Separations Can be Painful

Three decades ago, I often had an open book accompanying me when I was alone.  When I needed to send news to someone far away, I put my thoughts on paper and sent it by mail.  When the news was urgent, I would dial a number tediously, waiting patiently for the dial to return to its original position at each dialing.  Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, the world changed. 

Today, all the things I used to do three decades ago, I can still do but things are faster. I no longer have to wait for the dial to come back to rest, the buttons jump back up instantly.  Almost daily, I share news, thoughts and all sorts of nonsense with friends on other continents.  My students who are on other continents sometimes present their work to me via their laptops in real time. One student’s cat once jumped up onto his laptop and meowed into the laptop microphone and I heard it half a world away.  Al least, that was what it was like until recently.  I am unsure as to what exactly happened but my days at the office has gone back to what it was like perhaps a decade or so ago.  Something happened to the system at the office.  The internet has been coming on and off at random times.  Often it would die for extended periods of time. It has been an interesting period.

Working offline is refreshing and it annoying at the same time.  I have a huge number of books neatly arranged on my shelf, neatly arranged by discipline and most have notes attached to the relevant pages.  I have a list of academic journals elsewhere all nicely categorized by discipline, topic and time.  I also have numerous reference sources neatly keep.  In short, I have a mountain of information just waiting for me but there is a problem: they are all in a different world. They are in a world of binary codes, somewhere else. Somewhere that I can only access through the screen of my computer. The world from which I am regularly divorced.

In recent days, I have rediscovered the joy and peace that comes from writing my thought deliberately on empty pages of paper.   Making the curves and lines of writing for extended periods of time has a strange zen-like peace to it.  I can feel my thoughts flow like the trickle of a cool mountain river: a very different feeling from the clicking of plastic at high speed.  I could almost feel my world gently press on the brakes and slow down to a more leisurely speed.

I am also, annoyingly, falling behind on some work. Well, I guess you can’t win all the time.