Musings & Meanderings

Web developers hold hands with coders, using their bilingualism (in human-speak and computer-speak) to deliver specific products and places to small and large business.

Some are creating public playgrounds. Others focus on tools and toys. The most successful developers so far, are those with the broadest vision, those who set and aim at goals of their own conception. They are their own clients.

The average computer user hasn’t much knowledge of web development, or of coding, let alone how the internet works, and not much idea as to whether anyone is conceptualizing and building the places and tools they’d love and embrace.

Will it be today’s or tomorrow’s developer/entrepreneurs who span the many empty spaces with bridges built for speed and beauty and connections that didn’t exist before?

We’re in an interim state now, occasionally awed and sometimes underwhelmed by the wealth of knowledge and information technology has afforded a glimpse of. It’s not fully ours yet, though, not yet integrated into our social and personal reality. I’ve heard some awesome ideas, from non-techies, of ways in which many areas of our lives, from health care to education, could be enriched far beyond what exists today. I’ve seen few built. In fact, there’s still a big gap between the people who connect with each other and make things happen in RL society, and the integration of tools and destinations on the web to enable more than limited communication.

So far, our web places mirror our physical ones. My web page is a virtual clone or extension of my home or my mind or my shop or service. It’s a place for my stuff. That has proven difficult for the average person to create and develop effectively, so now I can have my shop on eBay, my diary on MySpace, my opinions on Technorati, and pictures, videos, etc. on other specialty sites. It’s working better than everyone having their own web page did, but it’s still very fractured, not to mention a lot of work remembering all those passwords and learning each site’s tools and rules. The collaborative efforts, mostly educational, are still the only places where we’re glimpsing the potential scope of what can be.

Just as each area of human resources is populated by chains of specialists, linking a discovery or creation to its ultimate and full applications, so I believe we will continually be developing new and deeper specialties bridging the virtual world through the coming years and decades until its full integration into our lives is finally on the road to maturity.

I expect, and hope for, the next wave of creativity to be headed by those who will sort through the enormous cache of everything we’ve created already and combine the best of it in new ways to deliver our next understanding of these new tools and this new world.

first a story…

As recently as 20 years ago, it was extremely rare to find a Western physician who did not believe that acupuncture was quackery, yet today more and more younger GPs suggest it to patients with chronic conditions that the GPs themselves cannot cure.

In the late 90s, my Jewish acupuncturist friend (there’s another great story there) related the following:

He said that a specialist in an American hospital was interested in connections between the human nervous systems. The specialist was using life sized maps with transparent backgrounds, and had laid the map of the Peripheral (Sympathetic & Parasympathetic) System over that of the Central Nervous System. As he stood pondering the resulting image, a colleague wandered in.

The colleague glanced at the combined image on the wall and asked, “You’re studying acupuncture?”. Startled, the specialist asked what he meant. The answer was that the main acupuncture points are located exactly at the junctures where the two systems intersect.

Now, as far as I know, Western medicine has yet to nail down any fully defined scientific basis for acupuncture, let alone really understand how and if it ‘works’. Nevertheless, the recognition of something that could be SEEN went further in broaching some time honored traditions of skepticism than any endless number of patients claiming or exhibiting relief or cure. Human opinions and claims, after all, are subjective, and can as possibly be imagined as real.

Scientists rely on facts and proof. In fact, there are now schools of thought that would see the abandonment of belief entirely, viewing it as useless and almost impossible to define.

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About Belief

We cannot function without lots of beliefs which we have not proven as fact.

We teach our children via their natural curiosity and desire to learn. If belief required proof to take on the certainty of truth, then every one of our children would have to burn their hands on the stove even though we’d told them what the result would be.

Our concepts of belief are inextricably linked to trust and credence, reliance and assurance.

If you sat down and actually listed the millions of things you believe, and upon which you base decisions and actions constantly, and then separated those which you had personally verified as factual truth from those you had been told or taught, you’d come up with one extremely short and another extremely long list. You could cheat and say, but someone else has proved this. You still chose to believe them.

Regular examination of our beliefs is a good and necessary thing, as exampled by:

Any experienced businessperson will only be successful as long as they continually adapt to changing market conditions.

