Quick, what comes to mind when you hear the word "agency"?

Alphabet soup? FBI, CIA, MI-6, NSA, NCIS...the cloak-and-dagger definition is a no-brainer, what with all the spy films out there,  but looking up the word itself can give you two definitions:

• One defines an agency as an organization responsible for and serving a specific function. For example, the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- also know as the ATF -- deals with "the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms and explosives; acts of arson and bombings; and illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco products." You may have heard of it being referenced a lot on CSI: Miami. The IRS is also an agency, and you know what it handles, right?
• The other definition of agency puts it as 'having the faculty to move in and influence the world."
  

It's the second definition that we're talking about here.

It's quite hard to get out of the mindset that mistakes are bad, bad things, isn't it?

Making mistakes seems to be a sign of  being less -- that you aren't as smart as you should be, or could've been, that you just weren't good enough. That if you had just tried harder, thought a little bit faster, predicted the future a bit more accurately, this would all have been avoided. The carrot of supposedly attainable perfection is held permanently beyond your reach, and you snipe yourself into a sad mess because you just--couldn't--reach--it.

Seeing that our educational system trains us to follow the rules as part of the socialization process, it's almost unthinkable to flout the unspoken one that mistakes "are something to be avoided," -- but then, we often learn more from the mistakes we've made than many of our successes. If you live a life geared towards avoiding mistakes, how much will you actually learn? For that matter, how much will you actually live?

Quick! A laser is a beam of coherent light, but what does the name itself stand for?
Answer: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (mouse-over)

Lasers can zap skin discolorations, whiten teeth and read the bar-codes on your groceries. They can cut through steel. Medical applications and industrial processes aside, lasers are awesome, and while waiting for light-sabers to become available, one has to understand that a laser's real power lies not just in the pretty lights it produces, but in the principle that makes it work: coherence. Lasers are coherent light. Flashlights can't cut through anything but shadows, after all.

So what does it mean for something to be coherent, to possess coherence? A lot of terms get tossed around in the resulting scramble: "possessing internal consistency, a : systematic or logical connection or consistency , b : integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values..."

Possessing coherence in communication for example, is having orderly, logical sub-ideas radiating from a central idea. If you've ever had to go through outlining an essay in English class, it's like that. Try thinking of yourself as a spider -- an intelligence in the center of a web created of interlocking and related ideas. Even as the real spiders can spin webs of simply remarkable beauty where each connection made just so, coherence can make the connections between ideas beautiful in their clarity.

It's the difference between a labyrinth and a spider web. You don't get lost visually when looking at a spider web. When this happens, wherever you end up, you can just latch on one idea that radiates from the center and use it to get back to the heart of the entire web.

Coherence gets to the point. Coherence radiates from the core.