Tantra and Ch’an teacher Daniel Odier explained in one of his videos how the unexpected is the doorway to revelation. (This is, again, a very personal post, so if you came here for Linux and Cloud Native shit, you might want to skip.)
You know, monasteries are enlightenment factories where no one becomes enlightened, but everyone believes they will. And why does no one become enlightened, or why is it so rare? Because there are no difficulties.
I watched this video many times (as I often do with his content) and realized two important things: first, that I’m really far away from any kind of revelation. Second, that life has put me in front of such unexpected situations, again and again. So if there wasn’t much learning, well, it’s all on me, really. It’s not like I didn’t have the opportunity.
Enumerating some of those situations, I realized that I have written about many in this very blog. Enumerating some of them for the curious amongst you, but not expecting anyone to actually read them and even less find the hidden thread amongst all those texts: Lucky Man, Car Accident, 1976, 1996, Serving in the Swiss Army, Memories of WWDC 2008, Cholila, My Biggest Failure, Managing Professional Decline as a Developer, Teaching, Thirty Years, The Developer Guide to Migrate Across Galaxies, Sandra, Swissair, Color Sin Dolor, Cointrin, Question.
There was a glimpse of truth, of immortality, of revelation, of enlightenment hidden in each one of those situations, precisely because they were tricky; at least for me, they represented changes of direction, polarity twists, moments in which the needle suddenly pointed in a different direction. I have missed most of them. Of course, I have. I want to believe I’m not alone; that we all have. But they were there.
What’s worse, is that in some cases I felt those jolts of electricity due to sudden impedance mismatches; in many cases, sadly, I chose to ignore them, and well, life has a tendency to show you the way, whether you like it or not.
However, in some small number of cases, by pure chance maybe or by sudden trust in my inner self, I’ve been able to figure out a small fragment of those pieces of information; very rarely in situ at that moment, but often days, months, or even years after the moments had passed. Sometimes the revelation, the true sense of each of those moments in my life, comes to us afterward, well after the dust of the moment has settled, and we have this huge sense of [INSERT FACEPALM EMOJI HERE] in my heart.
Such late reckoning, prevalent in my personal story, reminds me of this song by the Fredericks Goldman Jones trio, whose lyrics have been beaming in my head for the past 34 years (it was one of the first French songs I heard on the radio after I moved to Switzerland in 1991).
Aux années perdues à tenter de ressembler,
A tous les murs que je n’aurai pas su briser,
A tout c’que j’ai pas vu, tout près, juste à côté,
Tout c’que j’aurai mieux fait d’ignorer.