Prepping

I’m going to be giving a presentation this Saturday. Much of it will be new, although I’ll be using elements from talks and demos I’ve given before.

I remain somewhat nonplussed by the mysterious alchemy that goes into preparing for one of these talks. On the one hand, the weeks leading up to it seem so busy, in an almost random way. I might spend hours — even days — on experiments that I end up throwing out, but then something that took only a few minutes ends up being exactly right.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I believe, part of me knows exactly what will happen, how the actual talk will unfold, where all the beats will land. But that part of me isn’t telling the rest of me. Perhaps he doesn’t want to spoil the surprise.

As the days and then hours tick closer to the presentation, I finally start to see where I was going all the time, and only then does it fully make sense.

I used to think I should be fully planning these things out, in advance, that I was somehow being lazy or remiss by letting the pieces fall into place in such an apparently haphazard way.

Now I know better.

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