Change brings about chaos as naturally as dogs draw fleas. Stepping over the line requires courage and a reserve of faith that I frequently find myself lacking. I watch in admiration - and horror - as those around me move and shake to the new technologies of cell phones, printers that serve every conceivable office need, tracking systems, laptops that show movies, synthetic music, cars that talk back to you. Life has gotten more virtual by the decade and I am still in the land of the rotary dial. I refuse to sacrifice the comfort of familiarity and old friends to progress, no matter how tempting and time saving the world has become - I limit the on line world to one computer, old and out of date, but doing its job and keeping in its place.
As machines and technology renovate and re-invent life as we know it, important things fall by the wayside. Spelling is a lost art, no one prints pictures anymore, voice mail is the law of the land. What with all our labor saving, instamatic devices, it's near impossible to find a real person answer a simple question. I suppose we do all this to make life better, to free up our time for other things, like inventing more technology, but in human terms, our individuality is getting lost in the mix, as if we are being contoured and shaped to fit in and keep pace. What will the end of this race toward progress bring, I wonder - assuming that at some point, we do reach an end. And ultimately, who wins.
Being brought up on a small island in a tightly knit community influences my outlook, I know. The outside world was not welcomed there and people did things the way they had done them for years without questions or curiosity. New was suspect whether in people or devices or food or habits - eccentricity was valued and accepted and given room to grow, modernity was a stepchild from away, approached with great caution and closely inspected before it was allowed to take root.
Chaos and change are often too closely knit together to see where one ends and the other begins.
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