Table of Contents

Week 1 at Recurse Center (Learning to Paddleboard)

Twice this year, I’ve had the good fortune to find myself in spaces filled with people aligned to a common purpose: earlier this year at Haystack Mountain Schoool of Craft, and now at Recurse Center. These environments foster a regime of expansion and change, and have the power to focus, broaden, and alter one’s sense of purpose. These environments can be quite intense to adjust and recalibrate to, as they involve large changes to the core substrates and infrastructures that compose of one’s daily existence: time, geography, architecture, and community. Much of this is self-evident and not particularly profound to point out, but its lived experience can most immediately be felt in the constellation of affective states that manifest throughout the transition: overhwelm, nervous excitement, disorientation, decision paralysis, fight-or-flight, hyperactivity, dissociation.

This summer, at Haystack, in addition to learning the workflows and processes of ceramic 3D printing, I went paddleboarding for the very first time. On my initial attempts to stand up and paddle about, I was quickly tossed into the water. The Haystack campus is built on a granite island off the Maine coast, and faces out directly to the ocean. After falling a couple times into the rocking waves, I decided to paddle sitting down instead for a while, but before finally returning to shore, I decided to just stand on the board for a bit, without paddling. I then sat back down again and rowed back to shore. The next day, and each subsequent day on the beach, I found myself immediately able to paddleboard standing up without any further issue. The last time I watched my body in the process of learning was when I began taking ceramics classes in 2019, and it struck me, more or less for the first time, how quickly, and quietly, embodied intelligence is set into motion.

I think of acclimating to environments like Recurse in a similar way, that the transition still passes through the body, even for something as heady as Recurse’s guiding mission to enable its participants to become radically better programmers over the duration of the residency.

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So, it’s been a lot of just that, riding the waves through varying affective states, while also slowly refining my sense of purpose here. I’ve been working out a set of priorities and goals, in order to make more tangible that sense of purpose, which I’ll share below. It’s a little sobering that after having just wrapped the first week of my six-week residency here, I’m already nearly a quarter of the way through.

So far, I’ve committed to going through some amount of Andrej Karpathy’s introduction to building neural networks from scratch and Russell Webb’s accompanying worksheets, though I’m also likely going to switch to or ping-pong between that series and the Fast.ai series.

Guiding principles

Goals

See also