Saturday, December 8, 2012

On Being a Robot

“Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot” 
 Bruce Lee


     Odd revelation from the other day:  I was born a robot.  No, really.  It's not a bad thing.  It just is.  I was born a robot and someone wound me up from day one.  You know? That little key thing in the back of the old fashioned robots?  The key that you twist and the robot moves and doesn't stop moving until the key is unwound?

    Robot?  Yes, I think maybe most of us human beings are born robots.   I know I was born into a family and into a culture whose directions dominated my life.  This is not to say that it has been a bad life.  Quite the contrary but, from where I sit after almost six decades, I can see now that the path was pretty much  pre-scripted.  I suppose I could have deviated from the path but that wasn't part of my programming.

     I like what Bruce Lee says above.  Maybe now I can finally find a way to take the key out.  Hmmm - a bit risky that.  Perhaps the robot will stop moving then?




8 comments:

  1. I was born a robot, too, but I ended up veering off my pre-scripted path. I took a risk that I never thought I would take, and although I'm happy where I ended up, I do have some regrets about the way I got here. It's hard to put in words...

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    1. Oh, I get that place - the hard to put into words place. I'm there a lot of the time when I get reflective.

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  2. Ah yes, that key, the one passed down from the very first of our mothers and fathers. And don't forget, we robots also come complete with pre-recorded continuos loop messages.
    Hey, maybe once the key is removed the robot would kick it up and dance gangnam style.

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    1. Or maybe the robot would go surfing or skiing or take a nap! I want to find out!

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  3. Sorry, I don't buy it. Robot/shmobot. You are one of the most creative and innovative people I have ever met. Don't hand ME any of this robot business. If you were a robot, there is no way you could ever work on a middle school campus, and care about those kids the way you do. Believe me; I have seen robots before, and you do not qualify. xoxoxoxoxoxo

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    1. I see your point, Mr Mark -- working with kids or people in general , being real with them, doesn't have much robotic action in it, does it. So, I agree, the daily business is not as robotic as I might have implied - what IS robotic is the path that led to the work and the house in the little town and the marriage and the two kids - NOT THAT ANY OF THAT IS BAD - just that it was all written in the sand before I came along. XOXOXXOXOOXOOXOo

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  4. (I apologize in advance for what promises to be a long and wandering comment--not that that's unusual in my comments...just that I've done so many of them in a row the past sixteen hours or so that I'm starting to feel a little self-conscious about it...)

    In high school I knew a kid who wore a T-shirt that said "Conformity Without Ignorance." I kind of think of that as along the same lines as what you're saying here. Even if you have lived out a basically pre-scripted existence, I would imagine (at least from our conversations here in the computer) that you did so with a lot of conscious decision-making and self-awareness and (as Mark attested) creativity and innovation. You may already be living the Bruce Lee way.

    (This is the unnecessarily long part: When I thought of that kid's T-shirt, I thought, as I often do when I think of his shirt, that someone else MUST'VE said that, though it was not attributed to anyone on the shirt. I've always thought of it as a kind of Mark Twain-y thing to say. So I Googled "conformity without ignorance" in quotation marks, and the only reference I found was ME seven years ago in another blog comment in which I mentioned the kid and his T-shirt. I don't know why--maybe because this was a post about robotic/autopilot behavior--but I found that HILARIOUS!)

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    1. Conformity without Ignorance -- perfect! How could a high school kid be so wise?

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