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So, I went to Geek Mecca over last weekend and communed with the Geek Muses and the Geek Masses, refueling for the next year. That's right, my calendar begins at Esdee Seesee and continues until the next celebration.

As I've been making this pilgrimage with my partner in Art for the last few years, I've confined most of my opining about it to the blog we share, posting our consensus opinion about all things relating to what we do. But this is about me, I suppose, what I do, what I mean to do and why and how it's all come to this.

Over the years I've written and spoken (God how I've spoke. God, how I love to speak) about wheels and how they turn and how nothing is actually over until... well, when was that, then? But this year I got to thinking about what actually makes the wheels turn.

I'm one of those people who Life rarely touches, you see. Up or down, good or bad, I generally maintain what my father and other sailors refer to as "an even keel." This means, to you lubbers out there, that I maintain my balance. Or, outside my head or outside my home, I seem to maintain. Mostly, over the last few years I've been living in the "seem to" column with only a few people getting access to the actual inner works. Life, in short, has not been a picnic and being untouched by that lack of picknickery has been, well, challenging, to put it as mildly as possible.

While the challenge has not diminished- Life is Life, after all. There's no sweet without the bitter- the wheel has been turning all this time. I know this because, all this time, I've been pushing the sonofabitch.

Over the last several weeks I was privileged to be allowed to do the thing I'm made for in the company and with the support of people who are made the same. It was, I think, the first time I've been able to do that, to work in synch with Life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing, against the apparent flow. It was, after meeting my wife, the greatest experience of my life (and I've done some pretty cool stuff).

But it wasn't a windfall.

It wasn't a lottery win or the result of random chance. Nor was it, exclusively, the result of grit, hard work and determination. Whatever this last turning was, it came from some fuel, some force that sits between Chance and Design, between Providence and Labor.

As the friction between these extremes is often on my mind (sorry, folks, Creationism is bunk and so is ID) I began to wonder, as I said, about what it is that actually makes the wheel turn. As of now I don't have an answer. There are too many people like me, indeed, superior to me, pushing, pushing pushing, just as I have done, against the flow of Life that says they shouldn't, that they should be reasonable and do safer things. Most of those will die pushing.

The late Paul Newman referred to this phenomenon as "the tyranny of good luck" but, in my family, "luck" has always been considered a myth. You make your own, is how I was taught and, if it's you making it, it's not luck.

But, again, there are lots of others pushing their wheels just as hard as I did and do and getting nothing back for it. Going to Geek Mecca did help refuel me but it's also put juice into these nagging questions of mine.

It's a puzzle.

So I'm thinking about it.

That's what you do with puzzles.