I'm going to post these little jottings that I've been making while on the road – no order, structure yet, they're the bones of what I'll be writing about later. Advisory: may contain platitudes, truisms and inanity.
Unexpected joys
The joy comes mostly when you realise how it's all been leading up to this, how it all just fits together perfectly, how this marvellous moment could not have come about exactly as it is without all the other apparently less marvellous moments that contributed to you being here.
Improvisation
If I have a choice, I will always go for something made up as I go along over something with a prescribed or predefined method. This doesn't mean that there's no thinking beforehand, preparation or structure, just that I think it's importance to keep allowing for the possibility of novelty or creation to blossom out of what you're doing. This is allowing yourself to be wrong that you've already found the optimal way of doing something.
Iteration with learning
The trick is silencing the voice that says “you should know this already, you've done it before” No. In circumstances like these, you haven't done it before. Those people who have done something similar before didn't do exactly what you're doing with exactly the resources and background you have, they also did it within a different space-time. And you only really learn when you fail, so fail early and fail often and then go round the loop again. The thing to avoid is iteration without learning, that's trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, that's nuts.