A Blessing in Disguise

I used to think that it would be so cool to be all grown up. I thought I’d get to be so smart. I pictured wisdom miraculously being bestowed upon me and all the little ones and young adults coming to me for advice. Now that I\’m older I can tell you without a doubt that my previous way of thinking was the epitome of naivete.  I guess I didn’t anticipate the invention of google. It turns out that it doesn’t even matter how much knowledge I’ve gained over the years, I have been replaced by, of all things, a cyber ninja called GOOGLE! I guess things were a little more complicated when I was growing up. I remember asking my mother on numerous occasions how to spell a word and her first response was “look it up”.  I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to look it up if I didn’t know how to spell it!!!! She would further admonish me, “sound it out”. Boy oh boy, where was “autocorrect” when I needed it!!!!  Consequently I spent hours on tasks that could have been done so quickly!!  To me, google is like having an “open book test” – a no brainer!! My sister and I would trek to the library on any given day, just to look up information about some historical figure or some cataclysmic event that happened in history. We weren\’t one of those fortunate families that could buy a set of Encyclopedia Britannica that was so popular in those days.  My dad would hoard tons of magazines containing information that now, with just a click of a button, he would have access to all the information he wanted. I guess that’s progress.  My only concern is that there is a lot of mis-information out there so you have to be careful about sources. I grew up reading the newspaper and journalists were so careful about what they wrote down as facts. If something was printed that turned out to be not true, you can bet there was a retraction posted by the next day. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I felt secure in the information I was getting. Unfortunately that’s not the case now and it’s making me very nervous.  Growing up I had key people in my life that I would go to for advice. Those people became a valuable source in that I could check with them about information I would receive – they became my “fact checkers”. What’s remarkable is that they never steered me wrong.  

It seems that the world is moving much faster now, and I’m struggling trying to keep up. Or maybe it’s that I’m slowing down a bit. It takes a little longer to digest all this new information. I’m used to taking time to cook my food, savoring every bite instead of just swallowing it down whole. Gone are the days when I would anxiously wait for the mailman hoping that today I’d get a letter from a loved one. (Incidentally, I recently came across a few love letters from an old flame that truly warmed my heart – what precious memories). Now I just wake up and check my phone to see if there is any mail waiting for me to open. I wind up deleting most of it as we seem to be inundated with tons and tons of junk mail. Somehow I miss the feel of the paper and dissecting the words that were so carefully handwritten. I can still remember the excitement I’d feel just by seeing the handwriting on the envelope. I miss the intentionality of writing a letter, checking the spelling, making sure the content was just what I wanted it to say and then getting a stamp and taking it to the post office to mail. Not only that, I was pretty much assured that my letter would get to its destination in two days – three days tops as long as it was somewhere in this country. 

I can appreciate on-line shopping and groceries being delivered to my door, but I still manage to go out most days. I still enjoy looking through the clothes racks and trying on things. I even enjoy interacting with the cashiers, some of which I’ve come to know on a first name basis at stores I frequent. Call me crazy, but I still like going to bookstores. I can spend hours pouring over all the books and magazines there. I think of those things often but then I look at my life today and realize just how much wisdom I’ve gained.  When I forget something, when I’m trying to figure out what happened and when, when I want to know how to do something or where to find something, I wisely go to my computer and “Google it”  What a blessing! WISDOM, I\’ve got that!