“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
– Buddha
Too often it’s easy to spend hours days weeks far too long reading blogs and wilfing doing research. Looking for that perfect tool. Looking for a wonderful library. Looking for a new technique. Looking, looking, looking. Almost like Hans Guck-in-die-Luft, not paying attention to everything around and not where you’re going, let alone the task at hand.
A wise man, recognizing that the internet is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering.
The net is an illusion, created by its participants, and a large part of its illusion lies in creating desire. These desires are, indeed, illusions — when was the last time you could hold that ultimate WoW weapon in your hand? Or the person on the other side of the world with whom you spend hours and hours chatting — are they real? Illusion, all of it. And yet we spend hours and hours — gotta get to the next level… One more gold and I’ll have enough to buy it… Surely that library will allow me to make the perfect code….
The good thing about the net is that we have access to more information, people, places, and things than ever before in human history. The bad thing about the net is that we have access to more information, people, places, and things than ever before in human history. Or at least we think we do.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your internet….
Sometimes it’s important to get off the net, to leave the illusions behind and spend some time in meatspace. It’s still possible to be distracted in meatspace — in fact, it is very easy, but there isn’t quite the immediate temptation to click one more link, to see what’s behind the next url.
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” –Oscar Wilde
Next time I sit down to code, I’m first going to take some time and look inside, finding the thread of the code within. Then with my connection to the net severed, I’m going to write. I’ll spend at least an hour simply writing without any distractions. If I come to something I need to lookup, if I don’t have it at hand, I’ll mark it and move on. I think that I will be surprised at how much I can complete.
Excellent points. I’ve taken to heart to purposefully disconnect myself from the Internet, in order to be more attentive to what I’m doing at the moment. It often means that I am forced to look things up later, or to hack around until I can find a better solution.
What I’ve also found is that I’m now more fond of reference books. A complete reference of Rails, Ruby, jQuery, MySQL and a few more and I’m comparatively well cared for. There is an advantage to reading a reference work when trying to answer a question, rather than the Internet. There is often more relevant material to be found in proximity of the answer to my question, which furthers my understanding.
If you haven’t done so yet, try disconnecting from the Internet to write from the heart; it’s liberating.