When people talk about DNA, they often analogise it to a blueprint for the organism, or like a piece of code that gets executed. I don’t think this is quite right. The DNA of an organism is a set of instructions for assemblers to create assemblers to create cells that interact with each other via local rules to construct and shape and grow the organism. It is radically bottom up and incredibly cool.
I missed the writing call today and it is 2:52 in the morning but I need to honour my commitment. I am quite ashamed of this and I hope it will not happen again.
I am a pretty inconsistent person. My tastes in music, in food, in ideas will fluctuate wildly during even just the course of a day. I like this about myself, I consider it liberating not to be confined by a consistent personality, to be able to introspect and listen to what i actually feel rather than forcing myself into the shape of who i think i am.
But on the other side, I also try to have integrity. I remember my form tutor in secondary school at some point saying ‘integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is looking’, which i found really resonated with me. But I think that integrity is a bit more than that. I think it’s about having deep rooted principles that i stick to no matter what. It’s about having beliefs and values resilient to forces acting against it. It’s about deeply caring about things in the world, even if it has a cost.