Aug 19 - Ostrich Forecast
Basketball, probes, and Sisyphean tasks.
There's a guy on my street with a basketball hoop at the curb, who shoots baskets most every evening, starting after dinner and going on quite late, often until midnight or later. I've hardly ever met anyone as committed to their practice as this guy, but, despite his ten thousand hours, he is not good at shooting baskets. The sound of his practice, a sound I find relaxing, is never dribble, dribble, swish. It's dribble, dribble, clank, thud, aw-shit, jog, jog, ball-hits-his-car, dribble, clank, repeat. I like to joke that, one of these days, he'll get his shot at the NBA, but today I'm wondering if he's cursed.
Maybe, once, when he was a kid, he was playing in the street, and got in the way of an evil fairy, and now he's cursed to shoot hoops every evening for eternity, and never improve.
By contrast, consider the Parker Solar Probe. As you'd guess from its name, its job is to study the sun. But did we launch it at the sun? No. Because, apparently, that doesn't work. Since 2018, Parker Solar Probe has been orbiting the sun at a distance too far to do its measurements. It has made 23 orbits so far, and only in the last year has it gotten close enough to do its intended work. For all that time it's been wanting to meet this sun, trying to meet the sun, and never getting quite there. It kept meeting stupid Venus, instead. It met Venus seven times. It hates Venus. Venus is a drag. But that's the point. Every time Parker meets Venus, it slows down a little, and gets a little closer to the sun on its next orbit.
I wonder if it knows this, whether someone at NASA ever sat it down and said, "Look, Parker, for the next eight years you'll be going in circles, spinning your gyroscopic wheels, feeling like your life is on repeat. But you are going to get there. You will meet the sun, and fulfill your purpose. Unless you get fried, which is totally possible."
So that's the question for you this week: Is your task—you know the one I mean—a Sisyphean curse, or a long, looping path to success?
Also: would it matter? If you like shooting baskets, whether you make any or not, could you go your whole life cursed, and never know it?
