I'm preparing to leave town for the first time since that one dark day.
The Stockholm event was postponed until January due to the ensuing
circumstances, which I won't revisit. Suffice it to say that we are
returning to business, my team at Sun. We're again seeking developers
out, to educate, to engage, to learn with...the new
Sun Tech Days season,
which was to begin in Stockholm on Sept. 18-19, will now begin
in Warsaw on October 29-30. And I'll be there, God willing...
How different are these new days? How different indeed...these times
are unique to my reckoning...but I am reminded of other times. The
60s, for example. I was born in 1952, reached consciousness of some
sort by the age of 4 and thus was exposed to much of our world as a
generationally bound child of television. As such, I remember first
hand those historical events which can now somehow give solace...
I was witness too, being older now than the median, even for an
aging nation.
The Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, the hand-crafted, cinder block
bomb shelters at a friend's home where once a backyard lived.
My father didn't put much stock in such preparations...we had a basement
which turned out to be more than sufficient. I remember listening
to JFK live during the Cuban Missle Crisis, thinking this might be it...
we might actually fall into the abyss of the unthinkable. Did
I really live in such a universe?
I think it is safe to say that one day our species will become
extinct. Extinction events are as fundamental to speciazation as
death is to life. Despite political views to the contrary, Darwinian
forces dominate any sufficiently complex ecosphere. Thus, humanity
too shall pass; as terrifying as that thought may be, it can also
be one of our most freeing realizations.
Just as each of us must ultimately face the inevitabilty of death from
this universe, so must we all. As with all species, we too have
limits; the temporal dimension being perhaps one of the less obvious
in the aggregate, we are nevertheless so constrained. As we come to
understand and embrace that realization, it becomes just as obvious
that while we cannot eliminate the inevitable, we can seriously postpone
it...the length of our "reign," as it were, can be a function of our
own choosing, individually and in the aggregate.
Belief. This too is a function of belief, individually and in the aggregate.
If we plan to fail, or fail to plan, we have codified our belief
in time and made it so. If we see the long now, it can be ours...
at least, that's what I believe.
We still wave our flags at home...and the flag in the upper left
corner of this site will remain. My diary now returns to "normal,"
and the mission continues despite the changes we feel since that
one day. So I remember being at war...my country at war, inside and out.
I remember the fear of the draft and the guilt of a high draft number,
escaping the fate of too many of my peers. And I remember living....
and loving and life. We got through those times. We'll get through
these. If we see the long now, it will be ours...
If
there's hope for humanity it's in software