Ro Versus Fade

Today, Rohit turns 30, an age that he has believed his entire life is the beginning of the Fade.

Also, it was five years ago today that we met on his 25th birthday and decided to leave graduate school so we could start KnowNow.

It was a little less than five years ago that I turned thirty, and I put a message in a bottle to the future me and Rohit with the title Thirty, rest, and motion. My favorite lines from that essay:

1. People who mind their own business die of boredom by thirty.


2. Said Renee Zellweger to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, "I care about the job, but mostly I want to be inspired."


3. If you look closely at a circle, you see a tightly woven interconnection of many points equally distant from a particular center. If you look *too* closely at the individual points, you cannot see the circle at all; if you focus too much on the relationship between the circle's constituents and the center, you miss seeing the beauty of the whole.


4. Said Steve Jobs, "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."


5. Said Yoda, "Fear is the path to the Dark side. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering."


6. Said Alfred D. Souza, "For a long time it had seemed to be that life was about to begin -- REAL life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. THEN life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles WERE my life."


7. In Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, the journey from need-directed goals (survival) to outer-directed goals (belonging, then self-esteem) and finally to inner-directed goals (self-actualization) requires expenditure of energy to overcome the fear to quantum leap from one level of the pyramid to the next.


8. In Clifford Anderson's stages of life, development consists of five stages. If development is blocked at some point along the way, or if learning is disrupted (for example, by the need to go to work full time or support a family), their basic capacities do not develop properly or any further. The beauty of reincarnation is the ability to hit the reset button and try again until we get it right. Here are Anderson's five stages:
   1. Prelinear (roughly ages 1-5; basic clerical skills)
   2. Concrete (6-12; higher clerical, supervisory, and technical skills)
   3. Abstract (13-18; professional and managerial skills)
   4. Relativistic Thinking (19-25; visionary and leadership skills)
   5. Nonlinear, Intuitive Thinking (26-33; creativity and synthesis skills)


9. It is precisely when you come to understand -- to REALLY understand and to COMPLETELY internalize -- your own mortality within the context of a 15-billion-year-old universe and a sub-100-year lifespan, that you understand what is most important. Time is the only finite resource, creativity is the only truly challenging goal. As you become more elderly, the crispness of the vision gets burned into your mind's eye.


10. Said Arthur C. Clarke, "Perhaps the adjective elderly requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!"


11. Success consists of getting up one more time than you fall. Everything has a message in it if you are willing to look, and seemingly contradictory points at opposite parts of a circle's diameter are actually complementary when you look at the circle as a whole. But don't look too closely or you'll only see the individual brushstrokes and not the whole picture, and you'll get confused as to whether this assemblage of strings has any purpose to it at all. That it has a purpose is not under question; the only question is whether you can make the creative leap to connect things that were heretofore unconnected. A life when viewed as a whole is more beautiful than each of its individual points, but without the tightly interwoven set of points there can be no complete circle. Time is the lubricant that enables innovation, but creative leaps cannot be rushed and you cannot cross a chasm with multiple jumps. Some actions really are atomic.


12. Said Billy Joel, "Some people stay far away from the door, if there's a chance of it opening up. They hear a voice in the hall outside and hope that it just passes by."


13. Said Cliff Burton of Metallica, "You don't burn out from going too fast. You burn out from going too slow and getting bored." I would have asked him about thirty, rest, and motion, but he died long before Metallica sold out stadiums.


14. Sometimes poetry is badly in need of an editor who will sort out the nonsequiturs and smooth out the self-references and organize -- no, classify -- no, clarify the prose into something more readable than that which pleases the author alone. It is the author/editor combination that produces the innovation that can then be connected in the web and enable further syntheses by others. This is the way that evolution revolves, not with a whimper but a bang.


15. Life is a terminal illness. The terminally ill go through five stages upon realization of their imminent mortality: 1. Denial, 2. Anger, 3. Bargaining, 4. Anticipatory Grief, 5. Acceptance / Resignation.


16. Each day is like a microcosm of a life, with a journey from start to finish. You sleep, you wake up, you waste time, you go to sleep and start again the next day. Sometimes you get a little closer to acceptance, and sometimes you get a little closer to that creative pinnacle, but in any case you spend your available time for the chance of that happening. You travel from the New Otani to the 360 to the Spinning Bar atop the Westin Bonaventure just for the chance to see how spectacular a clear winter night can be when the ideas flow free, knowing in your heart and your mind and your spirit and your soul, that with acceptance comes calm.


17. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, achieving the mass of a professional bowling score to the tune of 220 or 250 or 274 or a perfect 300... and the angels in the architecture never let you see where you're going next until you're already there. Luckily, wherever you go, there you are. And it is precisely at the moment that you can transcend the hundred fires you're fighting and the hundred years of solitude from the cradle to the grave, that the singular point of your existence around which the circle of points in your life are equally distant comes into focus. You lose the fear, you abandon the pursuit of the less important distractions, and the energy in your mind becomes crisp enough to take a body of rest... out of rest.


18. In any given situation, you should ask not, "What did I do to deserve this?" because deserve's got nothing to do with it. Remember always that ideas are dangerous things for most people and that the enemy of the great is not the mediocre. The enemy of the great is the good enough.

I haven't really got much new to say, except to wish Rohit a happy birthday and to point out that he's come a long way even in the past year: he got a PhD, he got engaged, he won a Distinguished Paper award at a well respected conference (ICSE), he got married, he was named Director of a Research Lab, and he set up 2005 to be a year of publications.

To remind myself how far he's come even in just the past year, I need only look to my Ode to Engagement I wrote to him 11 months ago:

Indulge my pen-to-paper as we close 2003,
And we embark your last starry revolution before Ro' hits 30.
This is the week that FoRK turns 8, or vertical infinity,
But let's set our sights on success more finite: recent history.

Take a moment to reflect & in the rearview mirror we see
A month of achievement, a month of closure, a month of family:

1. You become excellent by doing things a bit better each day, oui;
2. You added a degree of freedom: completing a decent PhD;
3. You engaged a lovely, thoughtful superhero kung-fu-fighting TB;

All that remains is to chart out the route to become the NeXT BillG!

I believe future-side we'll see this month as a turning point passed at the speed of c,
So every year @ The Festival Of Lights remember to savor this milestone victory.
Delight in this moment, relive it and own it, find strength in your journey's destiny,
And sow the seeds to feed your needs; the truth has indeed set you free.

So Ro', a toast as our ship leaves this harbor toward the open sea:

VISION, CLUE, AND BITS FOREVER... and...

May you & your loved ones live forever after, heathily and happily.

So happy birthday, Rohit. Remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To laugh often and love much;
To win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children;
To earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;
To know even one life breathed easier because you have lived...
This is to have succeeded.

I leave you with Edna's line in The Incredibles:

I never look back, darling. It distracts from The Now.

So it goes.

Update, slightly less than 24 hours later. I was able to sneak my FoRKPoST on 30 in with 151 seconds remaining on November 25, but to my disappointment, Rohit did not post at all today. Once upon a time, he never would have taken 30 off. But that was then and this is now, and in fact he did take 30 off. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

Comments

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Happy Birthday Rohit!

[Richard Treadway]

Very nicely said Adam and Happy Birthday Rohit!