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SURE THINGS
Sunday Oct. 18, 2015
People find people to work with, play with, love with, collaborate with, make music with, build things with. On purpose. Sure. More often by accident. Think about people who matter most in your work, in your play, in your life – how did you meet them, and when did you know they were important to you?
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone we encountered came in a branded box – we could just look them up, see how they are rated, Google them to find out if they’ve been scandalized or sued for patent infringement or are awash in class-action lawsuits, check out the compatibility and specifications of whether fan A works best with hard-drive B and interface C, processor D and ram E.
We trust what’s in the box by the name on the box. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, right? Predictable. Reliable. Safe. Honest. Buy Gillette. Buy Sony. Buy VW. OK, maybe not VW …
Tabloids, headlines, infomercials – goods marked ‘new’ or ‘improved’. Silicon valley IPO kids barely old enough to shave reinventing our lives, their latest innovations altering life as we know it, reinventing how we buy, work, play, book a room, hail a cab or meet someone.
I can see what’s in front of me, but is that what is next for me? Or best for me?
Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a sure thing.
Everybody wants one.
Whether we pick a car, pick someone’s pitch, pick products from store shelves, pick a friend from a room full of strangers – bet on a horse, or someone, have faith in an idea, belief in a theory or commit ourselves to a cause – we want sure things.
A simple coin toss would be simpler. And more accurate.
We all want things to work out.
And they do. Just not as we’d ever planned, expected or predicted. What can our eyes see, our belly feel or our mind know?
Don’t need to visit patent offices to prove we are eligible, novel (at least some aspect is new or contains and inventive step) or useful. When registering our intellectual property, product, process or method is worthy – demonstrating those elements, those nuances, to some bureaucrat holding their rubber stamp – poised to register it as ‘patent pending’ or ‘thanks, but no’.
Can we re-invent ourselves?
Do the math …
Many times, wondered what my life would be like if I’d been contented, stayed a path – if I’d not sought what’s next? so many times, if I’d not wondered what’s around the corner? , then sought what was around them …
Reinvention is everywhere.
We don’t so often see it at home, in our mirrors.
Can I possibly know? Can you? For everything we do, if there was some actuary with a visor, a pencil and a candle – calculating risks, probabilities and chances long into the night. Would you like to know the odds, for anything working out? Is this a reasonable, doable and thinkable thing – fraction as hard as knowing, will this work out for me? Or thee? Or we?
What do we seek?
True or false, or interesting …?
Life, figuring it out, may one day be reduced to a software function that won’t work – it will be structured to create the sure thing and it surely won’t work.
Whether we seek the sure thing or the un-sure thing, something drives our searching, our seeking – sometimes it seems like an elusive secret, sometimes it’s as plain as the ice-cream cone in our hand. Could be location, location, location. Could be timing, timing, timing. Could be a coin toss.
Mark Kolke
written / published from Calgary, AB
morning walk: 10C/50F, mostly clear, clouds crowded on the horizon made a spectacular sunrise – calm, quiet, medium-long walk, mulling the day ahead or me and the week behind me …
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