In the Navy, my job was primarily to stare into a large field of noise and try to make sense of it all. I would stare into a visual and audio representation of the electromagnetic field and everything that was emitting a signal onto it, intelligible or otherwise, and try to find patterns in all the chaos that existed in a realm that goes largely unnoticed to the un-indoctrinated.
Initially, when you start working in that field, it’s like sensory overload. You’re staring at pure static mixed with an array of beeps, buzzes, clicks, and anything else that the audio module down converted into sound. It’s like staring at an antenna TV with no signal and trying to find patterns in the snowy screen. The first time you identify a signal, which is usually a local radio station, you feel this brief sense of accomplishment that you were able to dig through the haystack and find something. But it’s short lived, as you realize that you’ve basically just manually done what your car stereo can do with the seek button. It wasn’t until my first mission that I really gained a sense of the power that this role had, and also began to make sense of noise.
Overtime, as my experience grew, I began to find patterns easily. I could stare at the spectrum and find familiar signals intuitively. Instead of seeing pure chaos on my screen, I began to see an image of the environment. I could piece together various signals and deduce what “platforms” were around us. I also began to hunt in this forest of chaos for things that didn’t want to be found. I became passionate about the job, and by the time I was approaching the end of my time in the Navy, I had made a name for myself in mastering this form of esoteric warfighting. I felt a sense of purpose. I had a niche that I was proud of.
Then I got out.
And with my departure, I lost my access to the noise. I went back home, to find a “normal” life, and had to begin my re-integration into society. It took me about a year to start looking into re-joining the military. I was not re-integrating well, and I was having a hard time turning off taking myself too seriously. I ended up focusing pretty heavily in trying to carve a new niche for myself as a civilian and I expected a lot of myself. At the time, cyber security was just starting to emerge as a profession and I’d been on the cutting edge of it. I was going to college and had involved myself in clubs and competitions where I could differentiate myself among my peers. I was doing well and likely would have been successful in that industry. But while I was sinking all my attention into my professional development, I had been completely neglecting myself socially, and as a person.
The Navy had re-structured my identity for the most part and separating left me as a bit of a hollowed out shell of my former self. While this had gone largely unnoticed by me, my family and friends could see, clearly, that I was on a downward spiral. I hadn’t taken time to rebuild myself, as a person, and was relying almost entirely on my professional development as an identity. After about 2 years of being out of the military, I lost someone I loved and it catalyzed a collapse of ego into the hole that I’d structured my life around rather than repaired. I consider the time I spent in this hole as the worst time of my life. I tried a few times to fight my way out of it with some unhealthy methods, but each time I fell back in. It didn’t take long to realize that without doing the work to repair the hole I had dug, I was going to continue to fall back in every time.
One particular night I remember very clearly above the fuzziness of that time, that I spent staring into the snow while it was falling.
At the time, the concept of chaos I had was different. It was inefficient, and was an inherited trait of disorder, or rather, a complete lack of determinism. It happened when things were wrong, or untuned. When a plan falls apart, it succumbs to chaos itself, as an entity. But that night, as I stared into the snow longer and longer against the solid black backdrop, I couldn’t help but feel like I was seeing patterns. Little waves of snow flakes in patches as they fell, and opposing pockets of no snow. Areas where snowflakes fell and curved against some invisible gradient. This wasn’t purely chaos, there was still some degree of determinism happening here.
I know now, as a 36 year old father of 3, that chaos is nothing like what I thought it was. It’s not something you can prevent, only anticipate and prepare for. There’s a paper that was written in the 70’s called “Period 3 Implies Chaos”, and I can’t help but see the irony in it. It seems to be the perfect number of children to ensure that your life remains in a complete state of chaotic resonance. That aside, you do learn how to thrive in it. There are patterns in chaos, that I think our minds are able to pick up on intuitively, and have been picking up on long before the introduction of chaos theory and fractals. Like when things are “too quiet” or life seems to be going “too well” you almost expect for something to throw a wrench in things, and inevitably, something will. You see your kids playing, but you left out a gardening tool on the opposite side of the yard that they could get hurt on, and you instinctively pick it up, knowing that some how, that gardening tool will become an attractor and the kids will somehow get hurt on it. You start to build these bifurcation maps in your mind of everything that can happen given a particular phase state and how things can break down.
<sigh>
Sometimes I just wish I could spend a day watching the surface of a stream.
Life’s lessons are many.
Back to work I guess.
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