History is about the details..

12/27/2005 1:10 AM (I adjust the time of postings, so some of these are out of order, sorry!)

Another night of reading for hours, setting the alarm clock for 7:30 AM with high hopes of finally doing the morning run that I’ve been fantasizing about for a month now, trying to sleep for an hour, and then doing then inevitable: facing the fact that I won’t be able to sleep until I get a few thoughts on paper. One to two AM, I’m discovering, are usually my most productive thought-processing hours. If I’ve read or experienced enough during the day, my brain usually requires a writing-session to develop ideas introduced during waking hours.

Since reading (at least part of) the book, How to Change The World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, I have noticed a marked difference in my approach to work here and many aspects of my life: details. I have been, until this point quite the idealist, as many of my friends or family members would confirm. Whenever asked about what I want to do with my life, what I want to do with my business, what I am doing right now… I usually wax eloquent… in the negative sense of the word, according to Bornstein, author of How to Change The World. He said that one gentleman, in his quest for powerful ideas and potentially effective social entrepreneurs world-wide, looks specifically for flavors of idealism, philosophical language, broad or vague terminology among interviewees. Many people have great ideas, but they don’t spend hours and hours at night, in the shower, over coffee hashing and revisiting the ideas for years and years, fleshing out every potential problem and developing solutions for each stage, each connected branch of the entire idea. When he is interviewing someone, he watches for any signs of idealism and immediately highlights this as a serious weakness. Think about it this way. If you’re an artist, it is the details of a face make it recognizable. Vagueness renders it indecipherable.

I have subconsciously and consciously taken this to heart in many areas of my “work” (life) in Agdz. I recall the days, even in childhood when I would stare into the darkness until early morn just pondering how to make a fairy dress or what my perfect dream-house would look like, but the fact that I stayed awake for hours until I fully fleshed out the idea… those moments I’ve now come to treasure as valuable. Stay awake, hash an idea out. It might be the most productive part of my day.

I played Risk for the first time in my life on Christmas Eve with several friends. We stayed up until 5AM. I lost terribly, but found myself doing something I’ve struggled with in the past in such games as chess: strategizing. I watched every move and spoke little, lost in the dynamics of movement and power-struggles across the “world”. I marveled at how the shape of a continent, or its relativity to another affected a person’s ability to maintain control over it and which certain countries or a region were key to power domination. As I watched the power struggle unfold, history came alive… world wars and ancient stories past through my mind. Every history class should play Risk when learning about World War I and II. History itself has become such an exciting subject for me… understanding of the past is crucial to fully grasping current events and how they are shaping our future. And history (just as the rest of life I’m coming to realize) is made of billions of individual stories. Many are valuable to understanding events of a certain year or even century. I want to know as many of those individual stories as I can, as many lives and institutions, religious revivals, inventions and world disasters that have shaped our world. The chance to find books that slowly fill in the massive picture of Earth today feels like a treasure hunt or a puzzle with 90,000 pieces. I will never have the time to see every piece, much less find where it fits into the picture, but each piece will be treasured by the mere fact that it allows me to see more and more of the realities of the world I live in, bit by bit. Ahh, History.