What I am part 2

Back from two weeks holiday in Ireland I realized something this morning, and I don't know why it escaped me for so long, it's one of those things that's just plain obvious, maybe everyone else can see it, but it's about me, so I couldn't.

Here's the thing I realized. No one knows what I do now.

Maybe with one exception, possibly I know what I do. Or perhaps I know what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do since 2013 looks more and more hopeless, I guess. Because a big part of what I do involves other people using what I create. There needs to be a lot of them for it to work.

Here's what I think I am.

I am an old software developer, a programmer.

I make software because it pleases me to do that, the way a potter makes pots, or a gardener tends a garden, or a cook prepares meals, or an architect designs buildings. That's it. That's what I do.

It's not my imagination. There's real software out there that I created that companies and people use.

PS: Of course I also blog, but that's part of being a software developer and a human being.

PPS: Don't cry for me Argentina. I have had it pretty good. I share my observations here. This is just one more.

Continuity

“Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says

Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, ‘I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. If that is true, somewhere a boy sits next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window handle which lowers the wing flaps and makes the car rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world”.
-Garrison Keillor’s fictional world of Lake Wobegon.

There is a continuity in human experience:  are there not countless children who had such thoughts, or similar ones? Their world is a magical place where reality has not yet crushed the power of imagination, where a car can become an airplane soaring through the sky, and where a little girl can walk through a scene of suspended animation. Anything is possible in the realms of the imagination; the unexpected, the unlikely, the absurd, they are all acceptable.

“It’s the same thing I looked at forty years ago”, says Clarence Bunsen. There is a continuity in childhood experience. All around the world there are children whose imaginations can take them on flights, or on walks up beaches like Tramore Bay.