The Bravest Love of all...

I have recently being looking at love and what it is. A couple of experiences I've had recently have brought the topic to the surface and have piqued my interest in the subject.

I'm looking at love in terms of the love between a man and a woman.

In our modern day, what is love? Is it infatuation? Is it being nice? Is it being willing to die for the other person. Where does sex fit in? Can you have love without sex?

My contention is that in our modern world we have confused the two and have equated sex with love. A simple demonstration of this is in our use of the word "Lover". What is a lover? How are you a good lover? Well when we say "Lover", the word refers to a someone's sex partner. In other words, a "lover" is someone you're having sex with. To be a good "lover" is to be good at pleasing someone sexually.

It does not refer to sacrificing all for the person, it does not even refer to being vulnerable, or (sic) being friends! You don't have to know anything about your "lover", to be loved by them, and to be in a love relationship. How often in the movies are we told that the consummation of love between a man and a woman is the sexual act?

But you may ask, what is love really. When does "True" love exist. True love is when your total well being has been placed in the hands of someone else. In other words, when two people are in love it's like they've taken that which is most precious to them and given it to the other person to look after. They excruciatingly vulnerable and supremely powerful at the same time.

What braver thing could a man do than give someone the power to hurt him more than he could imagine? More brave than any physical challenge a man could confront in our world today. You want to prove you're brave, love, in that way. Take heart however, because just as she has the power to hurt you, you also have the power to hurt her. So you're both in the position together. That is the bravest love of all.

Business Initiatives and Processes

How many times at my place of work have they come up with a new system that is going to move the business into the next echelon of efficiency and efficacy? The process is implemented, the people do it, but in just two weeks it is a forgotten entity placed on the scrap heap of "it seems like a good idea at the time".

Why does this happen?

It boils down to one issue. Need. Business processes and mechanisms, if they fulfill a need, stay. Once implemented and running for a number of weeks one begins to wonder, how on earth did we survive without this mechanism? A simple example comes from my place of work (computer programming). We now have an application which keeps track of the various tasks we have to do, and what state those tasks are in. There was a time (sic) when we did not have this application, and I shudder to think of how we managed without it. How did we manage?

This goes some way to demonstrating why new needs arise. It's only when you fill one business need that other needs arise. Without the first need, you have no idea of the 2nd. While you do not have food you have no need for a roof over your head is a fairly brutal illustration here. A more realistic illustration of this is that recently we also installed a new build system (maven), very funky. We've used maven for almost a year and it has certainly made life a lot easier. However, now that we've been running it so long, we've noticed that what we now need is an automatic email sent by maven whever it does a build, to anyone who is interested. At the moment, the notification is done by a human. It would be great if maven could automate that email. Without maven we would not have this need.

I think this is also the reason why programming is more often than not, an iterative, incremental process. i.e. you often find yourself forging ahead with the design and building something, only to realise that the original spec and design was limited and sometimes, just plain wrong. Having build the first "phase" you realise how many more needs there are. These needs are hard to predict. The reason why these needs arise only after you've started is analogous to the way a "new" need arises after you've implemented a new process in the work environment.

comments are always welcome.