I was having a hard time writing about this idea some technology folks have been jabbering about – it will link back here below when I’m done with it – and I could not figure out why I was having a had time.

I felt like a part of me was shearing away from other parts of me, the friction of aspects of me rubbing against themselves uncomfortable. So I grabbed pen, paper and clipboard and sat outside until the orange winged parrots did their ritual noise to go fly somewhere else.

They do that, you know. Tens of couples, maybe even a hundred, squawking in all their inelegant glory with flight that matched. They peel off the trees of this side of the valley to another part of the valley every day around the same time and make it a point to let everyone know.

Peeling off aspects of the ecosystem of this side of the valley to become aspects on the other side of the valley.

Aspects.

I think back to younger years, where the aspect of me most in tune with technology was overtly dominant, only because of opportunity and circumstance. Had I had my way in secondary school, I would have done Literature and Computer Science, but that was not a possibility. It was one or the other. The path was picked for me, and even though I had a say I did not go against it.

In retrospect, Literature with the other languages was not something I would have done well with. Damned one way or the other, I suppose.

The world was defining the choices I had as a young adult, if there is such a thing. Childhood is largely multiple choice, while the adult world is about the essays we write – and nobody asks to see our working, only our results. Then if you have the results to easily, they want to see your working, an audit sometimes not based on your capability but the lack of others.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I had the time and inclination to grow beyond that. Certainly, there are the wonderful works of literature in Gutenberg.org, but the real growth was from breathing different air. Taking the time to spend away from flat screens and 2 dimensional pages, for the puzzle of life is not 2 dimensional.

Representations of people, too, are not people – they’re just characters, masks that people wear like Instagram posts, more often than not advertising that they’re living their best lives when in fact they really want to be thought of having better lives. ‘Better’ is subjective.

Stay away from the Tide Pods, kids.

So many times people get locked into a way of thinking, of living, and therefore of perspective. This becomes more rigid over time, for better and worse. It happens to all of us, we become baked like bricks into people with granite perspectives, their point of view barely able to turn a few degrees without breaking something.

This is not me. I float back and forth, exploring things from different perspectives, twisting them and sometimes even torturing them if I’ve had one cup of coffee too many. I think that this is needed in our species more than we consider, it allows us to understand our world better by allowing us to understand ourselves better – because everyone we see, we see as a reflection of our own perceptions.

Technology doesn’t do that by itself. It can be used to that end, but all too often the ends of technology are not used that way at all. It is not the fault of technology. It is the fault of we humans, as we stand on one side of the moat or the other.

It’s worth taking the time to peel off our human aspects and look at them now and then to evaluate them. Each journey doesn’t begin with a destination, it begins with knowing where you are.