Skip to main content

Intangibly nice people

Being nice is so obviously a good thing.

The fact is that you'd be hard pressed to get a single, succint definition of "nice". Courteous? Yes. Reciprocal? Yes. Well mannered? Yes. Not rude? Yes. Win-Win? Yes. Giving? Yes. Etc. Etc.

In public interactions, nice is synonymous with keeping peace, moving in unison, making things easier for everyone. This is absolutely the right way to conduct oneself in the world, if we want to move the world. It is the habit that many of us mold our childhood innocence into, to make the world a better place every time we practice it.

But the nice that I want to frame today is different. It isn't a quality, but more than that. Without offending all of us, it is safe to say that only a few people are this nice. Of course, some of these nice embodiments are given to you - parents, siblings and early childhood friends. Their niceness lasts a lifetime if you are gifted enough to tend them against the escape velocity that space and time separation places into the mix.

This other kind of nice is something you know because you simply feel it as a presence around these people.  They are it. They make you feel - safe. With them, even if you are faced with a sheer face of a rock (of a problem), you know you won't fall if you let go. They are safety. 

And curiously, you tend to ignore these nice people the most, because, like the air you breathe, you don't see them in that light every day. (that is indeed a shame if that happens often).

I have the good fortune of being friends with some of the nicest people of this kind. Some, I have had short interactions, but with some, fairly constant over time. Some are great seers, some are exactly like me - every day folks.

I'm deeply indebted to all of them - for changing me beyond what I thought was possible, all without advice or request or demand or force (in the order of typical escalation of expectations).
















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why PI is not 4, math is great, and other mysteries.

The other day, I found myself with an interesting problem of approximating a circle with the enclosing square which seems to prove pi = 4. The paradox was forwarded by a most interesting puzzle collector, Surajit Basu, a friend and life long inspiration. See Sonata for Unaccompanied Tortoise for why! Here is the offending paradox: This is an example of how counterintuitive questions can be answered with a little calculus. The key is to realize that no matter how closely we approximate the circle, the orthogonal lines of the approximation formed by inverting the square corners will never actually be tangential to the circle. Note carefully that as you get closer to 90 degrees, the horizontal line is much longer than the vertical. Same goes with the approximation at 0 and 180 - the vertical line is much larger than the horizontal component. If we take a quadrant of the circle - let's say the top left quadrant, moving counter clockwise from to
5 comments
Read more

Architecture, Engineering, Operations - 1

The world has infinitely more stuff to be "done" nowadays. At least in the sense of building/running an institution that uses technology, there are many roles that are involved in making things work. The world of IT and technology in general makes the speed and variety possible. We now have a platform of IT that is globally scale-able if we can put some new thinking to the old problems of "getting things done". There are great organizations that do this well, and they use modern IT principles to achieve this. Fundamental to engineering a modern IT (or infrastructure organization) are the three roles of Architecture, Engineering and Operations. Some would say Architecture is encoded Engineering-history, but for now, we will keep them separate. The popular definitions for these roles are about output delivered or the domain of discourse. The personality drives that determine the actual performance are not discussed, as far as I can see, in a holistic fashion i
Read more

Ambition vs. Fear.

Most important things in life don't come to us. Nor do we get them by seeking/wanting them. It comes from letting go of the unimportant stuff. The hardest part is letting go of the tendency to take the world as is. This is a habit of our past successes. But success is not a destination, it is a STOP sign. You stop, wait, and move on. Too often, we are paralyzed by success into the fear of the new. We stall on the road to a new life. We need to break our inertia and move. Our thoughts and thought habits are hard to break. But that is where we have to spend the most energy. Thoughts are always competing strands  - of worries of the past and anxieties for the future. For some of us, they are cleanly separated into rivers that nurture every place they travel. For most, they are like the torrents and trickles -- competing, rushing somewhere, stopping completely elsewhere, always mixing, morphing, competing, winning, losing. Our thoughts are the potential difference between the t
5 comments
Read more