In 1967, when I was in high school, I learned to program the only computer in town, a device so large that it filled most of one floor of a building at the local engineering college. Ironically, I have more computing capacity now in my phone.
In those days programming wasn’t done by typing code onto a screen. No, we typed on a device like a typewriter, which then punched holes in cards that we stacked and fed into the computer. Computers today are pretty sophisticated, so that when something isn’t right with a program, we usually get an error message telling us what mistake has been made, and where it is. But in 1967 the computer just said, “Error,” and we had to go through the entire stack of cards from scratch to find the mistake.
From infancy on, other people punched cards and fed them into OUR computer. They wrote the programs that would determine how we saw the world and how we responded to events and people for the rest of our lives.
Regrettably, these cards were often punched with faulty information, and subsequently they caused malfunctions without even properly identifying the nature or location of the mistakes. We have spent our lives trying to function optimally—to be happy—while using defective programs. We don’t even realize that our programs are wrong, just as I did not know as a high school student when a faulty card was in the stack.
We can start over. We can learn to program our lives cleanly, without errors. We can eliminate the lies and the fears, and learn to be genuinely happy. In the beginning, considerable diligence is required to ferret out the mistakes, but if we persist, we can do it and begin to experience the happiness and rich relationships we deserve.
Eliminate the lies and fears—learn to be happy.
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