One more rainy day before sunshine. It brought glory.
The final tally for running on empty:
Days in a row of rain to mostly cloudy: 12 days (January 22 to February 2)
Extended streak of days at least mostly cloudy: 23 days / 25 days (January 9 – February 2)
Nearly every day it didn’t outright rain, I climbed to the roof twice to catch what power I could. Many days I got zero. Some days I got enough to power the phone a day or the computer a few hours. My computer shut off multiple times running out of power in sleep mode. I’m not saying I suffered. I’m saying how I couldn’t take for granted what I grew up thinking I always could: power when I wanted it, however much I wanted.
I’m reading more books than usual. Since listening to books using the library’s app on my phone doesn’t use that much power, I’m listening too. In particular, I’m about half through Bruce Springsteen reading his book Born to Run. I can’t recommend it enough. In particular, about the first third of the book describes his developing a vision to share what he knows he can connect with people, deeply, personally.
He slept on floors, eked out a living, and lived how anyone else would ask why he was so extreme or some way different than the person asking. They didn’t understand him and maybe an outsider couldn’t see it until it ended up on the record. But he knew. He practiced, played, developed, and kept delivering, always staying true to himself, as far as I can tell.
How can anyone live differently?
In the future, I’ll share the epiphany that came directly as a result of being unable to work at my computer that tied my book together and enabled me to take off, helping save the world.
Instead, I learned to relax. Then ideas flowed. Glory. Technically, I’m writing these words February 3, the day the sun came up, but I couldn’t post with a computer shut off. This morning I woke before the alarm and several ideas and experiences floating around my mind came together. If some day in the future a model based in some of the following hits our zeitgeist and changes it, it came at the end of 23 days out of 25 with mostly clouds with my apartment disconnected from the electric grid and I refused to draw polluting power: whatever-it-takes/override-reason steamroller elephant mode.
Sorry if it doesn’t make sense now, but I have to write it out for myself first.
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