Those Biblical words are familiar to me and to many through Handel’s “Messiah” – but they also make a pretty decent headline for the last five days and the Cyber St andstill in which I have found myself regarding my website. I seem to be back in business now but not really understanding why or even what went wrong earlier this week when it became impossible for me to publish any additions or edits to my website.
I am embarassed to admit just how much this felt like a full-blown calamity to me – and I’m still trying to figure out just what neurosis I have that should have made this admittedly brief and ultimately inconsequential outage seem like a disaster leaving me painfully isolated from the rest of humankind with no relief in sight. I can gauge the extent of my over-reaction not only in my terrible sense of frustration – but also in the sweeping gratitude I felt for my brother-in-law Mark’s efforts to help me sort this out. I’m not kidding- I felt the kind of gratitude you feel when you’re drowning and someone risks their own life to dive in after you. (Not that I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of help, but I can guess.) I’m especially embarassed after having learned that one of my favorite people at church, Ann Dudycha, has been without email for the last three weeks. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I think I would have thrown myself off of a cliff long before reaching the three-week mark of such an outage.
I’m still trying to sort all of this out and just what is at the root of this dependence and perhaps even addiction to those means which now connect us in such unprecedented ways – and why it is so maddening when they let us down. Probably part of it is that computers – and especially Macs – seem to be forever prone to quirky anomalies that defy all explanation and about which we can’t do much except restart the thing and hope that whatever gremlins got into the computer are chased out. Part of me wishes that I were living in the era when the most complicated piece of technology in the house was the butter churn; whatever else you want to say about it, a regular person knew how a butter churn worked and could fix the thing in the unlikely event that something went wrong with it. But computers are beyond our capability of understanding to the same extent- and when things go wrong that elude our earnest efforts to correct, it’s tempting for even peace-loving folks to take their computer and heave it through the living room window.
I hope that it mostly has to do with our love of connectedness as well as our dread of isolation. Once in awhile I might cherish the thought of being on my own- away from people phone and laptop- but in my everyday life, I need to be in touch. . . and I guess I am coming to realize and appreciate that email and this website and the easy voice mail on my cell phone have helped me establish and re-establish connections with people that would otherwise be impossible in such a nutty, hectic life. But I’m probably right on the edge of being one of those people at risk of being terribly anti-social with the people around me because of my efforts to be social through this little toy on which I’m typing these words. (Just ask Kathy and Bobbi and Ellie.) I guess it’s one more example of technology’s double-edged sword and of the common tendency for us (for me, at least) to take something just meant to be frosting and consuming it by the gallon, as though it were the cake itself.
I think that’s more than enough profound philosophy for one sitting, so I’m going to sign off now – hit publish – and hope that it’s sails into the website without incident. But if the gremlins are back, then it’s back to the butter churn for me.