Starting Windows

     When I fire up my laptop it always says "Starting Windows". That is so true on many levels.Through the internet, I have managed to reconnect with many old friends and schoolmates. I think that I'm beginning to figure out why social networking sites like Facebook are so addictive. The people I connect with there are, for the most part, not people living in my immediate community, the small town I occupy now. They are, however, friends that have occupied any of a number of places where I have lived at some period of my life. It's interesting.

     What this technology has provided to me is a sense of community that was somehow lost along the way. Almost all of my Facebook friends are people with whom I've shared a good chunk of my life at one time or another. Perhaps it is different for the younger generation who have lived almost their entire lives with this technology. Perhaps the reason that teenagers and twenty-somethings always seem to be texting is that this is their community. Unlike my generation, it is a community which they have never lost to the propulsions and compulsions of relationships, marriages, universities, careers, family obligations etc. They can stay connected in ways that my generation could not have even dreamed of thirty years ago. Perhaps their sense of community will always be stronger for that reason.

     Alfred Lord Tennyson mused " I am a part of all that I have met." In this digital age, one could write, " I am an active part of all that I have met." Having "met" someone no longer reduces the experience to a period in one's personal history. At our choice we can continue realtionships in an ongoing manner. It is the social equivalent of having our cake and eating it too.

     So where does this leave me, a middle aged troglodyte just recently emerged from the cave? Almost in a state of joyous exuberance. I feel like a little kid who, after learning a new skill, jumps up and down saying "Look what I can do!"

     So far my personal technological renaissance has been interesting, at times frustrating,
sometimes heart warming, fascinating and  fun. Starting Windows Indeed!

                                                                                                                                                       

                                               ...more later