I feel as though often we forgo the journey, the process, the experience of things and head directly for the quick fix. For example… I remember the days I had to go to the book shelf and look up things in our lovely collection of Encyclopedia Brittanica. For papers, for things I didn’t know, for things I was interested in… there was no “google it” or “wikipedia it” back then (like back then was even that long ago!) Or when we are driving in our car and decide we “need” to talk to someone right then and there, and our driving habits become badly comprimised as we dial and chat away, hopefully successfully multitasking our way through traffic. Or when entertainment came to us, in the form of books, stories, movies on VHS – where you couldn’t skip through parts unless you “fast-forwarded” in sped up real time. We couldn’t go online, go searching for stories to satiate our minds and curiousity – we had to go to the bookstore, peruse the bountiful store for the perfect story to fulfill our quench for adventure and excitement.
I was sitting at my desk, typing a thought out on a computer, when all of a sudden the power went out. I waited patiently for it to turn back on. I waited and waited. I lit candles and put on my headlamp. It wasn’t coming back on. And then all of a sudden I looked over on my night table and there sat my journal. My journal that has sat on my night table since I’ve moved to Maui. The last entry I had in it was from over a year ago. So much of what I write these days is in digital medium. Photos, blogs, thoughts, stories – all on computers and floating through cyberspace. Old thoughts and photos are hidden in some arbitrary file folder somewhere in a storage box of hard drives that line my closet. They are carefully shelved, most likely never to be found again. I have too much information, too many pictures, too many hard drives, too many folders. The likelyhood of me stumbling across an old thought written in a word document is slim. So then what’s the point of writing it in the first place – it’s just a means to get out a thought or frustration that I have and then it’s disregarded. At least with my old journals they are still tangibly there with me. They stare me in the face, the messy writing, the random drawings, the old photos falling out, the half finished song lyrics… They may be old, but they are still there. And they are tangible.
I worry that we are becoming too dependent on this digital world.
After that thought I wrote an entry in my journal. It is called “Batteries Not Included”
But that’s for the next entry.
Step away from the computer every once in a while. Disconnect from the internet and turn off your phone. See how it feels. So much of this “life” thing that we are all trying to figure out is in the journey through which we take to find the meaning of it. There is no answer in the internet that will ever satiate that curiousity. Only through living it will you ever step closer to finding out what it’s all about. Shut down. Close all programs. Pick up a pencil and paper. See what happens.