38

Today I turn 38, and like many of my recent birthdays, this is one marked by an increasing self-consciousness of getting older. I suppose the other side of this proverbial coin is that I reflect more intensely on what I've accomplished and what I need to accomplish. On balance, my 38th year was what I would consider to be very productive to my goals. Namely:

1. I'm confident I've become a much better father than I was a year ago, though I find it exceedingly difficult to know whether I'm doing well or not in any objective sense.
2. I'm more patient as a father and husband, though the other side of this is that what I want has become increasingly clear, and the gap between the two has therefore come further into focus.
3. I've started tracking particular daily nutritional and fitness metrics, which has resulted in a lot of self-improvement in those metrics. I'm happy with my own design of the metrics and the system to maintain participation and maximize effectiveness, while minimizing any unintended second-order behaviors.
4. I've stuck with a consistent-enough and effective workout routine, all while not restricting myself from doing more recreational activities when the opportunity arises.
5. I list and track my to-do's in one place and have begun reviewing them daily, which seems to have helped me make more consistent progress on them.

Aside from the usual continuous optimization, the main things I want to work on over the next year are:

1. Making sure Merry feels special and appreciated, rather than just trying to make her life easier.
2. Finding time to do things I want to do while maintaining or increasing what I contribute to my family.
3. Learn how to better help Signe to become not just happy, but independent and self-confident.
4. Learn to relax & eliminate "background anxiety" without substantially reducing my productivity.

Signe is 21 months old today, which is not old, but is nevertheless old enough for me to get a sense that she has changed my life in a way that I couldn't have conceived of before. I think some people would articulate what I'm feeling by saying that she has "given life more meaning." Maybe she has, but that's not exactly how I'd choose to articulate it. I recently described the effect of having a child on my experience of life as "adding an additional dimension", but I think it's more accurate yet to say she's increased the opportunity space I have available to explore. Maybe that's essentially what people mean when they say "given my life more meaning" - I dunno, but the latter sits better with me because it feels a bit more precise.

Why My Stories Read Flat

The primary challenge of writing for me is traversing the space between the first draft - which might establish some, if not all, of the primary ingredients which will shape the story - and the final product, in which they have been refined and optimized to (hopefully) maximum effect.

The method for crossing this gulf is a mystery to me, in so much as refinement must occur on multiple scales - some of which possess a compositional or logistical complexity larger than my working memory. Surely some form of summarizing, or some other reductive process, can increase the scale across which a person can effectively optimize writing, but I don't know what those methods consist of. In my writing, I can collect themes and ideas into a text, and I can optimize well enough on the sentence and perhaps paragraph level, but I do not know how to trace a series of paragraphs or whole sections of a text gracefully along forms that will produce some profound cumulative effect.

Anyway, I think this is why my stories so often read 'flat.'