I remember quite well a UK gentleman, one of my best mentors I was lucky to encounter in my early career, whom I met and worked with during the late 80ies to mid 90ies. Graham Price his name (R.I.P.), a native Welshman, who spent a lifetime as a Xerox executive in Rochester, NY, and even at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto (not sure whether he wasn't pulling my leg on that last bit). A stoic and incredibly wise man, who had gulped corporate politics and top floor intrigues with buckets! He was eventually made redundant (don't we all?), about when he hit 50. He subsequently became an independent consultant, and I happened to involve him in a number of ICT strategy projects in the Benelux and Switzerland. Norsk Hydro and Hoffman La Roche were among the largest of our customers, where he spent many long months with. I was more than 20 years younger than him, but he didn't mind 'working for me'; why should he, as we ended up me working for him in real terms, while he's been 'selling' the results of our analysis work to the client company chiefs. In general, C-level folks prefer grey wisdom to tell them what to do, and Graham had that, sort of... Anyways, during 1988 and 1989 I used to drive with him a lot to customers in various parts of Central and South Holland, and in Belgium. One 'sunny' day, while driving from Eindhoven to Venlo, I saw him stunned, staring at the Dutch landscape, obviously impressed by what he saw, like he'd never seen that before! With a gasp, he uttered, "I been around here a million times, I never managed to 'notice' the 'windmills', dammit! Did they just built them?". "Yeah", I giggled, "like two hundred years ago!" We had good laughs about this, years later, talking about the 'old days'. However, the incident has been engraved in my brain cells, and I remember this like it was yesterday. Graham hadn't noticed the damn windmills in Holland's countryside!!! I remember him often using a wonderful expression about bartenders and waiters for "being the world's leading experts in looking at you and never seeing you". I believe his very quote was exactly applicable to him, as he 'forgot' to swallow his 'own medicine'. Looking at the windmills countless times but actually never 'seeing them'...
You gotta be blind to come to Holland, travel around and never see the windmills. I had a scream when he said that. What a moron, I thought! Much I knew then... He basically admitted that it was all about arriving at some airport, picked up by some taxi or limo service, driven to the company facility while leafing over the relevant reports on the way, never talking to the driver, toil all day long, being driven for overnight stay to some 'corporate standards' hotel in the neighbourhood, probably being entertained by some business partner in between, with night cups before sleep, expensive French wine, and cholesterol saturated dinner meals, back to the office the following day after a few hours sleep (courtesy of the usual jetlag) for more torrential meetings after meetings, and eventually heading back to Schiphol to catch the overnight flight to some other corner of the world. For more of the same. Graham passed in September 1999. Hardly 60 years old. Complications of an operation, his son wrote to me months later. Into the year 2K, it was. Un homme pressé! Diabetes, cardiovascular, or maybe cancer. Or a combination of any of the above. I'll never know. It doesn't matter anyways. All of us, brilliant career boys will go down similar ways. Mark my words. Not much glamour there. The keyword is 'stress'...
It's the tulips season these days round. Early spring that is. We got quite a few of those in our garden, and, for a number of seasons during the last 3-4 years, having abandoned corporate life for good, encouraged by friends from countries where locally grown tulips are a rarity, I photographed and shared my pictures with those same friends. As a matter of pastime. But like Graham, I never stood still by their intricate tulip beauty, so divinely expressed by simple but brilliant geometry, another proof that Mathematics is nature's very architect. To many indeed Mathematics is nothing short of The Creator! God Itself. (Aronofski's 'Pi' is an interesting try to prove this thesis. Worth viewing, despite it's technically mediocre B/W filming and its occasionally scary occult 'messages'.)
Nonwithstanding our broad knowledge about the obvious destiny, like many millions other 'brilliant career boys' running the enterprises of the world out there, me as well, I never stood still. I actually 'forgot' to do it! Can you just believe this? My world for decades was merely the Company, its products, its customers, its numbers! I haven't 'seen' my offsprings grow from infants to teenagers, to adolescents and young adults. I'd been still looking south to see them stepping on my shoes to do the 'funny walk', but I was shocked to find them north, my eyes staring upwards and discovering them quite few inches above my line of vision. I had become the shortie and hadn't realised. 'Who knows where the time goes? Nina might have known... Life passed me by and I found myself driving through countless and vastly spread fields in the last 30 years with millions, probably billions, tulips, in the very Netherlands of all places, but I hadn't 'noticed' them!
Click on my recent picture above for a larger view. I somewhat annotated it to prove my point hereafter. When I saw four tulips like this one with their petals spread open, during the uniquely sunny and warm day yesterday, exceptional for the time of the year, I became speechless. I just couldn't believe the wisdom by which evolution 'managed' to create tulips like those four. All configured and pre-defined for millions of years, deep in each and every specialized cell of theirs by their own (magical as well) DNA code. We witness a miracle taking place, and we feel too incompetent to grasp its magnitude. I mean the size of the divine wisdom that 'created' nature's laws, which subsequently made tulips 'happen', as well as the rest of the visible and invisible universe for that matter.
Look carefully. There's two systems of three petals each, 120 degrees apart, combine into a simple but beautiful symmetrical structure to form almost a full circular disk, as they spread wide open. In themselves, each of the 'systems' forms with its tips 2 virtual isosceles triangles that are repositioned 180 degrees apart to combine into a 'star of David'. They actually result in a virtual hexagon, with at its center the flower 'style' ending at the 'stigma'. The stigma itself, in a shape similar to each of the petal systems (reminiscent of a Merc star), is also properly aligned with the rest. Everything seems symmetrical by revolution. With every 60 degree angular turn the resulting shape remains invariant as seen from a fixed reference system of angular coordinates. But the sheer beauty of all this is how those 6 anthers (why 6 indeed?) appear aligned to the tips of the petals. The latter turning from light yellow to dark purple around the spot opposite those same anthers, is creating a stunning visual contrast. Probably in order to better attract insects, the masons of the fertilised plant seeds. Like the archangel messengers of the coming of life's next generation.
I think, this time, I might have indeed 'noticed' the tulips. Never too late to teach an old dog new tricks...
1 comment:
Vassily
Imagine how many people before Newton stared at an Apple tree but never saw the Apple falling! The prepared mind discovers :-)
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