Pushing against the elements is alot like life. You live day by day and move forward, sometimes with the wind at your back and other times in your face. If the wind is not blowing at all, that's the nicest and makes you feel the most relaxed. But that's also very rare and should be cherished whenever it occurs.

You push a little bit harder and when the running loop has been completed, you feel that much better. Tomorrow will bring yet another loop to finish, and be sure to appreciate it as well as the rest.

In those days you had a number of ruthless heroes. For example, Sir Francis Drake was a notorious pirate who attacked many ships. His specialty was harassing Spanish shipping and ports and capturing gold treasures for Queen Elizabeth.

Sir Francis Drake, El Draque "the Dragon"

Protocol back then meant that when your ship was attacked, you had two choices. Either you surrendered immediately and you and your men were taken prisoner, or you fought back. If you fought back and lost, then every person captured would be killed, sometimes in excruciatingly gruesome ways. This was accepted practice, so you can imagine how worried you might be when the battle started.

One common practice was to flay the prisoners alive, and then hang the bodies upside down from the masts. It was better to be killed outright, rather than being merely wounded and later skinned alive. This was a warning to other ships, making them reconsider entering a fight with this person the Spanish referred to as El Draque "the Dragon" who was sent by the devil.

Another interesting fact about the defeat of the Spanish Armada was that the tactics of sea battle were changed drastically. Since ancient days, fighting at sea was done just like on land. The only difference was that the two ships would approach each loaded with soldiers, the goal being to get close enough and grapple together, allowing the attackers to jump on the defending ship and initiate battle there.

What led to the defeat of the Spanish was that the English had faster ships which could maneuver to a safe distance from the enemy and open fire with cannons and other artillery, sinking or immobilizing the enemy.

Borrowed from Wikipedia, Spanish Armada

This was very frustrating to the Spanish and caught them completely off guard. It was completely against all accepted rules of war. The poor Spanish would be cursing and yelling at this unfair way of waging war, as the poor souls sank to the bottom of the English Channel.

We definitely have control over our own thoughts which means that we are masters of our own moods. Own moods result directly from thoughts, the way that other thoughts interact with each other. At least logically that makes sense.

I guess that what I am trying to say is that we create the world around us. The environment is nothing more than an infinite collection of energy and movements. It is influenced by the objects moving around within it and the way those objects interact with each other. These are contained and constrained by the laws of nature, many of which can be described using simple mathematical formulae, others to a lesser degree.

People are also objects, complicated and unpredictable I agree. We might not be able to control completely the actions and interactions of others, but we can influence them in a positive way. Even minor actions on our part can result in a chain reaction of complicated events, feeding back on us and improving us for the better.

Think positively about yourself. Have confidence in your actions, and expect the best of all possible worlds, even if disaster may strike you down once in awhile. Find a path through the world of interacting objects which does justice to your beliefs, desires and ever-changing moods.

Next year is full of new opportunities. My challenge at least will be to make the best of things and remain positive at all times.

An interesting book:
Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel By Changing the Way You Think

Recently I purchased two books about this amazing programming language, Clojure in Action and The Joy of Clojure, and although I've read about a fourth of each book, I have not had enough time to study it as deeply as I would like to.

Here's a very simple example of how elegantly an otherwise difficult to program algorithm can be expressed in a single code statement:

(reduce + (range 1 1001))

Basically, this one-liner takes a range of numbers and adds them all together giving the total of one through one thousand and one. Show me another programming language which can express this more simpler.

Very interesting is the fact that this language is based on Lisp which is one of the earliest (functional) programming languages and is many decades old. The pendulum swings back and forth and now it is time to return to our roots. We will have to turn our linear programming mindset inside out in order to move forward.

So with that in mind, it's now time for me to go out for my daily run in the freezing cold and warm up my body and mind by philosophizing about programming computers and the true significance of simulating/stimulating human thought processes.

The book has all kinds of interesting discussions about running development teams, based mostly on the idea that you can inspire them best by empowering the team members to take more control of their own environment.

