Over head

'When was the last time you were in over your head?'

The question came to me as a power outage, recently endemic to my area, encouraged me to read Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect by candlelight and reading in the deep dark about his experiences that lead him to Dresden during World War II. Here was a man in over his head, circumstances tossing him about.

Being in over one's head allows growth. When forced to live by one's wits, one stretches aspects outward. But it isn't really growth. It's more of evolution - using parts of yourself in different ways for different things. It happens slower without being in over one's head. The downside could be all manner of things, from rejection to death - but that's also a motivation.

Looking back on life so far, I'd have to say that I've spent a fair amount of time in over my head in one circumstance or another. There's the time before my eureka moment with calculus (it was a dream, actually). There's the first professional programming gig that required me to learn C in a weekend. There's the time I started at Honeywell where my first assignment was programming a proprietary board that I had never seen before. I could write a long list of these.

Yet I don't really have any recent examples. I've spent so much time waiting for people to live up to their commitments in the last few years that I've just been caught in a wave of inertia around me. And in that way, I suppose I'm in over my head - and it's time to find something new and interesting to attempt to dissolve myself in.