The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
(JRR Tolkien)
For many people, there comes a point in life when you start feeling you aren’t where you’d like to be. Grant you, I guess no one will ever get there, we are motivated by desire and no matter how high we climb there will always be another mountain in the horizon. But when it’s early days and life seems so long ahead of you, you may not care. Your life may be so full you don’t actually have time to think about what’s going on.
Until eventually one day, you’ll stop, look around and meditate. You find that you get tired more easily, you have more things you want to do than time where you can fit them, you have a family to take good care of and increasing needs and aspirations. And suddenly time begins to feel short: for all the subjects you want to learn, all the places you want to see, all the things you want to do.
It may just be a midlife crisis. Or it may be maturity and realization that skills get old and you have to move on. It may be just your own imagination: that you’re not as good or successful as you believe your friends to be; that your life is busier, more hectic and less relaxing that what you think the Joneses’ is; that you are failing your family and destiny because you have not yet risen to your full potential. It may all be ok. If life is stable and comfortable, perhaps it’s just time to reduce your goals, assume your own limits and be happy with what you have. It’s a good way to happiness. But if there is still a little bit of energy in there that you can put to use, maybe this is the time to do something.
I currently feel like this. I’m in my early 40s. I have a long career already in IT, and a bit all over the place. I started as Software Engineer, then made a detour through academia that lasted just over 10 years, I did a PhD in Computer Science (on Complexity and Cryptography), I was a lecturer, I moved countries to become a Post-doc researcher and finally came back to industry again. Long ride, it feels, but still not the final destination. I’m driven by curiosity, an insatiable thirst of learning and doing new things. I never regretted leaving Academia and going back to Industry. It was the right choice for my situation in life, but I am conditioned to the opportunities in my job: my company, my team and our customers.
There is a wonderful new world of tech emerging right now, and two fields are particularly interesting to me: Machine Learning and Blockchain.
The time is now, I tell myself, to make a dash for these if I can. It’s not easy, I have less time than I ever had, I’m older and more tired. But inside I’m still the same eager, curious child I ever was, that likes a new toy to play with. And so I’ll try to make it count.
In Joseph Campbell’s words, I’ve heard the “Call to Adventure”. I have shied away from it, I have delayed it and replaced it with other gleaming things that caught my eye, but the strange mysterious world is still there, at the threshold of my vision… calling. And I’m stepping in.
This blog is meant to be my diary, a chronicle of my efforts to learn one or two of these fields and share what I learn with whomever comes to be interested. Will I fail, and its pages stay empty and dusty for evermore? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try. Hopefully, it will cover a good part of the way. The road is there, and I’m taking the first steps.