However, in order to trust the team with such a heavy responsibility, one has to be able to trust oneself. You can only trust others of you trust yourself. This makes alot of sense, the essence of which is contained in the following quotation which I've taken from the chapter about respect for each other:

You must believe in yourself and stay true to your own reason and common sense, even when others disagree with you. You should only change your mind when new insights have convinced you, not when other people have pressured you to reconsider. Because doing something that you don't believe in is an act against the trust in yourself. A self-reliant person has confidence in himself, while still allowing new information to change his mind.

The last point is just as important as the rest. You want to avoid the situation of becoming too hardened to resist change and thereby becoming an unnatural obstacle to moving forward. That's why it's also imperative that you regularly listen well and try to empathize, even though your course might be set in a given direction.

Here are some links that might also be interesting:

• Management 3.0 Homepage
• Jurgen's Blog
• Agile Alliance

The next thing you realize is that it is the next day just one minute before the alarm is about to go off.

You wonder how that's possible, whether it is just a coincidence, something which can be explained by thorough scientific investigation, or simply some intuitive twist of the subconscious mind which is trying to trick you.

In the meantime, you have completely forgotten that last moment right before you fall asleep when your mind empties and all thought becomes nothing.

The next time you go to bed and wait long enough, you will remember it again, just a fleeting instant before the alarm is about to go off, that same cycle.

The repeating cycle that defines the fine line between what you think you are doing when awake and what you think you are dreaming when asleep.

Then you wake up and realize that all of the above was simply stuff you had been thinking within a strangely convoluted dream.

To make things worse, it was pouring down rain, dark and gloomy, and the wind was blowing so hard that my car was bouncing back and forth slightly, like it was drifting on some stormy seas, dancing across the water.

Listening to Neil Young, turning up the volume real hard, hearing him singing the lyrics emotionally out loud, made me feel better.

Before I realized it I was already back home. How did that happen? The album just finished the moment my car entered the driveway and came to a gently stop.

That was when I realized that every single song on the Zuma album is amazing and that perhaps that album is the best collection of songs Neil has ever created.

I'm going to listen to it again this evening, I thought, and write about it. So here I am right now.

He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns looking for the new world in that palace in the sun...

I have to admit that getting mentally prepared beforehand takes a bit more effort compared to those sunny and pleasant days of summer times past. The goal is what attracts me more than ever, mostly because it's more of an obstacle and therefore when it's all over with, I will feel much better about myself and what I have achieved.

Today is a good example of that. About one third of the way around my usual jogging route, I was huffing and puffing and wondering why the heck I was putting myself through all of this misery. The cold breeze was blowing in my face, my finger tips and toes were tingling, and it was getting dark quickly. Realizing that such potentially negative thoughts are mere distractions and therefore unreal, I refocused on the task at hand, and then felt much better.

Learning to run, acquiring a good tempo, and making it all happen is what life is all about. Having a good healthy workout like this mirrors the basics of life, improves your physical condition as well as re-wires and re-lubricates those inner thought processes. Aging is a myth and inner spirit is where the energy all comes from.

Some people have to climb high mountains, others travel around the world, and still others spend a whole lifetime acquiring perfect harmony with nature. That all seems inefficient to me. So much extra time and energy needed when similar adventures can be made by simply running around the countryside for an hour or so a day.

Tomorrow I get to join the ranks again of those fine upstanding working folks out there. Get up bright and early, learn more stuff and meet new colleagues, and have some purpose in life again. Renewed and invigorated, you're never too old for that.

Having so much time leftover has certainly improved my golf game immensely at least. Looking through my records for this year, not counting all the match plays, I've managed to play more than ninety rounds, with an average score of 81.4. My highest score was a lousy 92 and my lowest score was an inspiring 71, which I had twice.

However, playing good golf isn't everything, and it certainly doesn't pay the bills. Back to the real world for me. I wonder how much my golfing skills will suffer, I hope not much.

With more money in the bank, I can buy new clubs and other golfing paraphernalia, which in theory might help improve my game. I will drive to work and my golf clubs will travel with me everywhere. Who knows when an unexpected golfing opportunity might arise while I'm on the road.

