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Context is a way that I look at people to make them right or wrong about anything, it is how we make something feel silly or important, of utmost urgency or laissez-faire. 

Context is how we can look busy and be doing nothing, look like you’re doing nothing but just about drowning, embattled during a cease-fire, or stoic in the midst of conflict.  

Context is an angle you look at life through that allows you to generate a second opinion about something.  

If you cannot think outside of the context you are operating in, then you are only thinking within the context of thought you’re currently limited by.  New understandings increase the contexts through which we can think from, but there is always a limiting factor to what we can understand about the world, namely through the contexts we came from.  Each of us offers a different fragment of a whole lens of truth about ourselves.  Every person we meet, idea we exchange, and understanding we gain represents a new step toward increasing the context humanity has to work with in our decision-making every day.  

I am fascinated with context as a term because I understand its power and various forms of meaning.  

Context is what I have had to come out of in adulthood in order to feel like I can function like a normal human being that isn’t limited by their obsessions and compulsions.  Undoing such things requires one to mentally back the car up and understand all the places where you took wrong turns that led you astray from where one 'ought to be'.  

Then you get to spend even more time witnessing all the things you could have experienced in life if you had the context that would have allowed you to do it in the first place.  I understand very much the ‘could have’ sensation and feel like I have lived life in parallel to the thought of what my life ‘could have’ been in the context of being a ‘normal’ person with ‘normal’ parents in a ‘normal’ relationship and ‘normal’ upbringing with a ‘normal’ coming to adulthood.  It never felt like I was anywhere near the normal, driving life's main streets, and, if I did, it was for a brief visit and refuel before heading back to the side streets of crazy town.  

I craved so much to have a life filled with the content I could only witness from the screens of my computer.  So instead, I mentally checked out of my own experience of life such that I was passenger to what I was actually driving toward and not owning everything I was doing, good or bad.

This left me completely hollow to my own triumphs and defiant to my enemies as foes until they left me beaten, bare, and in desperate need of support.  

I became such a passenger to my experiences that I allowed them to shape me, mold me into whatever I fit into at the time, that I was really just a ball of potential with no specialization in anything being ready for whatever is next.  As a result, I have grown to become a disgustingly organized person that enjoys conversations about knowledge management, data integrity, and information systems that are as imperfect as the people managing them.  I spent my time looking for and eliminating errors that prevent a large organization from operating at its otherwise best shape (at least in my mind at the time). I obsessed about the data being right, being measured correctly, being used appropriately, being spoken to accurately, and it showed.  But when the data was all good and all the answers have been said and everything is ‘all right’ then all that’s left to doing is doing.  

The most confronting thing I’ve ever asked myself is what to do next and that is because I am constantly questioning who I am, which is nuts in writing it, but here ya go.  What I’ve learned as a result of the context I have grown up through in life is that context can be limiting more than enabling to what we want most for ourselves and is simply a consequence of what was known at the time.  We do not give ourselves enough permission to fail because we think in the context of other people’s perceptions of us in our failures and what that means to us as individuals.  I do not give myself permission to fail to a degree that is unhealthy because I compromise my own personal peace as a martyr to my failures instead of representing them more passionately and with gusto that reflects a person who can live with their mistakes as human.

What I have learned to be the greatest lesson from this is that we all are passengers to how we are being influenced in life as we follow its road signs toward our destinations we call Paradise.  As a person who has had to turn back mentally on a lot of things and drive back to the main roads of thinking, I can attest that the rework is not fun or hopeful, but I can say that it isn’t done in solitude.  Everyone is stuck in life trying to drive back to whatever turn they took that made them think they couldn’t be happy with right where they were going in the first place.  That drive back home to Humility to unlearn all those incorrect ways of being is not fun but the drive is worth doing.  And for those stuck at what feels like a dead end, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the moments in life you declare to yourself as your rock bottoms when you decide to turn that car around and find something else.  We are all obsessed with where we are going that we do not know where we are going half the time until we realize we’re home in our minds and left with our thoughts about the day to work with.  Some of us are dealing with unpleasant feelings and situations, others are going through more comforting and joyous times, and others are retreating to a cave in our minds to numb ourselves on things in life we get the most consistent and yet unfilling satisfaction from.  

Operating in a single context for too long is what causes us to eventually skid down some streets in life as we hydroplane our decision-making into a ditch of inevitable self-sabotage caused, time and again, by the entrapment of our own desires.  Whatever we value most in a moment can always be found, but is not discernable unless you observe the same thing in different contexts, or look at different things in the same context.  Time is what yields a person as one with the context they are operating with and their upbringing is the context they have come from.