Bum Left Hand
I sliced through the tip of my left index finger Saturday night. Right through the nail. Spent some time with our medical community as a result. It’s really slowed me down. I’ve got a lot going round in my head on the following topics – be on the look out for some more substantial posts as soon as I can type without doing this hunting and pecking with my left hand.
- mindfulness
- kindness
- compassion
- consumption
- limits to growth
Still Amazed by Technology
I should not be amazed by technology because I am part of the technology world. But I am.
My first web browsing experience was with a text based browser called “lynx.” I was in my early twenties when Netscape 1.1 was released. I survived “the browser wars” my favorite browser of the time didn’t, but was re-incarnated.
I’ve seen a lot change in the past 12 years. My first technology job was working in a call center, helping people with dial-up connections on Macs. We were all excited when 33.6 kbps modems came out and even more so when the v.90 standard was still called 56K. Dial-up essentially died before v.90 was ratified. We could only imagine web based video being delivered to the home at those speeds.
I had one of the first generation palm pilots made by US Robotics. It was highly useful, but had no way to sync-up with content unless it was in a cradle. WAP became the rage, but it was very limited. The first Palm VII released in 1999 had wireless service that was highly limited and the device retailed for $600 for a monochrome screen! Now, I’ve got a device that delivers well formatted content (including video and streaming audio) to my hand. It synchronizes over the air with my work and personal email and calendars.
It is stunning. It is useful. It feels like technology nirvana.
It’s taken me a long time to get one (lots of politics associated with it at the office) but I’m truly addicted to the blackberry.
Abnormal Peace on a Sunday
It’s 7:40 AM. Sunday. I’m the only one up. This hasn’t happened in almost two years. I’m having coffee with milk and sugar. I usually have it black but this is a treat!
Could this be a sign of things to come?
Lets hope so.
Every now and then…
Every now and then, you get transported back to a place and time that is simply special. If you are lucky enough to become a parent for the first time, I have no doubts that you will absolutely adore the way your child falls asleep on you (completely involuntarily) during the first 6 months to a year. At some point though, this simply stops happening. As part of their growing up they are better able to regulate their sleep and as a result they do not collapse on you. If you are like me, you’ll initially feel relief when this stops happening. Then you’ll miss it.
Mr. Grey has been sleeping through the night for some time now. He’s also been able to go to sleep without any one in the room since he was about three months old. But tonight he’s a bit under the weather (so is his mom). He was very upset from the time I got home until he went to sleep since he is not felling well. I spent a great deal of time with him tonight trying to calm him down. He drank his milk in my arms. He sat in my arms and watched Thomas. He still was not settled. So we rocked.
It’s been a long time since I rocked my boy to sleep. But that’s what I did tonight. And it felt good. My baby boy is not a baby anymore (a fact I witnessed when he stood on my chest and I held him steady with my hands — arms completely outstretched instead of bent at the elbows like when he couldn’t hold his own weight on his knees). And yet, he fell asleep in my arms.
And that, my friends, was simply marvelous.
To do:
The list of things I should be doing today is probably too long to post, and I’m not feeling up to them anyway. So instead I’ll post the few things that I plan to do today instead.
- Go to a bookstore to explore books on systems thinking and Buddhism.
- Hit the grocery store and pickup milk so that there is some here when Mrs. TKD and Mr. Grey get back tomorrow.
- Ruminate on the following thoughts from Andrew Brown in the UK’s Guardian and how they are interrelated with Dr. Kaza’s book Mindfully Green:
Climate change … is a global tragedy of the commons, individual action cannot be enough. I cannot ensure the survival of my grandchildren, nor even yours, without compelling you to behave in ways that science tells me are necessary. Not to act, not to coerce, itself becomes immoral.
…
Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won’t do it. People aren’t made like that. They need to believe in what they are forced to do. They need idealism, and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion. But we can’t engineer it. It can only arise spontaneously. Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth, and when they do that, they’ll have lost. I just hope it doesn’t happen too late. (Andrew Brown)
