Pieces of
Everything.
Perceptions of
Somethings.
Validation of
Important things.
Ignorance of
Lesser things.
Blown tossed and strewn
Thrown up awaiting gravity
They land where they will
In each person's life.
Never the same place.
Never the same time.
Sometimes the same pieces.
Never the same order.
All forming realities
That do not exist.

For no particular reason, I found myself echoing a thought that I first heard worded by a departed Uncle as a statement: 'That is not a good way to live.' The obvious question becomes, 'What is a good way to live?' - and that isn't the question that occurred to me. The question that came to me was, 'Why is it that as I was growing up, no one asked me how I wanted to live?'

Childhood has the mandatory, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And adolescence brings the parental question of, "What are you going to do with your life?" But no one ever asked me how I wanted to live. Maybe I'm the only person who has encountered this - maybe everyone else on the planet has been asked that question but me. Still, I can't help but wonder what a younger version of me would do when posed with the question

How do you want to live?

as opposed to

What are you going to do?

'Do'. Do this. Do that. Do both. Action! But living is more than just... doing. And I can't help but wonder if I was less focused on doing for the sake of doing - for the sake of answering the nagging question implanted by so many... and more focused on how I wanted to live... I wonder what that impact would have.

Granted, I figured out the question on my own. But it is an interesting thing to consider. Would I have spent less time working and more time on the beach? Would I have spent less time in front of a television and more time having discussions with books?

I don't know. But I think when people are young, they could afford to be asked how they wish to live more often. How do they want to interact with this world, how do they want to be treated, how do they want to be treated, how do they want to spend their time, how do they want to make a... living. Wait a minute.

Make a living: Doing. There's an interesting phrase. Since when did work become so central to living? { Read more }

I snuck in on KnowProSE.com the fact that as of 2009, I am semi-retired from professional information technology. No one seems to have noticed yet, which is fine with me - but I have intended to write a little bit about the why of that. This is a part of an explanation, written more for myself than anyone else. It's a cleansing of sorts.

When I was 11 I started professionally in Information Technology. That seems unrealistic, but I did write professional code back then that was used in someone else's printery. My late Uncle Amar guided me on it, but I was the one who really coded it - and he was the one who really designed it. Back then, programming and system analysis were approached separately. He was the system analyst, and I was the nephew code monkey who was also tasked with making tea. Over the last 26 years, much has changed - and nothing has changed. As an individual, I broke through the ranks and wrote code in many places. I wrote documentation, I killed bugs dead and created new bugs. But after 26 years of doing all of this, I've seen a lot of unfulfilled promises within information technology. There is an emptiness within the field of computing technologies that can only be filled with understanding how the technologies apply to human settings. They can only be filled by improving the human condition. { Read more }

As 2008 comes to a close, I've found myself in proximity with people who are 10 or more years younger than I - legally considered adults, but somehow not quite there. Where once there was a grey area, the line has become more focused... In watching one young man douse his liver with alcohol and finally come out of the closet about his smoking, I couldn't help but feel the need to give him some advice.

I stood outside of myself when I did that, last week, and as I watched my lips form words formed from a brain that I am very familiar with... I couldn't help but wonder who the person who was talking was. He looked like me. He sounded like me, almost, though there was a quiet way about him that I couldn't quite recognize.

Over the years, my own definition of maturity has changed more than once. Here's an evolution of the definitions of maturity as I remember them happening:

• The ability to accept responsibility. This was the core definition instilled in me, I think.
• Accepting responsibility and being accountable for one's actions.
• Accepting responsibility and being accountable for one's actions and lack of action.
• Accepting responsibilities and seeing them through, as well as being accountable for what one does or does not do.
• Accepting responsibilities and seeing them through and being accountable for what one does or does not do, regardless of personal like or dislike and regardless of the expected outcome.

The last one morphed quite a bit over the last... too many years... but now my new definition, I think, is a bit more evolved again:

Maturity is accepting one's mortality and accepting responsibility before and after the defining moment of mortality occurs, regardless of like or dislike of the expected outcome.

Why the new definition? Life happens.