Author: neil

We were greeted this evening at the beach with a spectacular sunset, and a double rainbow.

I’ve been engrossed in Donella Meadow’s “Thinking in Systems – A Primer”. It came across my readings multiple times in the last few weeks, and it has been an incredible read. I’ve been reading some of the material her foundation’s website has curated while waiting for the book to arrive, and maybe I’ve been primed for the primer 🙂

Watching the rainbow got me musing about how we can be so carried away with its beauty while perhaps forgetting that it’s an optical illusion or that it’s also an indicator of the weather system going through a change.

Dana repeatedly makes the point that systems are all around us, and we take them for granted. Most of us get captivated by events, the daily news being an example of our unending fascination with them. A smaller number tend to focus on behaviors. Academics/ academic types zone in on the elements that make up the system, and fewer consider the relationships between the elements. Even fewer think about the functions/goals of the system (and perhaps rightly so, or else we’d get overwhelmed).  If we are really interested in the system we want to bring a change about, Dana’s recommendation (at least in my dumb understanding first reading) is to start on the mindset, the questions we should really ask about understanding the system, what she calls paradigm upsetting questions.

Living in the present is a mantra repeated often. Be here and now, and appreciate whatever’s here and now.

It comes into stark focus sometimes. A health scare – or sometimes not merely a scare. There’s an expiry date – no pun intended. Time’s actually counting down. What will your life be worth? What about in the time you have left? Can you make a difference for yourself? For those you really, truly care about? Make memories with them?

Several friends and family are struggling with their health right now. Some will brush the problems off easily, others have a long rocky road ahead of them. Some don’t have to worry about the money it will take to recover. Others won’t say it aloud but are worried more about how to pay for their medication. The economic stresses of being ill are visible on their faces, and the choices they’re having to make.

Life’s a struggle. Our friends and family can make it a little more bearable, or dare I say, sometimes fun.

While I’ve lived next door to a telephone exchange for nearly 8 years, I – like most people – have never seen the insides of one.

Since migrating continents over a decade ago, I’ve worked in the telecom industry. From knowing nothing about the mobile or fixed line network to having a reasonable high-level view of both, I have learnt almost everything I know about the engineering that goes into a network from my generous colleagues.

Today, I got a 1:1 tour of the exchange, and a slice of the network that aggregates all the traffic from the neighbourhood heading to and from the world wide web. Modern technology uses a strand of glass and incredible technology to connect us on the internet, to let me publish my random thoughts to the world. It’s magic, and yet a creation of human ingenuity.

What was even more fascinating was the stories SL told me; the people who needed to work full time in the noisy hot factory that housed the mechanical predecessor to modern software driven exchanges;  their ability to notice trouble merely from the sounds of the whirring equipment; of how thousands of these building lie around the country, graveyards to machinery and racks and cards, forgotten by everyone except the technicians who go in there every so often to fix some service; how the cables are kept airtight with the compressed air being pumped through them; and on and on and on..

As I reflect on the day’s learning, and the lucky opportunity I got today to do so, Richard Feynman’s words (I’m reading his book “What do you care what other people think?”) resonate strongly: “With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned taht the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries – certainly a grand adventure!”

What an adventure it has been today. And to be grateful for the people who care enough to show me the ropes, the cables and conduits, and how far we’ve come to simply be connected to each other in so many different ways.

The young child who got his/her first computer at the age of 8/9/10. The fascination with how it did things. The desire to learn more about how it does its thing. Getting hooked/in the flow.

These stories (with some modifications) are common to hear from the leaders in the field. Great fame and fortunes are amassed.  How good it is that they found their calling at such a young age, etc etc.

As a parent with a precoccious child who has to be torn away from his computer or his screen-based learning, I’m not sure how the parents of these rich and famous folks dealt with screen time. The discipline of doing the basics, repeating them, working on the ethic(s) muscle as much as the intellectual and physical ones are often glossed over in those stories, I think.

All that said, I was pleased at how much the young lad was able to educate me on about his drone, the regulations about flying it, the mechanics as well as he understood them, the explanations of what potentially had gone wrong to not let him fly a couple of days, the boost in confidence, and the sheer joy he shared with me.  This picture is from one of his first solo flights, on a cloudy afternoon, when the rain broke for a bit.

Teaching someone else is the best form of learning, as many a wise person has said. It’s hard to teach when you don’t understand it well enough. It’s even harder to teach when the student is an adolescent or a child, who genuinely wants to know why something is the way it is, and asks the questions that leave you gasping 🙂

My knowledge of music -of reading sheet music, or playing an instrument – is rudimentary at best, and have hardly had any instruction that I can rely on. I learnt it by ear, by listening and watching someone else, and asking questions about the art or practice of playing music.

So last night, when cajoling my 11-year old to play his cello, I casually asked him if he knew what scale the music he was playing (Bach’s Prelude Suite No. I). He guessed a scale and pretty quickly let on that he had no idea.  I asked if he knew the Circle of Fifths (I’ve heard of it, and only cursorily seen it) and he vaguely remembered his teacher telling him about it, and also that it was in one of his many music theory books.  We got on to it, and with a paper and pencil in hand, figured out how the major scales worked on there.  And of course when we got to the 5 sharps or 5 flats and above, we were both struggling to keep up, at which point we called it quits.

80% of the scales could be figured out pretty easily, and that we didn’t have to learn it all at once was a lesson that dawned for him quickly. That we were both learning together meant the world – to both of us. And tonight we’ll tackle the inner circle on the Circle of Fifths, the relative minors for the major scales we learnt yesterday.

It also pulled me away from the screen and onto doing things I want to do. A win all over.