06 – The Middle

I remember hiking through the woods, alone.

Which is somewhat surprising, because I was part of a big group of Boy Scouts, which started off hiking through the wilderness in single file. Then those faster pulled ahead, and the slower ones fell behind, and I eventually found myself trekking through quiet glades without a soul in sight (I recognize that this is not good hiking behavior, now; this was more than a few years ago). Not quiet fast enough to keep pace with the big boys, and too fast for the little ones.

I played an instrument, winding my way into lessons and then a youth orchestra, trying to master a calm instrument pitted against a capricious body (why? why do my shifts always miss the mark?…). And everywhere there were students of the art that weren’t suited to creating music, didn’t have the talent or the gumption to see it through. On the other hand, there were masters of the art that could whip out concertos with alarming speed. Not good enough to take it anywhere, not untalented enough to prevent the dreams.

Programming is my art, code the pond in which I swim. And here, too, I take a middling path: a console cowboy? No, just a kid spinning out the spare webapp. Not serving as the vanguard of humankind’s ability to grapple problems for the public at large, nor content with sitting in a cubicle, tapping out Visual Basic for a faceless corporation.

I was a middle child.

I guess this is what being a jack of all trades gets you; a fair shake at everything bringing a middle competency to the same. Maybe I should abandon this path, of trying to be human.

Or maybe I’ll try at it a bit longer. We have yet to see where this break will take me, and we’re not even a third of the way there yet.

We’ll see.