An interesting reminder to me of what technology provides us, what it takes away and what I need to get better at. Yesterday, Apple Music did its Replay thing and I received that reminder late in the afternoon. I looked it over, reviewed it with my daughter and we compared data. How many hours we spent listening to music. How many different artists we’d heard from over the last year. Within the hour of doing that, the power went out at our house. I turned to the usual, thinking of what needed to be tended to now that we have no running water, no refrigeration, no lights, no heat and the sun had gone down an hour ago. We sat around, talked by lamp light and prepared for the next day, hoping the power would be on by morning, but knowing it probably it would not. We went to bed early, slept late and still no power. I called in to work saying I’d be coming in late. I tended to a few things to address the lack of power such as dealing with things in the refrigerator. As I got in my car to head off to work, the sun rising fairly high in the sky by then, I realized that this song had been in my head for the last four or five hours. Without the “decadence” of “electronic entertainment” for the last 12 to 14 hours we were on our own for brain/cognitive inputs and this is what came into my head, consciously or sub consciously, I do not know. It is a song that I have not played for many years, and it just reminded me of how quickly we can revert back and find the great things in our lives, the great songs, in this case, the great people, the great stories, and find the joy of being us in this world with what we have.
The constant influx of information through radio, television, internet, cell phones, AirPods, etc. does not give my brain a moment to ponder the world it is in at that moment. It is for that reason alone that I do enjoy when the power goes out and I can begin to “see” again. For me this also brings up the idea of intrusions through the likes of Twitter and Mastodon and even the timeline presented in Microblogs that we all have a challenge in trying to pull away from.
The reading of the someone’s thoughts in a blog versus reading someone’s posts in a feed, or timeline certainly work my brain in different ways. We seem to be identifying a need to work our brains in a more thoughtful and caring or meaningful way. Nothing new here but this moment made me see how quickly we can revert to those more valuable experiences that we prefer if we can find the “space”. Leaving the Social Media feeds and processing my thinking through writing for “Me First” has helped me find more of that “space” that I need to find the joys around me.
As Stan heads out for his next show he describes in the song the sun rising and the fact that he’s going down the road. I was doing just that this morning with a smile on my face, realizing that even without all the trappings of technology, we were all, ‘feeling fine for now, going down the road”.
Enjoy the day
