When in doubt: Take a Walk

The clock is ticking. Homework is due.

Sitting in your chair, you’ve managed to put in a few hours of work into your final homework assignment due for the week. Those hours were effortless. As you reach the finish line, you tell yourself you’ve got this in the bag. You think out your next step for the assignment – it’s something new you haven’t encountered before, but you’re reasonably sure based on what you’ve learned this week that you know what you’re doing. “Time is moving faster now, no time for double or triple checking” you tell yourself – implementation must begin. You write up the component, you slot the component into it’s place, you inject the required dependencies into your component – and then something happens. Your IDE starts spitting up red error warnings. Your injected dependencies aren’t matching the custom types you declared were required parameters in your component. Prettifier is yelling at you, adamant that you’re an idiot for daring to add some newlines for readability.

3 more hours until homework is due, before the source code has to be finished and you still need to write a small PDF about your assignment. Your heart is pounding. Desperate for the warnings to go away, you start manipulating the declared types in your component parameters – did I muck up what I thought I needed? That just adds more error warnings. You CTRL+Z until you’re back to the original problem. You start questioning the structure of the dependency you’re providing to your component – you dig through where the dependency code is coming from to see if your assumptions were correct. Time is moving – you’ve wasted 30 minutes. You’re still no further along. Panic sets in. How did I get to this? Where did I go wrong? Am I even cut out to solve this problem? Should I just accept a lower grade for the assignment? But what does that say about me? You stare at the computer screen for another 30 minutes.

“Hey, you’re looking a little stressed out – why don’t you try going for a walk or something?”, says your roommate who has peeked through your doorway. Exasperatedly, you tell yourself you need a break. You throw on your shoes and head out.

As you make your way down the street, you look up and take in your surroundings. It’s 8:00pm at night, dusk is raging on. You marvel at the colors in the sky – blue hues transforming into warm oranges, with patches of twinkling stars lost among the dark side of the evening. You remind yourself that you need to do this more often. The walk is short – no more than 15 minutes – but it’s more human than anything else you’ve done today. You feel alive. You feel secure. You’re remind yourself that no matter what happens when you get back home you’ll figure it out.

Walking back into your room you pull up the application code again. You skim the error warnings, but this time around you’re focused on what you’ve actually implemented. “Huh” you mutter as you find yourself changing one improperly placed “,” to a “;”. The error warnings go away – and a much more appreciated message appears: “No problems have been detected in the workspace.”. You’re not surprised; after the walk your soul already knew there wouldn’t be any problems for the rest of the day.