Any government or political representative you choose to vote for should no longer receive your vote if he/she betrays your trust.

Any professional has an obligation to stay abreast of new knowledge, premises, laws, etc. in their field in order to practice responsibly.

Even in those personal matters where our love, faith, loyalty and allegiance are not subject to question, we participate in important rituals through which we renew and reaffirm our pledges.

Examination is a good thing because all our actions have consequences and we bear responsibility for these.

The strength, value, bases, and comprehension of our beliefs can be translated directly into personal happiness and success, the choice of appropriate and outstanding relationships, and exceptional realization of personal potential.

Think of a story from your own life experiences, of the list of beliefs you held when it began, of how any of them changed along the way, and of their relationship to the conclusion. If you are a strict scientist type, you could still try it secretly.
You may need a second step, to cull out expectations and even wishes masquerading as beliefs. An unexpected benefit of this exercise can be the recognition of fundamental beliefs so basic and long-standing that you haven’t previously examined them.

We do postmortems on business deals and transactions all the time. Extending that process to the personal level can have as many, and even more benefits.

Knowing what has worked well in our lives and what hasn’t, leads us naturally to repeat the first and avoid the second. Knowing why, as well as taking into account how the world around us changes, empowers us to broaden our scope with truer aim.

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Something Personal…

My first given name, Vera, has two translations from its Russian origin.

The first is belief. This meaning is widely exemplified in the common term for the Creed of the Russian Orthodox Church (the closest to original Nicene creed, I think), which is its first word –Veruyu – meaning I Believe.

The second is faith. In the Orthodox Church’s pantheon of saints, Sophia’s (wisdom) 3 daughters are named Vera, Nadezhda, & Lyubhov (also 3 of the most common Russian female names better recognized as Vera, Nadya, and Luba). The English versions of these 3 sisters’ names are Faith, Hope, and Charity (originally Love).

It seems to have become common for idealogues to claim that proponents of an opposing ideology are mentally ill.

Religion is a mental illness, communism is a mental illness, and so on. Excuse me?

The thing about this that I have the hardest time with, is that it’s happening within a society that has raised political correctness to sublime heights, often at the expense of honesty and humor. The two forms of communication combined can make a simple exchange of views virtually impossible. More and more I see well-mannered individuals keeping their opinions to themselves.

I still don’t comprehend what was wrong with just plain good manners. As I learned manners, their practice was a means of being respectful of one another (including a respect for privacy), of displaying human kindness, and of refraining from rudeness. Then there was the Golden Rule -that would be Treat Others As You Would Want To Be Treated Yourself, rather than the tongue-in-cheek He Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules.

Practicing Good Manners together with the Golden Rule resulted in civilized behavior, didn’t it?

Sure, the world has changed. I was there. I remember the day ‘Camelot died’. I wore hip hugger bell bottoms and hung love beads in doorways. I’ve been known to swear a blue streak in appropriate circumstances and behind closed doors, and have had the privilege of learning to win when playing with sharks in business, too.

I’ve refused, though, to adopt pc language in place of good manners. They’re still serving me perfectly well, and if I really have to communicate something not very pc to someone, I can usually do so politely and privately without having to use euphemisms or equivocate. Plain talk is something I welcome all day long. The truth isn’t always easy. That’s why we also practice diplomacy and learn to empathize.

All we need is love?

Well, love is definitely grand, but I’m sticking with treating ourselves and each other with true respect first.

I found this delicately carved ivory box in a little Chinese market stall about 30 years ago. When I held it in my hand, it decided to be mine; I felt compelled to purchase it. This is not the sort of thing I usually collect at all, yet it is unquestionably and permanently in my keeping and I love to see it and occasionally hold it in my hand. Some things we don’t need to understand intellectually.

Years later, I sought to interpret the characters carved on the side. Wandering into a well hidden Chinese art gallery, in a side street basement, I found an elderly gentleman with little English who lit up with passion at the sight of my box. The carved characters were a favorite poem of his, he managed to convey, written many years ago, and he spent weeks, with me stopping by to visit regularly, searching for a Chinese English translation among his thousands of books. He never did find it. Meanwhile I had the poem identified by a university student, but did not tell the Chinese gentleman this, as his pleasure in being visited by a young person who cared about her lovely object and about one of his favorite poems, was too pure not to simply enjoy.

