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Meditations on the Cloud. Connecting back to mind body balance.

The human back is the infrastructure of our existence, much like IT infrastructures are the backbone of our business existence. However, our 21st century lifestyle has co-opted evolution and placed our backs under extreme conditions: we work at a desk, we travel using car, we relax with a TV, movie, video game, or a story session with our child.

A back than is bent at 90 degrees is something that an upright biped was not supposed to be doing 24x7x365.

Admittedly, it is comfortable to sit in a chair than walk or run miles every day to find food. We can thank our own ingenuity for that. Score one for mind.

But over time, this leads to a state where this comfort turns into agony: back pain. Score -1 for the body.

Net result: 0.

If you have never had a back freeze, I suggest you continue doing whatever you are doing to stay that way.

Here you are, climbing stairs lightly, carrying your child, trying to open the door, and catching a falling door-key before it drops to the ground, in fluid motion, effortless in appearance. And the next day, all it takes is a single missed step, and you are fully conscious of the excruciating pain around one area: L4-L5 that would be subject to jabs of so many sharp pins, for so many minutes, and a dull cycle of surging and falling pain every 6-8 seconds.

Maybe it is 14 hour work days, the bumpy roads in the old city, the lack of regular food timings, or a stressful life event. Or a combination of all of them. It takes all your will to stay motionless to get rid of the pain, forcing yourself rest even as more work fills your Inbox and workflow portal(s).

The key is to realize that the problem is an imbalance between body and mind. The mind needs a certain rate of thought flow and a certain posture of the body, to keep it under normal operating conditions. Keep the thought flow within limits and balanced with real action, and you are happy. Forget to take care of the body, and forget to slow down the mind - it gets back, and gets your back :-)

It is difficult to slow down the mind. However, you have two choices: take control and do it, or lose control and be forced into it.

The human mind and body need to work together, in their natural range of functions.

Likewise, business processes cannot be good in an imbalanced IT infrastructure. And our IT infrastructures are getting terribly out of balance nowadays. The performance gap between compute, memory, network and storage is getting wider and wider. We are stuck to old processes and slow moving software and business processes, and ultra-fast moving compute landscape. There's an imbalance of form versus function in most business architectures.

Knowing how business processes work, balancing them to fit the IT infrastructure, as well as flexing the infrastructure to optimize the business processes, is what true IT practice is all about.

Meditation unites the mind and body. What is the silver bullet for IT and Business? A flexible, scalable way to grow infrastructure to business needs, and a way to simplify business needs to fit your infrastructure?

Is the promise of the Cloud Computing akin to the promise of meditation?

Comments

  1. Rama, well thought of ..about the pros and cons!

    Hope everyone realizes about this, 'life style based low quality living' before not only their back but the totality is lost.

    I always admire your fine abilities!

    ReplyDelete

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