Being in “Labour”

About the pain and joy of giving birth to an idea

Just the other day, I learned that Fred Brooks had died, and I felt sad. It must have been at OOPSLA 2007 that I met him. He and David Parnas both did a talk. During his talk, Parnas (tongue in cheek) expressed his desire / expectation that Brooks’ tombstone would read “Parnas was right”. It turns out that Brooks already admitted in 1995 that Parnas was right, but I can’t help wondering if something will end up on Brooks’ tombstone.

I do however clearly remember a phrase from Brooks’ talk. He talked about there being no substitute for “the dreariness of labour and the loneliness of thought”. That stuck with me for the rest of my life.

I remembered that today, while walking outside, when I finally found a way out of the weeds, after days of banging my head into something complicated.

I have a love-hate relationship with those situations. It all starts with a leap of faith. You take a deep breath, and you just go in, knowing there will be little to guide you. At some point, you’re so deep in, you are beyond the point of no return. You find yourself completely lost, without even a shimmer of light in sight, balancing between hope, courage and despair, and yet you can only go forward.

In my case, that means taking long pointless walks, staring out the window for fifteen minutes, losing all sense of time. Also losing my wallet, keys and phone, since my brains is just continuously chewing on that one problem.

I would lie if I would say that I’m in a good place in those situations. Admittedly, you are totally in the moment, but it can be quite depressing.

So today, during my walk, I remembered that Brooks talked about the dreariness of labour and loneliness of thought, and that it was a necessity, and I felt a bit better.

I also wondered about his choice of words. The word “labour” can be interpreted as “work”, but it can also be interpreted as “giving birth”. Perhaps it’s because of Amy Whitaker’s definition of the role of a producer: (“the midwife between an idea and its realization”), that I feel the second interpretation is the more appropriate one.

Giving birth to an idea is painful. There’s no painless fast track around it. You have to accept that suffering is going to be part of it.

Still, when you finally manage to produce the solution, the relief is huge, and the reward more than compensates for those awful hours where it all seemed hopeless. And that’s the thing I love about it, and why I keep returning to it and why it’s so much better than standing aside and never take that leap of faith.