Perspective and Patterns and Time

This is a picture of the tiles in the bathroom flooring of my office building. The reason that I took this picture was because I caught myself about a week ago trying to find a pattern to the seemingly random mosaic of colored tiles. Where, I wondered, was the border between one square of randomness and the next. How was it laid down by contractors? Was one square of small tiles set and then the next, identical one, rotated 90 degrees to mix the pattern and confuse the sequence even further

I tried breaking the tiles into imaginary blocks of 9 (like a Rubic's cube) to see if that made it any easier to decipher. But eventually I had to admit that I didn't see the pattern--though I am still sure that there is one.

But that is how the brain works. It looks for patterns. It collects facial details and stores them away. The brain can't accept randomness and wants to figure things out and make sense of it all.

***

I am trying to tie this photo idea from a week ago into this 12th anniversary post for the start of WWYG?! Because, I think as much as for any other reason, when I started writing this blog 12 years ago today, I was trying somehow to find my own pattern. I was trying to sort out my young life--with a career just getting established, two young children, and lots of unknowns still a part in my life. I was settling down into my adulthood, leaving behind my college years and the original concept for what I first thought those adult years would be. I would not become a professor. And Lynda and I were very much committed to raising a family--but we didn't really know what that meant . . . yet.

Sarah was only 4 and Grace was still a very young toddler. Lynda and I had good jobs at MHE, but I was still a project worker and there were no guarantees in anything. We had families in Georgia and our friends and church family in Hilliard and at St. Nicholas. So, by no means were things bad or even uncertain. But there was still much unknown and--as yet--unexperienced.

Twelve years later, much of that experience has passed.

(Here is where I drop in the plug for you to peruse back through this blog archive and see what some of them were. Most of it is dumb and pointless. But, hey. . . a lot of life back then was--at least for me sometimes. All of my experiences with my work friends was a chance to reignite a bit of fun in life at a time when I was walking away from a particular set of goals and dreams and years of study and "seriousness". I was glad to embrace frivolity and fun.)

And that makes it sound like all of that fun has gone away in recent years and that's not true or fair to the friends I still have at work and the fun I still have a lot of the time. But no one can pretend that a lot of changes haven't happened around there in the last ten years. And . . . I'm over 40 and getting more boring every day.

BUT--I ain't dead yet.

There is still lots to do and I hope I can still find time now and again to carve out space to describe some of it on the blog going forward. There are always TV previews to write. And while I may not think Tom Cruise is as crazy as I once said he was, you never quite know what those Thetans are going to ask him to do for the next Mission: Impossible movie stunt. And, certainly, my family and my kids aren't going away--and that was what I wrote about the most over the years anyhow.

So, there is still stuff to see and do. And you'll keep hearing about it here. Here's to more years of not yet figuring out how to grow.