The poem was written by renowned poet Meng Haoran, Chinese Tang (618-907 AD) Dynasty.
It is called Spring Morning (Chun Xiao).

Here is the translation:

This morn of spring in bed I’m lying,
Not to awake till birds are crying.
After one night of wind and showers,
How many are the fallen flowers?

I have to feel past the words to see it. It sounds a bit more stilted to me, the English translation, compared to the lilting sound of the elderly gentleman reciting it in a reverie of memory …but then, all words sound more beautiful when spoken with love.

first a distinction…
Passion is not the same thing as fantasy.

Passion

There’s a common belief in our culture that if you find something to do that you are good at, you will be successful, and if you are also wildly passionate about it, you can be wildly successful. This simplistic idea pleases us. There are enough examples of successful people confirming it to give it legs, and it offers a cleansing illusion that supposedly removes the evil taint associated with money.

Passion, though, is not an activity but an emotion, appropriate to devotion such as in love, sex, religion, art. In pure form it has no goal and is its own reward.

In order for the belief or tenet about success to make sense applied to a life plan, we have to marry our passions to activity, adding means, and goals, as well as motivations.

The term marriage here connotes the process through which we build the vehicle of daily human activity within which to carry and nurture our passion.

Understanding passion is easy in the context of a great love or devotion, talent or gift. Any of these translates clearly in our minds into a picture of daily activity. Bringing that picture into a context of worldly success, however, is much more elusive.

Some of us are passionate and some of us are gifted. Everyone has passions and everyone has gifts. Both of those statements are true. Using what we have most effectively can also be viewed as being true to ourselves, which may or may not translate into worldly success.

Money

We all know that money is but a token of exchange. Trading your effort for those tokens in order to acquire/provide the necessities of life is the first order of survival.

A focus on worldly success and wealth, however, is capable of pushing almost every emotional button human beings have. We can believe passionately in a classless society, for example, but human nature will still dictate that we’ll be judged against our accumulation of tokens. Power and success are tokens, too, which may or may not translate into money. The ability to cause other people to do things is power. Setting a world record or baking the perfect souffle are both types of successes.

Anyone who says they don’t discriminate or judge is lying. The whole concept is totally contrary to human nature. You can feel virtuous for being humane and compassionate when you help someone less fortunate, but you can’t explain how you determined the basis of that without making judgments. Or, as my husband is fond of pointing out, if you tell kids that you’ll no longer keep score in a game they’re playing so that there won’t be any losers, they’ll ignore you and keep score for themselves.

Keeping score is natural. I want to own my accomplishments and successes. It is completely unrelated to whether and why I might decide to use my tokens for someone else’s benefit.

Our difficulties come about not from making judgments or keeping score. They arise from passing and executing sentences based on those judgments, from taking actions which affect another’s rights and freedoms. We’re all entitled to our opinions, and are going to have them even if we aren’t lucky enough to live in a society that grants us personal freedom to state them out loud.

We analyze constantly on the basis of comparison, deciding how a thing/place/idea/person is the same or different from another, in order to discriminate and make judgments.

Wanting to succeed in monetary terms really has no more morality attached to it than wanting to hit the most baseballs in a game does. Doing it has requirements and consequences, though.

If your world is partly defined by your relationships with friends and peers, most of those relationships will change if and when you have a noticeably greater amount of tokens than you did when you met. Those relationships might have to change substantially before you can reach a set goal of token ownership. Setting off in a different direction will make you different. You will be judged.

Some people who succeed financially receive adulation and others are vilified. The basis of either of those rewards is a perception of a combination of things, many of them superficial, such as charisma or lack thereof and good or bad public relations. Rarely is it a purely moral judgment.

Being more successful than others means, by definition, being different. It means a greater share of the spotlight. It attracts, proportionately, the attention, speculation, and judgment of others. It changes who your peers are.

I’ve never met a highly successful person who wasn’t passionate about something. They don’t necessarily care about more things than others …many are breathtakingly single minded… but their depth of caring and commitment to something is exceptional.