certainties.append

This is not a post about the intricacies of programming–I can barely sense, yet alone articulate, any intricacies. It’s a short post about an updated belief…

I’m in the midst of learning about interactive programming in Python. This morning, I was toying around with a key functionality: lists. Like most programming languages, Python includes a variety of methods to manipulate basic data types like lists. One of these methods is append. The append method is used to add one item to the end of a list.

For a while, I’ve maintained a semi-private list. This list is called certainties. It contains one item. The entirety of the list can be formulated as:

The only certainty in life is that the fragile will break.

Now, I would like to append an item to certainties. Now, it contains two items. Now, it can be formulated as:

The only certainties in life are that the fragile will break and the broken can heal.

The first iteration of the list was not exactly synonymous with rainbows, unicorns and lolipops. The second iteration is, at best, equivalent to bleak, plus a twist of lemon. But that’s okay. The joy of life is in the possible, not the certain. The second item in the list serves to remind me of that.