Moving

Hurry up. Come on now. Technology is marching forward, and if you're not moving forward with it, then you're falling behind, and if you're falling behind, you're becoming irrelevant. Pick up a book. Read about what's relevant now, and do it now, because it won't be relevant five minutes from now.

Five minutes from now, you'll need to figure what's new, read about it, understand it, digest it. But five minutes from now won't make sense, won't have context, if you don't know what's going on now. And if you learn X right now, then you're not learning Y right now, so you have to figure out whether to learn X now or learn Y, or learn both, but even if you learn both, you can't learn Z, and even if you could, there's A, there's B, there's C. How can you possibly ever keep up?

But if you don't at least try, you've given up. History recedes ever further back. The future comes ever close. We're on a treadmill that's just accelerated, and what was a walk, became a jog, and what was a jog, has become a sprint, and the sprint is just becoming a full mad dash to keep on or to be flung back.

Why are we living this way? Why does the rat race consume us? Technology has made us better racers, but hasn't taken us away, or has it? Has this rush made us do more, even as we don't do enough? Has it brought more meaning, more fun, more stress, or has it given us less?

Once upon a time, we didn't have cars, couldn't fly across the country, chose to live only miles from where we born, and our world was much smaller, and now, even if we choose not to move, the world comes to us, through the compute, though the Internet, though the millions and millions that have found a voice, a way to communicate, to put this pantheon of information and data all for us to see.

And now we must sift through it all, try to make sense of this new world, full of information, full of data, full of just plain old stuff. This is not your grandma's radio. It's not your dad's TV. It's the most participative form of technology we've ever assembled, and it makes us feel more inadequate, even as it gives us better tools, makes us feel we know more than our parents did, even as we know there's so much more.

Take a chance to breathe, to walk, to talk to people, real people, really in front of you, to stare, to sigh, to converse, to smell. Take the time to stare at the sky, the leaves, the trees, the grass, the lake. Let the icy air whip your face, causing an icy burn. Breathe out the humid air and see it chill. Then, rush on inside where the heat burns again, and wrap yourself up, done with reality for a little bit, and get hooked into the Internet, for no one can tell you what it is.

You must experience it yourself.