Legacy Code
I work in the IT department of a company that’s been around for more than a century. We were writing software before there was an Internet. And we continued to provide software and services to this day. When you have programs that run for decades at a time, you are forced to re write what is called legacy code to keep up with all the new bells and whistles. If you don’t keep up, eventually you won’t be able to run your code on the latest computers or the Internet. But every time you modify old code, there are invariably unintended side effects. You change one little thing and whole blocks of code stop working.
At 50 some odd years of age, my brain has a similar problem. It is running on code that’s been running since the 60s. At that age, I wasn’t responsible for what went into my brain. I got my first operating system, compliments of my parents. They were quite devout. But as I began to examine the beliefs, I inherited things started to go sideways.
At various milestones in my adulthood, I have declared myself agnostic. But it never stuck. Whether church service or hallmark commercial, something would draw me back to believe. I don’t know if this is genuine faith or merely a bug in the code.
As I slowly moved toward my senior years., I am becoming a more spiritual person. But markedly less religious. I have no time for sermons, platitudes, politics and cliche one liners. But sitting quietly in an empty room surrounded by my beloved dogs? Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel connected to the universe.
Repeatedly I am drawn back to the Indigo Girls first hit song Closer to Fine. The line that resonates with me and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other people, is this: “There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line. And the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”
