At Odds With Words, But Not With Me

As I prepare for my book, I’ve been looking through my dozen years of blogging. I’m focused on Keywords and their Ideas. Ideas and their Thoughts. Thoughts and their Structures. All of which lead to conclusions or results.

Am I saying the same thing throughout the years,
or am I wallowing like a water-soaked log on a feisty sea?

I like keywords. When their definitions have meaning, then it’s easy to see their ideas and the thoughts you think to define a structure that leads to a conclusion. That’s the result! But make the word at odds with itself, then you realize there is opposition at play. Can you gauge the two and find the middle?

That’s where the oddity comes to play.

The spectrum of left to right, up over down, forward while being dragged backward. In the middle of the spans is a center point that represents me. The pendulum swings wide, but the resting place is where gravity causes it to pause. Forces may push one way or the other, but the center never changes.

Perhaps that’s my worldview. My focus. Perspective. Me.

Imagine a Prism

Let’s imagine that your world is a prism with various possible outcomes—the shape of your prism matters. Shine a light through you, and what do you get? The light source is important, and it can change the results based on type, direction, and power. The style of light matters: Wide beam versus Narrow beam. Get the picture? Your possibilities of outcome are seemingly endless. But you are still the prism in the middle. You’ve not changed. You are still you. Prisms never change unless they are fractured or broken. Right?

Yet, we know beyond a doubt that we all change. Change is seldom quick and is often as slow as a tortoise, but change always happens. A diamond is a style of prism that changes as someone fractures the cut to produce a different clarity. The hard surface can permanently be chiseled through.

Years and experiences give us differing perspectives. We may still have the framework of life, but we’ve shifted the source of light that molds the outcome. Life has thrown us curveballs that have put us on the defensive and maybe even on the offense.

That’s The Oddity of Words

The meaning, usage, and validity of words shift over time. The core idea and structure may remain the same, but we gravitate toward an “improved” (??) language to describe our center and world.

We are prone to create new words to define a differing perspective or re-present an older term that had meaning from a prior life that does not fit modern life.

When I say, “Go left.” What does that mean? From which perspective am I speaking, and am I pointing you from your perspective to go a certain way? Which way is “left?” From my view, or yours?

When I took my motorcycle driving test, the officer told me he would follow in his car. If he beeped his horn once, then I was to turn right. Two beeps equal a left turn. No beep means continue the way I’m going. Immediately pulling out of the parking lot, he beeped his horn once. I turned right immediately! Right into someone’s driveway. He clarified his instructions. Right when we come to a “road decision” and not a driveway choice. I was only 15, and it was 1970 if I remember correctly. He could have treated me sarcastically, but he was kind. I was embarrassed.

Life has a way of unsettling your core based on your experiences.

From missing school due to surgery, being poked fun at because of your last name, or living bored when the teacher thinks that what is presented is the most fascinating thing on earth. I never understood Geometry or Algebra! Growing up in a Judeo-Christian, southern, Texan, blue-collar background, it was easy to stay in tune with life because that’s all we knew. But I branched into Banking and then IT, which moved my world way ahead of where I could have been. I was not better, nor different, but my platform was “over there” and not “around here.”

The Core of Me

I am still the same at my core. My values had not changed. God, family, country! Experiences have opened my eyes and understanding to a different framework.

The computer never slept! Mainframes operated seven days a week, 24 hours per day! Computer languages, acronyms, and heady experiences as we utilized technology in ever-evolving ways. We discarded all our keypunched data cards about 1978 and moved into data storage that was digital! Our factory and offices were wired to connect dumb terminals to the mainframe through controllers and coaxial cables. We even tested a connection through a never before used process to show our computing process at the Astrodome two miles away during an oil tool technology conference. Gray Tool Company was a great experience!

Then, opportunities took us to Alaska, Texas, and again to Alaska! I was content to stay in the cold north forever. But God. God had a different plan. Washington. The only state named after a president and the weirdest liberal place I could ever imagine.

Every step of life kept adding to my frame, but my core remained the same.

I accepted that life was unique, but that didn’t mean I had to change. If anything, my core tightened up to reject the varieties that force our world to be different. Some things were never meant to change.

However, I find my weariness of age and times make me more aware of the next 33 years of life. Yes. I’m headed for a 100-year-old birthday!

All around, the pendulum is swinging on different platforms. What was left may be headed back to the center. It will swing right with the force of gravity behind it and momentum. That is life.

If I live long enough, maybe it should be said, the weight of my core values helped keep the center where it needs to be. Neither left nor right. Not up, nor down. Not dragged backward, nor leaping forward. Here I am, right in the center. That’s where I want to be.