Borobudur

If you haven't heard of it before, I wouldn't blame you. Do a google search on it, and you'll find out more. Borobudur is an ancient relic, a building that pictorially depicts the life of Buddha, and his journey to enlightenment. The building is multi-storeyed, and as you go around all the floors on your way to the top, you see Buddha progressing on his journey to enlightenment, when you reach the top, you've seen his story, and symbolically atleast, attained enlightenment. The interesting feature of the building is that you cannot see any floors above you, but you can always see the floors below you, an expression of the causality in life, and a reminder to always remember where you're coming from. Ever since I learnt about the place, I've wanted to see it, and hopefully someday I will.

The second building I find fascinating isn't something you can see in one location at all. Technically, it doesn't exist at all, out of a computer i.e. If you've played civilization, you'll know the building I'm talking about. The intro video to the game revolves around this building as it's constructed and shows a fast forwarded progression through the ages as the building evolves over time. However, we always only see the facet of the building that represents the current age.

Those of you who've read my posts before know this is about to get hairy, so here goes. I was thinking about maturity, personality, and how we grow mentally over time. Language lets us put binary tags on people, like whether they're mature or not, and the like. However, something I realised recently, is that our maturity really is scenario dependent, i.e. the same person could be very mature about one thing, and yet wholly immature with regards to another. My reference to the virtual building is a pointer to that, that we are like a building under construction, and each facet to it proceeds rather independently of the other. They can pull each other up or down, but that's about it. The independence alludes to the fact that each part can be built very differently, and can have varying levels of stability. People can react very differently to different things, their behaviour is somewhat consistent when the transition between situations is smooth, but when shocked, the variation is quite stark. Even more importantly, the stability, let's us try different things. If we are stable and confident about a part of our self, we're much more relaxed in trying out different things, cause we're well grounded in that and know we can cope with whatever new thing gets thrown at us. You'll always find that the people most adamant about a stance, are the ones who're too dependent on it, or too scared as to what will happen if they're proven wrong. These are the ones who'll fight tooth and nail for it, while the more relaxed, more mature ones will stand by. Not to be confused, the ones who have no stance at all, will do so as well, but merely out of the fact that they have no maturity on it at all. It is similar to window cleaners cleaning using a swing. You need a certain amount of strength to hang one, and so not all buildings can take it. As a kid, I was always taught to not fight but listen, cause when you listen you can understand the other point, and to an extent, it helps you ground your own ideas in more sound arguments. As they say, only fools rush in.

I may have mentioned the part about Borobudur before, that it's easy to see how obvious the right answer was later, the gift of hindsight, as they say. But more important is the patience part, waiting and progressing when the end is not nigh. Agreed life doesn't always, if ever progress linearly, but it's a useful trait nonetheless to have, one I believe is the hardest to acquire, not that I have, yet :)

This post is a realization of the fact that no building is ever truly finished, and that outside veneer doesn't say anything about what's inside, and that even though it may feel like we've reached the top and stuck our hand out as far as it may go, there're more floors above and still further you can go on that ledge (figuratively of course, please not literally), and the fact that the ground seems so far below, is a good indication that you've progressed a lot, but there're still other floors to go to, and other parts of the building to complete, lest you forget about them. That's all for the building puns for tonight folks!