Context – What is it. It is everything. It is life. It is what makes you you and me me.
For computer science graduates context generally refers to all the details that are part of a running process. It is not very different in life too. A context is one that is build on our experience, perspective and outlook of life. A simple example. What is luxury? For a person who is in battlefield, a few moments of sleep is luxury.Getting alive home and meeting his wife and kids is a luxury. For a person who has been riding a bicycle all his life, a two wheeler is a luxury and the two wheeler guy a car. For the car guy it is truck – no you silly – a bigger better car. It goes on but you get the point. Right? When we complain about life, we miss the point. All it takes is to alter our context and look at the world from someone’s else’s context.
We have a wonderful caterer for lunch @ our company and he has excelled in not letting us get bored of his food. However on some off days the food is not inspiring and we do complain, atleast among ourselves. Who would eat this junk? Many in this wide world would. Have a look at the picture of somalian kids and you would swear to not waste food after that. Imagine in the shoes of people who were left hungry and with the only choice of eating each other. The only thing that differs is the context.
We do complain that life has not been fair to us. If you are reading this, then you have been fortunate enough to be educated, understand computers, wealthy enought to have access to one and still you complain. Research says that people who have had life threatening experiences behave life yogis after that. Because they have understood and experienced a context which no one else has. They know that the momemnt we realize we are a temporary variable in this universal code and will be purged out of the stack when the time comes, we take life much more positively. Take war for example. The society that has seen war sees our normal everyday boring life as a gift. Same with people diagonized with say Cancer. They would feel that we are wasting a precious gift called life.
Context exists in personal relationships too. My wife believes that there could be no one else taking care of his wife as I do. Her sample data consists of pigs dressed as men and of men who behave as feudal lords of yester-years. Men who would prove their manliness by controlling their wives and treating them as bought slaves. So even a normal male human being seems like an impossible existense to her. Similarly when couples fight they often have totally different context bases. Same with a parents and their kid. More than half the problems can be solved the moment one switches context and looks at it from the other side.