I've been having trouble falling asleep recently.

No, it isn't anything physical - I'm not sick, and my sleep schedule isn't quite erratic enough to be the cause. What keeps me up at night is the future.

Nine months ago, I would fall asleep easily - complacent, satisfied at the time with what I had, and without a real direction in which to go. My days were marked by the hour and minute rather than milestones passed and old limits broken.

At the time I didn't care. I was too stupidly obsessed with the little things I had thought I had achieved to put much thought into what I would do next. And that's why I slept easy: I had nothing to reflect over, and few future paths to consider.

But now as I lie in bed awake, my brain iterates through possibilities, almost as if it's building a decision tree of my future actions, then finding the best path. (Is it a DFS or BFS? Feels like a multi-goal A*, but not sure.)

Either way, I'm not complacent. That's not to say I'm not happy with where I am now - that would be a problem if so - but rather that there exists, at the very least, a direction in which I can act.

..and then within time I do, and whatever result I reach can be backpropagated and used to accelerate. It's a self-reinforcing process.

I think that's the most important life lesson I've learned over the past five months - to never stop moving.

Like a fundamental particle, our position and direction in the universal state space of life are uncertain. And Heisenberg's principle applies to us too: One who becomes too satisfied with their position in life, stagnating, loses sight of their direction, of where and what they want to strive for. But on the other side: if one has a good idea of their direction and enough determination to act, no longer do they have to care about where they are now - only where they will end up.

Some might fear action because they fear the associated possibility of failure. But no...

Like a neural network that never strays far from its seed, never growing or adapting, the decision not to change is the decision to forgo precisely what makes us human: the ability to make mistakes, but crucially, to learn from them.

We must fall to learn how to stand, trip to learn to walk.

And, to take inspiration from Olivia Rodrigo's hit song 1 step forward, 3 steps back - take one step forward, then ten more -

Never walk. Run. And don't stop.

tags: life