onilecraM | Marcelino

What a difference a few years makes

Every once in a while (after a few drinks and a smoke of the hooka) I like to reflect on things. I think it’s mostly the hooka, not the drinks. I’ve got this weakness for strawberry tobacco. Anyways, my latest reflection focuses on my career, friendships, and a few of the other things preoccupying my life. I’d like to say that this is progress, but I think it’s difficult to gauge what that really is.

I used to believe that progress was measured linearly, that wherever I stand today could be measured against a point in the past, and if the line drawn between those points had a positive slope, then I’ve progressed. I don’t think that anymore. That’s way too much of an oversimplification. I don’t even think that progress is a curve, because even then, one could argue that you could still draw a line between two points, and that a slope could be measured.

It’s more like an electron cloud, full of uncertainty as Heisenberg would postulate. You know that there are points, constantly in motion, and at any given instance an event occurred. And sure, you could pick two points in this cloud and try and draw some correlation between them. But what good is that if you’re traveling in a circle?

So to carry this electron analogy a step further, some of these points that represent events in my life have carried greater significance (higher energy) than others. Some have been low energy instances, representing low points. But on the whole, I’m in motion. So maybe that’s progress?

If I take a step back and look at many of these points at once, then I get a better idea of the motion (progress) that I’ve made the last several years. Sure, there’ve been many low points, but on the whole, there’ve been more high points. So I guess that’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty (of Progress) Principle.

Maybe I need more energy to elevate my electrons to another level. Or maybe I need to stop looking at electrons and focus on the atom. Not quite sure where this leads. Maybe some more drinking and hooka smoking is in order.