Sunday, December 31, 2006

New year on the sofa

I had a mighty long chat with my pops on skype today, it being new year and all. So the sketch time was a little skimpy. It does make a lot of difference to the communications having all this technology at our fingertips, but we also had a little conversational lubricator on hand in the shape of a Guinness for me and some kind of rummy mixture for senior.
I guess the report writing took up most of my day, I am still writing down ideas in the hope that I will be able to whack them in to shape once they are out there.
I do get the sense that the system is failing to notice the importance of simple things like drawing and writing. Techniques for communication beyond speach that are within the power of most. Whatever the complexity of the question answered, it is quite likely that the answer was a drawn or written squiggle on a piece of paper.
At one point in our loops of thought across the cybergs we ended up talking about the other side, the dear departed. I was of the opinion that the sense of contact I had with that back when my mother died was something that only happens at those times, and not a regular doo. At that time I did feel a tremendous sense of peace and interconnectedness. The stretch outward into infinity is somehow familiar to me and perhaps to us all as we look into the night sky, but the story doesn't end there, infinity has no parts, no out or in, so when the mental elastic reaches the end and whips back I don't usually get the same amount of stretch in the inward direction and I end up on the end of the bungee dangling here in reality once more when I would rather have the sense of everything I had back then.
My sense is that today is just another day, and there are issues persisting on our planet that make the simple turning of the year seem less significant every time around. Even in relation to my little volunteer work there are echoes of some changes for the worse in the world. I have noticed the school becoming more isolated from the community and now the doors are locked more often than not. There have been many incidents of people entering schools and trying to harm the students, so this year Y shaped poles appeared on the walls of the corridors for teachers to grab and fend off sword bearing intruders. My idealistic hope would be for this to be temporary, but I can see that once you declare outside dangerous it is very hard to go back and declare it safe again. There used to be a sense of the school being a place that could not be entered by those intending harm, like the precincts of a temple, but that is gone. We are certainly a weird bunch, persuaded into fighting wars by the propaganda of economic convenience to those in power, but letting these essential and valuable realities fade away without a fight. I am happy that my children enjoyed a childhood that did not include these things. Of course I know that childhood at least will prevail and find peculiar entertainment in this strange world, like my dad talking about hunting for bomb fragments after each air raid all clear as a kid in WWII Britain to see who could find the biggest. My dear hope for the coming years is that the WWW will by some strange alphabetic quirk become a true web of interconnectedness and make WWIII and other conflicts an impossibility. I think that the millions of conversations floating over that web like the one I enjoyed today must be going a long way to counteract the unimaginative leadership we enjoy and the similarly unimaginative terrorism that is fighting against it. Even if the next generation is just a little more creative they may make it their habit to search for the third option, a lighter middle way that needs no Jerusalem. So here is to them, and more power to their collective elbows in this place that could be paradise if only we would let it. A happy new year to all intending no harm to others.