Lifeline

The world is changing.  And as always there are people who are afraid to jump on the wagon and try out the newest wheels.  Caution is a good thing, but it is not everything.  Lines have been drawn in the dust by every group of people who eventually decided to jump over most of them.

A desire to keep track of things and tell our stories led us to draw pictures and invent writing.  Wandering humans needed a way to communicate over distances.  Writing on rock walls moved onto other more portable tablets.

Messengers, mail men, pony express, telegraph, telephone, television, computers, every year there are new ways to keep in touch.  We are pack animals.  Orphans die from lack of attention, so do older people.

Gone is the day when Grandma sat in the fireplace corner holding babies and mumbling to herself because she craved adult conversation.  In the past we accepted the fact that the elderly, the shut ins, anyone with a disability that kept them from being out in the mainstream world paid the price of loneliness or inane noise that was really not geared to their personal needs.

People need to communicate to feel alive and communication means at least two people going back and forth in some kind of meaningful way.

One of the newest ways of doing this is texting.  It is easy to scoff and say that texting is something teenage girls do to waste time and avoid paying attention to other things, but that is only a caricature.  All new things were treated this way at some point.

Texting offers people a chance to communicate as briefly as they choose, or as deeply as they want.  You can watch a movie with your best friend and talk about it without bothering any of the other patients in the room.  You can eat breakfast with your son while he files a brief in Timbuktoo.  You can talk about how many angels dance on the head of a pin if you feel like it, but however you use it, texting allows people to remain engaged in ways that were not possible before.

Texting offers the possibility of transcending loneliness.

And that is a lifeline not to be thrown away.