library at The College of Wooster, poking around on one of their few web-enabled terminals, reading Wired with near-religious fervor (hey Derek, remember they heyday of Hotwired?) and remembering that feeling of being blown away by possibilities.
The world has moved on since then, to steal a phrase from Stephen King. Now it’s a world of weblogs, of Flickr, of Google, of Treo 650s, of terrorism, of 30″ displays, of plasma TVs, of American Idol, of Lord of the Rings, of Laura in Japan, of my expecting-to-get-married-and-then-not, of Ruby on Rails, and so on and so on and so on.
It’s a different world. Some things get better, some things get worse. Everything changes. Sometimes I sit here and feel like there’s nothing next, that hope and dreams have been replaced by nostalgia and apathy. Sometimes I’m full of energy and I feel like I’m straining against my physical constraints, growing as quickly as possible. There is wisdom in realizing that neither of these are permanent conditions; make hay while the sun shines, as my mom always says, and do the best you can with what you’ve got. In other words, use the energy while you have it and do the best you can when you don’t. What is progress if not a blend of these moments, a cocktail of inspiration and determination?
Yesterday I was inspired. Today I’m burnt out. When the two are averaged, progress is still being made – and that’s deeply reassuring. Perhaps the real wisdom is realizing that it’s normal and OK to have slow days, and you shouldn’t worry unless you have them all the time.
Or something like that. Bear with me, I’m still trying to figure all this stuff out.