It would be interesting to explore that… I wonder how far we’d get?
MattKC – LEGO Island Decompilation – Part 2 (paraphrased)
I love that last bit. He’s got a curiosity about something, but isn’t expecting to fully explore it, necessarily. He’d just like to poke around and see what happens.
When I heard this line I was thinking about rebuilding Deadbolt in Godot, which I’ve put off because I don’t want to dedicate a huge amount of time on a new project, and one that I doubt I’ll finish. But the idea that it could just be something fun to try, and to see how much we end up doing in the end, well that’s pretty interesting.
So it’s like, the point isn’t to finish the project, but to do the project itself, ie. the journey rather than the destination.
And to not beat myself up if I don’t “succeed”, because I wouldn’t be waiting for either success or failure, it wouldn’t be zero-sum. I’d just be seeing how far I could get.
I really like that idea in other ways too. Like, I’m trying to be more social atm, and while I don’t have a metric for judging my success, other than just having friends to hang out with, I do think I’ve given myself a lot of expectations. So much, in fact, that perhaps I’ve scared myself away from taking the first steps. So maybe I could just think “let’s see how far we can get”, and let that be as much as I need to do.
Cause I do have friends that I’ve reached out to, only to have them reply half-heartedly with non-committal statements of “yeah sure if I’m not too busy”. I’ve been doing my best not to feel frustrated and defeated with that, and I think I’ve done pretty well… as long I remember that any frustration is with them being kinda boring, and not with them “ruining my social life and all my plans for the future” or something extreme like that! And to be fair, I am a very non-committal person myself, preferring to just do something on the day, rather than make a plan for it.
But getting back to that idea: If I just see those interactions as moments where I’ve tried to see how far I can go with them, then whatever happens, the outcome is still fine. Just a mini adventure, really. And often it’s a learning experience, too, as most of my old friends who I’ve been chatting with fill me with delight! And I just got a lovely little house decoration thing that says “stay close to the people who feel like sunshine”, or something like that, and it’s so true to how I feel about myself now, and what I’m looking for in life!
I have a secret journal where I post quotes and stuff like this. Recently I’ve been adding notes below them, about why they inspired me. So this is one of those notes