Lucky To Be Alive

Hi there,

I'm "@singularity.zero" and I'm lucky and very grateful to be alive. Call me Sing for short.

Of course, we're all lucky to be alive in a sense: the gift of living is quite miraculous on it's own; being human is quite special too. It's just that, after recent events, my gratitude has taken on a bit more meaning and immediacy.

3 weeks and 5 days ago I was involved in an accident and have been in hospital recovering since. That's where I am right now. Things were pretty serious in the beginning but I'm fortunate my injuries aren't life-threatening: fractures in my arm, in my leg, a broken rib and a head injury, all on the left side of my body.

I am unbelievably fortunate not only to have survived but that my injuries are as 'minor' as they are, considering the severity of the accident. I can walk (gently, for now), I can still use my hands (my left needs more physiological rehabilitation, but I'm working on it). I'm still capable of doing the basics of living myself, albeit a bit slower and achier than before. I can type, which is self-evident but worth mentioning.

It could have gone the other way so easily, but I'm glad it didn't. I would miss living. My passing would leave a hole in the lives of many. Reading that last sentence back it sounds self-important, but I don't mean it that way. I have a darling wife, a wonderful immediate family, a brilliant extended family and many beautiful and unique friends. I am really very, very fortunate. In the realm of what truly matters in life, you could say, my cup is overflowing.

On the other hand, in (one of the) other realms of life, the financial, I'm struggling. I've got very little and now my employment prospects are limited due to my injuries. In time, I will recover and get back to fitness, but for now I need to find some other form of income. I've always worked in highly physical jobs but now my body is a little broken. Not forever; I'm not giving up that easily, but for the time being I need to find other ways to earn income. Ways that don't involve lifting and shifting things and manually fixing and adjusting things. For now I need to focus on what I can do and what I can do is write.

I'm familiar with Hive and the various front-ends to a degree, but I haven't read the whitepaper. That's something I want to do soon. I understand that money, in the form of cryptocurrency rewards (HP & HBD) can be earned using Hive as a content distribution and social media platform. This is fabulous news! However, it does appear that if an individual were to take all of their digital earnings and exchange them for fiat currency to pay their bills in the real world, ('cash out'), this would put downward price pressure on the HIVE cryptocurrency itself. If too many people were to do this, the whole project would fall over in spectacular fashion. A continued downward trend in the price of the HIVE token would cause wider and wider selling in an accelerating feedback loop. What is the solution to this? On the scale of the whole network, I don't know. Perhaps a change in the codebase? What such a change would look like, I have no idea — that is beyond my influence, knowledge and ability to contribute. However, on the individual level, I can do something, so here's what I've got:

50% of my curation and author rewards will be used to pay my bills, while 50% of my curation and author rewards will be powered up. Is this fair? What do you think?

Starting off with an introduction while in the hospital might seem like a cynical attempt to gain rewards by exploiting sympathy, and I'm conscious my intentions may seem less than pure in doing so. What can I say otherwise? I've wanted to make a start on Hive for a while now and in a way, being in hospital has given me the chance to do so. For the first 8 days I was in the Intensive Care Unit. Most of that time I was unconscious, but later on I was awake but unable to even stand up and walk around on my own. Since leaving the ICU, I've been able to use my laptop and access the Internet using the hospital's free wifi and now 3 weeks and 5 days later, here I am making an introductory post. Apart from the pain of recovery, that's a positive of the accident: it's given me space and time to reassess and start afresh with renewed focus.

I look forward to reading people's posts and talking here. Indeed, the social aspects are what I'm looking forward to the most!

Here's a few words about the types of things I plan to write about, at least to start off with:

When I left the ICU and went to the trauma ward of the hospital, I was lent a book about permaculture. This book will appear again in later posts, because:

Before my accident, I was working on turning a piece of land in a country town into a home for my darling wife, myself and our future children. Due to the accident this whole project has been put on the backburner but, I haven't given up completely. Once I am fully recovered I'll be resuming that project on the ground. This book I mention has presented some clarity: I want to build the home and garden according to permaculture design principles.

In the meantime, I'll be teaching myself how to use a piece of open source software called Sweet Home 3D. This will allow me to make a digital plan of the future home. This will be useful for local government applications and just generally so there's a visible duplicate of the vision that can be edited and viewed easily, as well as shared online.

Longer term I have other goals and there's many topics I'd like to write about. Free and Open Source Software and Hardware are important to me, but currently I use a proprietary operating system on my laptop. I'd like to change that.

A dear friend who paints came to visit me in hospital and she gave me a thoughtful gift: a drawing pad, two pencils and an eraser. She also leant me a book: How To Draw Everything. With that, I will spend some time drawing. Perhaps I can share these drawings with you? My friend's paintings have always inspired and intrigued me: she paints how she feels. I wonder how I can do that, similarly. How can I draw what I feel?

Ultimately, music is what inspires me the most. I want to get back to creating and sharing music. Music is amazing.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to talking to you!

-Sing