The Reshaping
I formally went on a leave of absence this week.
In the language of my profession, you could say I paused the model training to adjust the hyperparameters. But in the quiet of this first week off, it feels less like engineering and more like pottery. I am realizing that the shape of this vessel, my mind, my body, this “self”, is not a fixed architecture. It is fluid. It expands and contracts based on the signals flowing through it.
For too long, I treated the vessel as a storage unit, rigid and packed tight. Stepping away from the daily grind has allowed the walls to soften.
Gold Dust in the River
A vessel is defined by what it processes. We are bombarded by noise, endless data streams, societal expectations, the hum of the city. The discipline of the “Bayesian Monk” is not to block the river, but to master the pan.
I am learning to let the water rush through. I don’t need to hold the water; I only need to catch the gold dust. These specks are the high-signal moments: a sudden insight into a theorem, a line from Camus that stops me in my tracks, or the stillness of a morning without a stand-up meeting. The rest is just runoff.
The Geometry of Imperfection
There is a temptation to want the vessel to be pristine, a perfect, polished sphere. But I am finding that the beauty actually lies in the structural integrity of the imperfections.
The stress fractures from past burnout, the weathered edges from difficult years, these aren’t defects. They are the unique topography of my history. They create the friction necessary to trap the gold dust. If I were perfectly smooth, the wisdom would slide right off. The cracks allow for expansion; they create the space for something bigger to integrate into the whole.
Maintaining the State
Ultimately, the goal is not to be full, nor to be empty. It is to maintain the beauty of the vessel regardless of the volume it holds.
Sometimes, this week, I have felt empty, a strange, hollow echo where the work stress used to be. Other times, I feel overflowing with ideas I finally have time to entertain. The practice is to ensure that neither the flood nor the drought ruins the vessel itself.
I am the container, not the content. And for now, the container is resting.