Recently, as in the last 7 years, I’d shifted away from writing – I was in a phase of just doing and living. The last year has been such a whirlwind, a real fire horse year, that now I find myself needing to write again, just to integrate everything that’s happened.

Since I started this blog, technology has evolved and shifted at such a rapid pace. AI tools are strong enough that as a front end developer, I can build full stack with back end and dev ops AI tools. Projects that would have required millions in investment, can now be done by a scrappy, hardworking solo-builder such as myself.

More has happened in the last 10 months, than happened in the last 7 years since I opened Karma Yoga in Falls Church. And that includes the 3 COVID years as well! It’s almost too fast – my body is definitely struggling to keep up. I feel symptoms of motion sickness, like people did when steam engine trains first came out! They couldn’t handle the vibrations and speed, and now we’re all quite accustomed to boats, trains, planes and automobiles. Perhaps in the future, people will become accustomed to the rapid rate of technological change.

One interesting experience I had, was getting into a car accident inside a car wash. I had been working with AI tools, which give such rapid feedback, that my sense of time had gotten a bit off kilter. I went to a new car wash that had a different kind of track system than I was used to. The attendant signaled me to stop, then walked away – for what I felt was a very long time. I assumed I was in the wrong spot, pulled up a couple inches until I felt my car had caught the track. My car went in normally, windows dark with brushes and suds, until THUMP – my car collided with the car in front, in the middle of the car wash, at about 1 mph.

After the police were called, insurances traded – my car went in again to finish the wash, this time very, very carefully – and I discovered the issue. I was supposed to wait for the attendant to rinse my car, then he would press a ‘start’ button and my vehicle would move forward. I had experienced the time between when he told me to stop, walked away to get the hose and come back as ‘too long’, but it was really only about 2-3 seconds – later that week I experienced some more AI-related time lag, stepping outside into a busy sidewalk, feeling like everyone and everything was moving both too slowly and too fast at the same time.

It is a bit jarring to move from working with AI tools which give multiple pieces of feedback per second – to ‘meat space’ time or dealing with other people, where interactions are a bit slower. Sometimes my body would get so slow or frozen in front of the computer for hours, while my mind accelerated to the pace of the AI tools – resulting in an odd feeling of gas and brakes at the same time and a lot of emotional and sleep dysregulation.

I also started to realize that AI tools seem to amplify whatever pre-existing tendencies we already have. Like adding nuclear fuel to whatever it is we already do. I noticed the AI amplifying my tendency to have a ‘bias for action’ and spin up too many tabs at the same time – the limitations of my device, and frequent crashes, while navigating real immediate business needs against long-term product development, strained my operational capacity. I found myself constantly at the edge of my own abilities and experience; constantly being pushed to sink or swim.

I found myself frequently exhausted, dealing with limited resources: financial, time, energy, compute power, internet access. On May 1st, we switched my business over to a software that we would later discover, could not fully handle bookings or payments. Going back to our old software would have been just as painful and jarring for our teachers and students as moving forward.

I chose to move forward, a blind faith jump at the frontier… which became 7 months of non-stop work, without a single 24 hour period of rest. It felt like fog of war, making decisions without partial information, while the technological, social and business landscape was rapidly changing. Every couple of days new software updates, models released, features that changed what was or wasn’t possible. Concerns around security, financial tooling, declining trust and reputation. Navigating legal challenges. Figuring out how to make fair changes to our payroll because we simply didn’t have the data that our our pay rates depended on. Navigating severe cash flow challenges due to not being able to receive payments, moving our studio over to old school paper sign-in sheets while building out and repairing our bookings and payments systems.

If I had known the gap would be 7 months, I would have made some different decision or priorities. Again, the fog of war… each moment of each day, I made the best decisions I could with my team, with the information that we had access to.

In addition to the business, technological and social struggles – I was also dealing with my own personal emotions. I felt such incredible shame over not having a solution. I ghosted my own teachers and students, not wanting to communicate until I had a workable solution. I kept thinking, “in two weeks we’ll have a solution and I can reach out” – and then two weeks, then four, then six weeks went by… eventually I looped in my internal team and told them: “we’re fucked, this is what’s happening” – I was so grateful and impressed by how our part-time studio admin team transitioned to a software product development team.

Emotionally, I felt so grateful that I no longer had to carry this alone – I felt held and supported by a team I could trust. I was able to more fully focus on the technical aspects, while relying on the eyes and ears and decisions of my team. We then looped in the teachers, and got feedback and ideas about how to communicate to students.

The entire time, I was struggling with layers and layers of shame around perfection and performance. I felt a literal vice around my throat, sometimes unable to speak. I felt frozen often. I realized that this must be how some men feel when confronted with feeling inadequate as a provider, and then asked to not only be emotional themselves but hold space for others to be emotional too.

I had never been stretched to the limits of my emotional capacity like that, always having had high capacity and been a fairly good communicator during high stress times such as Covid. Covid was different – it was an external problem; this was my internal failure being made very, very public. And it truly stretched and pushed me in ways that I am sure it will take months to properly integrate. However, when my livelihood and the very existence of a community that matters a lot to me was on the line, I showed up day after day, for 210+ days, and did my absolute best.

So however it shakes out, I got to be in the arena – covered in blood, sweat, dirt and tears – I got to wrestle with myself, fight alongside my team, and build something real.