Small Epiphanies

I was running this afternoon when it occurred to me that my running is a lot like my attempts at using emacs. Both start, go for a while, then stop. I think I’m over the hump with running though. I ran five miles today and didn’t feel like I had to quit at any point during the run. It took me three weeks and a lot of pushing through the little pains to get there though. First I had side splits, because my lungs were out of shape and I never really ran long enough to get past it before. Then my shins begged me to stop, but after running through the shin pain for a week and a half they seem to be ok with my milage now. All in all it wasn’t a terribly painful run, and it was the longest yet in my training for the Lincoln Marathon. What does it have to do with Emacs? I think learning to use Emacs as my editor will be the same way. One of the things that holds me back now is that I’m so used to the difference function in TextWrangler that whenever I need to compare files I just use that. What I need to do is work through the pain of figuring out the functions I need, I know they’re there after all. Another pain with Emacs is remembering how do cut and paste, which I still have to look up half the time (as well as doing regex searches). I imagine there will be a hump that I’ll cross at some point (and not know it) where I’ll know those things and it won’t feel so painful. I’m also aware that there are other pains I’m going to want to work through with Emacs like making the Windows key (at home) or the option key (at work) be the Meta-Key when I hold it down (instead of having to hit esc all the time!)... but I’ll work through that one in time too. I guess the key is to just keep at it.