TEMPORARY GENIUS

Not for the first time in my life, I threw my hands in the air and cried, "I am a genius!" to absolutely no-one.

Had I done that in the office, Tim, who sits (sorry, used to sit) opposite me would have been the very first to poke up above the partition like a meerkat, and humorously burst my bubble. But there's no Tim here. So I can enjoy my moment of genius a little longer.

I'm not of course, a real genius. Those people consistently think in abstract ways like out-of-the-box thought-artists. They build things no-one's ever conceived, they construct ideas and deconstruct traditional ways of thinking, and they pioneer thought that makes them stand out from the crowd. That isn't what I did; I had a temporary brainwave that happened to work.

I suppose we overuse the word 'genius'. Discounting 'someone who works in the Apple Store' for a moment, it seems to be reserved for anyone cleverer or more talented than us, typically in a sphere we know we couldn't do better in. There are plenty of things I can't do, and when I see someone do one of those things and make it look easy, they might as well be a genius. It's all relative - which also means that the word is a construct of our thinking, and as I've said before, it follows that we are all geniuses.

They used to say, if you were in conversation with Albert Einstein and he suddenly got twice as intelligent as ever he was, would you notice? Well how about someone who's talking to you?

Though, actually, I think Einstein really was a proper genius. Obviously.

Don't let me get confused though. I used the colloquialised word to describe a little ray of sunshine I had on an otherwise very cloudy day. I solved a problem I'd been thinking about for months: how to get a long string of command-line text to stop word-wrapping in a PDF - and the answer, in the end, was surprisingly elegant and simple. That does not make me Leonardo Da Vinci. But it does make me me.

And so the ordinary clouds of diffidence parted, and a little confident ray of sunlight poked through. Perhaps, I wonder, is it that there are a lot more cloudy days than sunny ones, and perhaps the sun is always shining? Well. I don't know about that. All I know today is that there's no-one here to prove me otherwise.