Cold Mornings
It's a rare morning when I don't have a million ideas bubbling up first thing (or at least as soon as the caffeine kicks in). This morning is chilly, and as I sit on my porch and settle in to work for a bit on the various writing, coding, and other projects that might occupy a morning, the cold is a bit too metaphorical. Warming up with the sun has become a pleasant ritual, or at least a reassuring one. It's a kind of sympathetic magic whereby as the sun renders my freeing fingers a bit less freezing, so too words loosen up. Again, more often than not the problem is that I can't type quite quickly enough to keep up and documents span documents, checklists self-propagate and material that has to be worked on later gets noted and set into the queue.
But cold mornings, well, that's a different beast. I'd like to think it's part of the process of rumination. That's a nice meaty word, ruminate — chew the cud, chew over. I like it because it sounds just a bit Anglo-Saxon, like all the earthy words that become meaty in the mouth; but it's Latinate, and a pretty metaphoric Latin at that. At those moments of cold I can sense that there are ideas percolating around, warming up, not ready to boil over yet. Thought ripens with time I suppose, and can't find its way until ready.
I'm stuck in my thinking on a business matter. An idea that is sound and good and appealing, but I can't quite wrap my head around. I suppose there's some fear, as it is a shape of something that is a bigger leap from what I regularly do. So my instincts are to research the crap out of it. But in some ways I've already done a bit of that. There's fear that I'm not really up to the challenge of trying this. There's fear that others — by which I mean the others from my other areas of life — will find it stupid or presumptuous. There's the old academic fear that I won't be qualified or expert enough. (I am constantly reminded that the academic scale of expertise is damaging to all other endeavors. Being expert in a field sometimes means, depending on how strictly you slice the subfield, being among the top x most knowledgeable people in the world. It can often be content based as much as achievement based. Or, rather, there are damaging preconceptions and conditioning around both modes of judging oneself.)
But the sun's out and it's warming up a bit. Hope springs eternal.