Aeternus

I came back from a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat and fixed a bug in five minutes that had tortured me for three weeks. That's not an exaggeration. Let me tell you what happened.

The Bug That Wouldn't Die

We had this visualization in Samanvaya a mandala that shows your life balance across different areas. Beautiful when it worked. Except sometimes it would just... glitch. Data would show up in the wrong segments. Colors would flicker. And the worst part? I couldn't reproduce it consistently.

I tried everything. Console.logs everywhere. React DevTools. Redux DevTools. I even added a useEffect that logged every single state change. The bug kept hiding. Classic Heisenbug it seemed to disappear whenever I looked directly at it.

By the time I left for the retreat, I was frustrated beyond words. "Maybe 10 days of silence will clear my head," I thought. I had no idea how literally true that would be.

10 Days of Just... Watching

If you haven't done Vipassana, here's the basic practice: you sit there and observe sensations in your body. That's it. No mantras. No visualizations. Just noticing. An itch on your nose. Tension in your shoulder. The weight of your hands on your knees.

At first, I thought, "This is boring." Then I thought, "This is impossible." My mind was like a caffeinated squirrel. But slowly over days something shifted. I started noticing subtler and subtler sensations. I learned to just watch, without immediately reacting or judging.

The Five-Minute Fix

The morning I got back, I opened the codebase. But instead of immediately adding more debugging tools, I just... read the code. Slowly. Like I was observing sensations in my body. No rushing. No frustration. Just watching how data flowed through the components.

And there it was. A callback function that was capturing a stale closure. The function was created once, grabbed a reference to the old state, and kept using that outdated reference even when the state changed. The fix was adding the state variable to the dependency array.

Three weeks of frustration. Five minutes of calm observation. One line of code.

What I Actually Learned

Here's my takeaway: the hardest bugs aren't usually technically complex. They're hard because our own mental state gets in the way. Frustration creates tunnel vision. Impatience makes us skip over the obvious.

Meditation didn't give me superpowers. It just trained me to slow down and actually see what's in front of me. Turns out that's all most debugging requires.

Now, when I'm stuck on a problem, I take a walk. I breathe. I remind myself that the answer is probably already visible I just need to calm down enough to see it.