When I walked into the sunlight to eat a banana as part of my daily ritual to get outside of the house at least once a day, the construction workers next door tended a small bonfire to burn scraps leftover from remodeling, mainly short pieces of wood.

A goldfinch in winter plumage hopped onto the tree limb near me and chirped away, expecting me to scoop up some birdseed and fill the feeder in the backyard.

The blue reflection of the sky domed me in, sunlight warming my pants and then my legs but not enough to take away the chill of freezing air around me.

When did I become this old man whose sympathy neurons were so overdeveloped from years of having to be on my toes, reacting to my father’s whims, his bursts of pent-up anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, that I don’t want to mingle with others because I have a bad habit of reading their movements in an attempt to gauge their thoughts in case they, too, would physically release their passive-aggressive volcano of internalised emotion-based thoughts or attack verbally?

I am a mischievous peacemaker, the devil’s advocate, whose raison d’être was to be constantly on the lookout for information to keep my father at bay, entertaining him while he was with me, paying attention to the conversations around us to steer people away from setting off my father.

I loved my father but to be with him, he who was the product of his parents’ and grandparents’ personality quirks, was to suppress my personality quirks that tended to set him off.

I look at myself and wonder how many of us are like me.

How many of us naturally respond to the behaviours of others just to avoid controversy?

I want to feel special, thinking I am the one and only me, but I know my set of states of energy is made of the same stuff as everybody else’s, sharing a large portion of subcultural as well as genetic traits with subsets, most especially those nearest me.

I am the two, three, four, x, y, z-dimensional intersection of subsets known and unknown.

My reaction to others is to immediately suppress my personality and figure out which subsets we have in common; then see if I can mentally predict the behaviours of the people around me not only in our conversation but also in events past and future.

The mischievous side of me sees what I’m doing, or what I know someone will do, and tries to stop it with a humourous interlude.

So many people take life too darn seriously when we know we’re all going to die.

I have grown into the old man in the cabin in the woods because I am now my father.

I ended up adopting his nonassertiveness when it comes to handling emotional responses to contradictory information from which I cannot pick or decide to choose a behaviour to exhibit in my repressed personality mode.

The most successful people, children AND adults, have spent many, many hours in training, learning from their mistakes and building upon their lessons.

Success itself is a rutted road, or the belief that one will keep one’s momentum pointed down the path of success, in whatever venture one seeks.

Habits, in other words.

My habits from early childhood were developed in response to my father, a man willing to use a belt or the back of his hand to serve justice immediately, with rarely a delay (my mother used the phrase “wait until your father gets home” sparingly).

When I was younger, I asked myself, “When do I get to be me?,” as if there was another person inside me wanting to get out.

At my workplace over the years, I attended a couple of assertiveness and anger management classes to get a better understanding of who people like me are.

I turned my assertiveness training into developing myself as a lead engineer, supervisor and then manager.

I learned that if I wanted to assert myself and was willing to face the consequences of my actions, no one would stop me because…you can guess where this is going…most of us are responding to others and repressing our personalities for the sake of the common good.

The secret to success is there is no secret to success.

All of us have habits that benefit some more than others, that’s all.

When I was an engineering manager, I wanted to hire an engineer who made more money than me.  My boss and the human resources manager told me that the system doesn’t work that way.  Either they had to increase my salary above that of the potential new hire or we couldn’t offer her a job unless it was at a lower salary.

Being a good midlevel manager not wanting to rock the boat, I extended a lower salary offer to the engineer and she declined after we couldn’t find any other negotiating points like a shorter workweek and/or flexible workday to make her hourly rate equivalent to what she was already making.

At that point in my career, I realised that I was on the wrong career track or perhaps working for the wrong company.

I never was a socioeconomic hierarchy climber.

I simply had my personal way of reading and reacting to the behaviour of others that made them feel good about themselves in the same way I treated my father, habits established in my formative years and refined as I got older.

I spent my whole life reacting, reacting, reacting and decided that if my only reward for reacting to others was to be given higher salaries and more people to manage, then I needed to stop reacting and become proactive, whatever that meant.

The only way to do that was to remove myself from social situations and place myself here in front of this electronic input device.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Money buys me stuff but it never bought me prestige, it lifted me out of poverty and gave me enough luxury to satisfy my wants as well as my needs.

As we get older, our tastes change in relation to our age, societal status, family needs and reactions to a world full of overstimulating mass marketing.

At my age, the illusions now propagated by the Internet are as much a part of my life as physical realities.

My needs and wants are largely met by the reflected and beamed light of an LCD panel just as the needs and wants of the previous generation were largely met by the reflected and beamed light of a television tube, interrupted by paper-based books/magazines, breaking the monotony with retail shopping/eating therapy.

What will the next generation spend time doing in their old age after they’ve spent their youth and young adult years saying they aren’t like their parents but becoming them anyway?

How did your formative years train you for the success you’re experiencing right now?

How will your influence upon your children’s formative years feed their success?

How does this translate to subcultures, cultures, the global economy and civilisations over thousands of years?

That’s all for today — time to listen to the wind and see what its “personality” tells me will happen next in our society in some fuzzy way that comes out comically on these blog pages.