Update: I hope everyone is having a truly Merry Christmas season. Please take a moment and read the many great comments that are attached to this post. It is heartwarming and uplifting to share with so many awesome people. God bless you all!
I have a love-hate relationship with technology. It's not that I'm a neophyte; having spent most of my youth in engineering and working on my own motorized equipment. It's just that most of this fancy, electronic gadgetry doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
For some reason the Instant Messenger on my computer went on the fritz. The central CD player stopped working and won't even open to release the 5 CDs held hostage inside. The IPOD nest on the receiver won't play. The printer isn't working correctly. The Internet phone has bandwidth issues. The smart phone "hangs" when running certain applications.
Sound familiar?
Imagine if the tools of yester-year functioned as unreliably as those of today. Take the shovel, for instance. Imagine if twenty percent of the time, when you picked up a shovel, it wouldn't dig correctly. It needed someone steeped in the art of shovel-tweaking to mess with it for ten minutes to "kind of" get it working. And then, it would only work if you yanked out the batteries first. And when you needed it, I mean REALLY needed it (like having to bury a muskrat that had mysteriously died of lead poisoning), it wouldn't work at all. A call to India to tech-support would only suck an hour out of your schedule and leave you feeling anxious and irritated.
But these aren't actually real problems of which I speak, are they?
And that's the point. Nobody is going to cry too hard for us experiencing electronic inconveniences in our overly abundant material world. We get annoyed, frustrated, agitated, and sometimes downright ticked off when our ridiculous surplus of gadgetry behaves as unreliably as it is unnecessary.
Which brings me to this: is all this nonsensical complication really supposed to improve our lives? Or is it really just the offspring of a population out of control with its own entertainment and convenience fixations?
I'll tell you this: while my GPS may make things a little easier sometimes, and while everybody from the teenager to the grandmother is addicted to cell phones and texting, the sum total of all this "convenience" and "communication" and "information" is zero in terms of life-improvement. They are clutter in a noisy world.
Life improvement comes from real things, the kind of things that never break down, that work every time, and don't require a Bill Gates-type personality to make them function. The list of these things, though increasingly crowded to the background in our video-game, high-def, mega-pixel world, is endless, and waiting quietly for our rediscovery of them. Here is just a sample:
1. the hug of a child
2. the kiss of a spouse
3. a fire in the fireplace
4. a stroll through the woods
5. a heart-felt "I love you"
6. home-baked cookies
7. a spontaneous conversation with neighbors
8. a silent prayer
9. a sunset
10. the sound of a gentle spring rain
11. laughter
12. a pat on the back
13. playing catch
14. lying in the sun
15. listening to ocean waves roll
16. watching fish around dock pilings
17. throwing stones into a calm pond
18. pondering timeless questions
19. wrestling with children
20. laughing at ourselves
Just a teaser list, really. The idea, though, is obvious. The more we crowd our lives with unimportant contraptions, entertainments, distractions, and noise, the less room there is mentally and physically for things like those on this list.
What things truly improve your life? What types of moments would you put on a similar list of your own? For this holiday season, maybe we can do a little "gift exchange" right here on this blog. All three of you readers out there can contribute. I, for one, look forward to reading what you have to share. After all, I've got nothing else to do. All my electronic stuff is broken!
Welcome to Chris Brady's Blog 
Leave a comment