The other night I sat down with my 2-year-old son at his little half-height table and cracked open a brightly-colored four-pack of Play-Doh.  As the lid came off of the first can to reveal the cylinder of raw creativity within, the familiar scent of the popular toy caressed my memories like a favorite old sweater.   Even being probably 20-odd years since I’ve played with it, the smell and feel seemed to be the same as it was back then when I was younger, smaller, and less on my mind.

I shook the blob out of the can and into my hands and then worked it up a bit before gently laying it out in front of my son.  “Touch it,” I urged him, smiling as I watched him press a finger into it.  For the first time he connected with an extremely classic toy as a complete newcomer — and I think he was instantly hooked.

As we pressed out shapes with cookie cutters, smashed the Play-Doh with our palms, pressed out our handprints, curled “snakes”, and rolled balls to make snowmen of unrealistic colors, I reveled in the simplicity of our playtime.   Like other classic toys — blocks, Crayons, puzzles — Play-Doh is only a barebones medium for what your mind can envision; it is still up to you to create something from the shapeless mass.

In some fashions, the ability to take a material like Play-Doh and shape it into anything at all is analogous to our abilities in life.    The situations, people, and opportunities we face every day are very often shapeless forms; how we perceive them, interact with them, influence them, and build them into something else determines how we function and where we go.

This doesn’t always apply, of course — life is also full of cookie-cutters.     They are the forces that shape and pre-define limits and boundaries to the events we interact with.    This can be problematic; we may have a star-shaped hole to fill and can only find a rectangle piece; we try to massage it into the right shape, but we may very well end up with a shapeless mass that is even worse than useless.

There is at least one property of Play-Doh that we do not, unfortunately, get very often — the ability to SMASH.   Create a crappy-looking car out of dough?   Grab it in both hands and squish it back into a lump from which can emerge something new.    Screw up and blow the job interview?   They look poorly upon people smashing their offices in an attempt to change the situation.    Time does not take well to do-overs.

Three hours later we finally packed up the Play-Doh into its cans and put all the cutters away.   Keston cried when we finally put it away, saying that he wanted to keep playing with it.   I explained that it was late; we really needed to put it away, go to bed, and get some sleep, but maybe we could play more tomorrow?    He was thoroughly convinced that this was the prime time to be playing, but we eventually got him redirected and back to a happy mood for a trip upstairs to bed.

I wonder what he thought about this first experience with being able to make something out of practically nothing; of directing his own input into an unbounded matter.    Did he feel empowered by the ability to make whatever he liked of the situation?   Scared to have a lack of definition and instruction on what to do?  Or did he find it amazing to make a mistake and then to simply — erase it?

It will be years before he makes these same associations and analogies, but as we fell asleep that night, I hoped that he will always find in himself the ability to create, to change, to influence, and to shape the world and his reality to a new and better day.    If he’s lucky, that will occasionally include yellow cans of squishy-soft blobs in bright colors and a familiar smell that will always bring him home.

Exposing yourself to the world at large is now a wholly easier experience given the multitude of social networking and publishing sites and tools we have available at our fingertips.    Catching up on the neighborhood gossip or seeing how that old girlfriend is doing (and if she’s put on weight) is now as easy as stalking her on Facebook and we find out all sorts of interesting tidbits about people from their Twitter feeds.     Got something intimate to say?  Why not post it on your blog so lots of people can weigh in?

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, was recently interviewed by TechCrunch and one of the questions was about privacy and what people were willing to post online today versus when Facebook first started.   He said he views Facebook as needing to be at the leading edge of the social norm for what was considered, “private”, and to make innovations to match stride with the way people are changing their online personas and information.    He also said that the social norm has shifted and the mainstream no longer thinks of privacy as something as important anymore.

Older generations seem to have huge issues with privacy and keeping identifications and information under wraps; I have almost none of this.   Do you want to know my underwear size?   I’ll tell you.   What do I care?   Ultimately it doesn’t matter.    If that’s going to be the deciding factor on what you think about me, then so be it, we might as well get that out right now.    I just don’t see what the point is of keeping about 98% of what we have traditionally kept private as…private.

Sure, there’s plenty of things I don’t discuss with others.   I don’t talk about the things that only pass between myself and my wife and don’t belong in anyone else’s ears.   I don’t talk about family issues with just anyone.   I don’t talk about my job because I like being employed and I prefer to stay that way.

There are tons of things, however, that people get tied up about that just seem nonsense to me.    Where you work, where you went to school, what clothes you wear, what religion you have, what political party you belong to, what you do in your spare time.    What’s the point of keeping all this under wraps?

Maybe I’m just naturally trusting and open.    Maybe I have an innate sense of when to open my mouth and when to just listen.    I see the revealing of myself through the various channels available as being something inspiring and connecting.   Maybe I’m just a dolt.

Folks, what’s your take on privacy and where we are these days?   Do you feel like you are becoming less private and more open, or do you guard yourself tighter given the environment today?    Do you think this trend is good, bad, or indifferent?

This year’s Blog Action Day subject is, “Climate Change”, and there are thousands of bloggers around the world writing in on this subject from all sorts of angles — support, refutation, complaints, issues, problems solutions.    But in the end, no matter what your understanding or opinion on the subject, dealing with climate change issues comes down to a moral issue over all of them, and I think all sides can agree on that point.

Whether or not climate change is taking place or not, and regardless of whether that change (if it exists) is drastic or not, we still are behooved to apply our advances in technology and industry to lessen our negative impact on the world around us.     When the industrial revolution began, factories and homes spewed completely unfiltered dirty coal smoke into the air without any concern for its impact on the world — but then again, the technology had not progressed to the point where doing something about this pollution was feasible.     And yet,  nowadays we have numerous technologies to prevent contamination of the earth and yet we do not always apply them, or we are too willing to fore go them in favor of a higher number on the corporate earnings report.

For us to possess the technology and resources to minimize our impacts and not do so is deplorable at best and downright evil at worst.   The exploitation of any resource by the human race has been generally frowned-upon by history in the past; will we be found in the future to have been apathetic about our responsibility to the planet that gave us so much?

Catastrophic climate change or fearmongering activist hype — which ever side of the battle, or area in between, that you plant yourself in this debate, the result is the same:   Should we not be doing better by the Earth since we clearly have the ability?

I think the answer by anyone involved is — or should be — a resounding, “Yes!”