Speed
During my software engineering career in Silicon Valley, most of my time was spent chasing fast things. Not fast cars or women, but rather fast algorithms– the step-by-step “recipes” of instructions that computers execute to do their computation. That's because I wrote software for digital images, and it takes a large amount of data to digitally represent a photograph. Processing this data was time-consuming. This is where my work came in – to speed up image processing. Many conferences, papers, patents and books were devoted to fast processing of digital imagery, though nowadays the speed of computers has overtaken the complexity of digital images to the extent that “photoshop” has become a commonplace verb.
Speed is an integral part of our life. Why? Perhaps at an innate level, just like animals, we need to run faster to catch our quarry while outrunning those chasing us. Speed helps us compete and survive in the world. At a subconscious level we probably connect slowness, or standing still, with death. Although speed may be imposed on us, particularly when we are working on someone else's schedule - be it tomorrow's homework or a work project with a tight deadline - no one can deny the feeling of exhilaration that accompanies speed.
In recent times, multi-tasking has become another tool for attaining speed. By doing many jobs in parallel, we often inject speed into them. The need to multi-task increases with the scope of one's responsibility. A related notion is compartmentalizing – putting away some thought or consideration out of one's immediate attention and retrieving later it after having addressed a more pressing issue. American ex-president Bill Clinton was lauded for his compartmentalizing as he continued his duties despite his Lewinsky troubles. Quick decision-making is often necessary for effective multi-tasking.
I am, however, one of those people to whom an unbroken chain of thought is paramount. If I pull my mind away from something I am concentrating on, I find it difficult to return to the same place. Perhaps a promising new thread disappears, or a mistake I had identified is lost (only to resurface later at an inopportune moment.) Thus, although I have to do it sometimes, I am terrible at multi-tasking.
Which brings us to the broader question: is faster always better? Many things in life require a combination of the fast and the slow. Take photography for example. The shutter's speed may be blindingly fast at 1/1000th of a second. But, whatever kind of photography you might be doing – landscape, birds, architecture or people – finding the right arrangement, lighting, and timing can take patience. For example, for photographing certain landscapes or trees, I have to wait for the right season – perhaps an entire year – before finding the right visual combination in front of me. It requires steadfast effort to find that one good photograph and a millisecond to capture it!
The nature of time is one of the most profound mysteries of our existence. But knowing when to be fast and when to be slow allows us to make the best of whatever time is allotted to us.
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