Local Optima
It’s been about four months since I last wrote anything here.
At times your life can reach a state of local optima — you are settled and you begin to get comfortable. If you were to critically analyze the situation, you’d realize that you are at a 7 on a scale of 10 (arbitrarily normalized.) Going any higher would require significant changes and would probably cause a lot of pain. So why do it?
My answer doesn’t matter.
I came across this incredible speech “Man in the Arena” by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, that never has and never will become irrelevant:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
That is all.