The common adage is that the first step is the most difficult. It truly is. It’s the step that sets you off from your home in Tatooine and toward a path and final state. You can try to predict the journey’s trajectory and end, based on some assumptions or models, but you will soon find that maintaining the course can sometimes take an incredible strength. At some point, the journey may take you off the predicted path entirely, into the wilderness that is the unknown. Or perhaps at any point, the journey may meet an early end, closing another chapter or even bookending your life. After all, the journey is already an inherently unstable process, where a big enough perturbance or mistake can completely change its trajectory or even halt it. Even the very first step you take can prove to be a misstep that ends up leading you down an undesired path.
A journey’s properties is much like an experiment’s; replacing “journey” with “experiment” in the past paragraph would yield a pretty accurate description. “Experiment,” however, prompts a question: what are you trying to test? What is your hypothesis? “Hypothesis” is so tied up with the realm of science and engineering that it’s difficult to use the word in other use cases. But let’s try and see what happens. While people embark on journeys for a reason, whether by choice or not, there is an underlying hypothesis that anchors them. “If I learn a new language, then I will have a more flexible brain.” “Given that America’s opportunities continue expanding, if I move my family from my home country to America, then my children’s opportunities will expand as well.”
So for this journey that I am trying to set out on with this blog, in a post-blogosphere era so distinctively against long-form and text in favor of memetic soundbites, what is my hypothesis? “If I practice writing in a public sphere, then with the impetus and desire to polish my work, I will improve my writing and maybe even write some interesting things about the liberal arts, sciences, and the humans behind them.” Pretty basic, I know, and even a bit arrogant. But hey, the experiment has to start somewhere. I may fret about the best way to frame or go about this experiment. I may worry about making polished and precise steps each step of the way, and despite all my efforts, I will make gaffes that I’ll look back on and cringe with hindsight. But what matters right now is taking that first step anyway, regardless of how amazing or piss-poor it is. Even if it does put me on a path I wasn’t planning for, I will at least have learned something about my writing and its content, for that is the other role of the hypothesis: to learn about the unknown.
So here is my first step into that unknown, and to hoping that the journey, the experiment, is a fun and fulfilling one.
Lui Yeon 