Painting
I painted the living room of my house this month. It took four days of pretty much nonstop labour to do it. The rough sequence of tasks was: strip back damaged walls and trim, repair damaged walls and trim, sand walls and trim, paint walls and trim with primer twice, tape trim, paint the walls yellow twice, tape walls, paint all the trim twice. There were also a number of “side quests”: remove the wooden cover from the radiator, paint the radiator, prime and paint the built-in cupboards and their shelves, repair some wallpaper lining on the old Victorian wall using some supplies loaned by a neighbour.
As someone who sits at a computer all day for a living, it was interesting to spend four whole days doing physical labour. I found it very difficult on my body. My shoulders and back still ached several days after finishing. My hands were all rough and peeling from touching abrasive things all day. It made me realise it would take my body a long time to get used to a life of manual labour after so many years of relative inactivity.
As well as being difficult, it was also immensely satisfying. Many times throughout the four days I fell into a “flow state” that I remember from programming but which I was a little wistful to realise had become quite unfamiliar. I do a lot more non-programming stuff at work these days, and when I do program it has lately felt a little tainted by AI, like some of the meaning has been taken away. Even personal programming projects, once a source of much joy, kind of have to have an AI focus or they feel like a waste of time, like I am not spending the energy I should be spending to stay relevant (and, crucially, employable). While painting you always feel relevant. There is always a clear next task in the sequence of tasks until the entire thing is done and you can stand back and look at it and see the sharp line form when you pull off the tape and enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of one colour contrasting with another.
We had to wait a few weeks for the paint on the shelves to “cure” before we could put our things back on them — books, records, trinkets, a sound system. Apparently if you don’t wait, which is very tempting, you will pay by stripping off your new coat of paint when you reach for a book. So you have to sit in your freshly painted room and consciously leave it unfinished. Spend weeks living in it unfinished.
This is something I was always really bad at with programming projects, and in life in general. Once I started something, I either felt a manic burning drive to work on it until it’s done, or just quickly abandoned it. Living with the project in an unfinished state was always very difficult for me. While programming too I enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of a clean terminal, the right colour contrasts in my syntax highlighting, a build with no errors or warnings, a nicely finished UI. But getting there is hard, uncharted, unobvious, and involves navigating through states which are full of uncertainty and mess. Nothing like painting a wall, music blasting from a speaker, the next task in the queue blissfully obvious.
Photograph: A freshly painted radiator (“Seashell”) on a freshly painted wall (“Oopsy Daisy”).