What is nature trying to tell us?

One's first impression might be that this is an ominous foreboding of a cruel winter to come, as this has been predicted in the papers during the last week. Supposedly this time around the winter will be a severely cold and challenging climate.

I prefer to remain positive and consider this awesome window view as a friendly farewell from nature. Let's acknowledge her kind gesture of thanks, there she is urging us to look forward to the return of next years sunny and warm climate.

Just hang in there is all.

Now that I have so much free time left over, I fill my days with golf in the morning and running in the afternoon. As of today, I have run eleven days in a row, which means that I've covered 84.7 kilometers. Supposing that I had done that in one stretch, it would have taken me all the way to Amsterdam and almost back again.

The route takes me through the wonderful flat countryside, in the middle of nowhere, along lots of water and past farmland. The last leg does take me along the highway, but the amazing view on the right makes it much nicer. If the sky is clear blue, I see the giant orange ball of the sun setting in the distance.

Each day closer to winter brings the sun lower and lower as the orange sliver gets thinner and thinner. When the new year returns, the orange sliver widens in glimmering beauty, welcoming my return and the return of the approaching warmer weather. But that will take some time, and now I will have to bear with it getting colder and the waterways freezing over first.

Google maps

Starting next month I'll be working again, in Amsterdam coincidentally. That means that there will be much less time for running, let alone for golf. I will have to figure something out if I want to keep my youthful figure and my single digit handicap.

Once you get out on the fairway however, things get much more difficult. There's a hidden six sense of golf that tells you about where to hit the next shot, being it either an approach shot to the green or a longish fairway shot. The fog messes things up by creating a thick whitish curtain through which you must hit the ball, thereby introducing significant error.

Can you see where the flag is?

Not only is the exact direction to the hole hard to figure out, but the distance as well. The fog creates this weird kind of optical illusion where it's very difficult to measure how far the shot should go. Perhaps the visual senses create havoc in your mind, a kind of panic situation, where your thinking gets much more muddled up than it should.

The best strategy is just not to think too much about the less than ideal situation and just stand up to the ball and give it your best. Also, you need to accept the fact that if you miss the target, it was not just caused by mishitting but by that irksome fog as well.

I guess you have to be pretty addicted to the sport of golf in order to want to play in such an annoying climate, but it's still great fun. That once in a lifetime shot that lands right next to the flag becomes even more miraculous.

This afternoon was a little different, though. I kept on thinking about this animated video I'd seen earlier that day. It was called The Divided Brain, and it was packed full of these amazing ideas which struck me.

In particular, there was this one repeating theme about how we need to be more passionate about the right hemisphere and the need to return what that knows to a broader context, which kept roaming around inside of my head.

These were the final words of that video which upon first hearing it rung so very true and then kept on going around and around in my head:

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We've created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift."

Over and over again, and then I was back home huffing and puffing at the back door.

So it is not hard to understand that the approaching winter and inherent lower temperature is something I find very difficult to appreciate let alone accept.

The air is colder and the ball becomes hard and untrustworthy. The normally massive drives will stutter and fail in midair, diving downwards prematurely and hitting the fairway tenfold meters shorter than usual.

The swing of the club is frigid and cramped, the muscles in your arms and legs stretching uncomfortably at best. You reminisce about that snap-of-the-whip crack of the club striking the ball but feel an awful muffled thud instead.

I guess the part I dislike the most is that my hands are frozen and stiff, despite the fancy new winter gloves I bought. Just grab onto the club and hold on tightly, hoping for the best.

The good thing though is that mother nature hardens you and helps you mature into the better golfer you were always meant to be. Challenged by the difficult winter conditions, like cold gusts of wind and icy-hard fairways, you are hardened into a truly hero-like golfer.

Good-bye nice golfing season, see you next year. In the meantime, I will try and remain an avid golfer by bearing with mother nature and its inclement conditions.

Later on I will really appreciate the nice warm weather again.