Samuel Pepys did not have a laptop; but
if he did, imagine the number of words.
I imagine also that the kinds of conversations
between Sam and his digital ego. Cataloguing the mundane, the divine and
the profane, the human attempts and the human failures, the hope that attends
the former, and the regret which follows the latter. In the polaroid snap
of an internet eye, it is all captured, clearly or blurred, and offered
up like a neon flash on the downtown strip.
Recently, a blogger I have come to follow
regularly for his insights on community and communication wrote about a
complication in his open marriage, that his partner really wanted to open
it, and the heart-rending that ensued (under the guise of understanding).
Others share their anguish or blare their angers, raise the dead or bury
the living, compromise truth or correct fallacy, and in all senses become
part of a modern digital organism called Babel.
Amazing creature. It groans and hisses
and sings and argues in every language under this sun.
Sometimes I think it an honor to be
pasting small images onto its body, or adding short snippets of song to
its voice. It is a modern wiki-canon, whose contributors, among the legion
of men and women, offer their spoonful of wisdom. There is something to
speaking a truth - even a conflicted one, like my blogger friend as he
publicly worked his head around the Real.
Other times, what is said seems little
more than veneer for what is done, and hours of verbal decoration are overturned
by a single moment of non-verbal expression.
Well, lace is a fine thing to add to
the hem of her dress, or to a plain drawingroom table; and a touch of spoken
color seems to call a shaft of light... no better thing to do, sometimes,
if you are able.
So many people looking for new work these days. Not only because their position was economically eliminated, but also early-life or mid-life change, or a lack of satisfaction or fulfillment that has crept in over time. On a long mountain hike this past weekend, two of our companions spoke of their desire to move out of their current employment, and into something... new. Something better, and not only in terms of dollars, but mostly in terms of feeling fulfilled.
The problem for each was not in the implementation, but in the search. What to do now? More of the same work, but for a different employer? Go to the job boards? Monster-dot-com? It is a daunting proposal to throw yourself far ahead, where your skills are just what they must be, the market is what it must be, and an employer has materialized looking for you. It is natural to mix the imagined future with the steps required to get there, and to confuse the few feet of trail ahead of you with the mountaintop that is hours of moderate labor away.
The next step in one's life... any,
every step... is never further than a single step away. The mind starts looking, starts casting about for far distant futures, and chasing after those futures. It's important to have a vision. It is important to know which part of the horizon you are walking toward: where your sun is brighter, where your weather is better. It is important to know this, to have a vision; but it is vital to have an understanding that the next step is only one step away. Therefore it is very close to you. It is not at a place you can never attain, it is never at an intangible, superhuman distance: it is always just one step away, a step that will only be as large as your pace. Therefore, to look far is to miss your footing. It is to fall or to fail, or to miss the trail altogether... because you are looking so far away, and have no sense of where you stand. You are looking so far away for love, for accomplishment, to fill empty desires, when all love, all success, all satisfaction is within an arm's length, all the time.
nothing to say
