Where were you last night when I looked for you? A dozen times, I found myself wanting to haul you out of my pocket to check the weather (Is the rain going to stop. Is it ever going to warm up?), check my email (just ads and announcements usually, but...), play a game (and pass the time), see the news, listen to music, watch a video, write this blog...and you weren't there.
I felt non-plussed, off-balance; my plans for the evening, out of the wind and rain and doing good work were thrown into disarray. And yet, not so long ago, when you weren't in my life, I organized my time, began and completed tasks, read, wrote, and went to bed satisfied with what I'd done. I didn't need your blue-shining face to encourage or enable me.
You provide tools and information and entertainment but no direction; I have to come up with that. Indeed it's hard enough establishing a line of march when, close at hand, you provide easy distractions and encourage dissipation of my energies and time.
Still, I love your heft as you sit in my hand, the easy way you slip into my pocket, the brightness of your face, the fervent 'yes' you say to all my 'can I?' questions, the ear you give to the conversation of all humanity, and the voice you provide me for participation.
So I tamped the unease I felt and said, I'm going to learn to live bereft, at least for a night. I didn't even complain to my wife. So I finished reading a book that I'd been lent by a friend, watched the first half of Prokofiev's War and Peace, made a list of some outstanding philosophical issues I want to think through in the next few days, grumbled to myself about not being able to write online, listened to the slap of rain on the windows (what is it going to do tomorrow?), and went to bed...to be wakened at 5:30, not by your alarm, but my own inner restlessness.
Here you are next to my classroom computer, as I thought you'd be. Messages for me? News? Quirky pieces of information I find myself needing from time to time? All there. Everything assembled, day ready to begin. Ah.
Still, I whose face shines blue with your reflection still have to find the course, and hew to it, that provides me fullness of life, that is, encounters. If you're up to that, come along.
I felt non-plussed, off-balance; my plans for the evening, out of the wind and rain and doing good work were thrown into disarray. And yet, not so long ago, when you weren't in my life, I organized my time, began and completed tasks, read, wrote, and went to bed satisfied with what I'd done. I didn't need your blue-shining face to encourage or enable me.
You provide tools and information and entertainment but no direction; I have to come up with that. Indeed it's hard enough establishing a line of march when, close at hand, you provide easy distractions and encourage dissipation of my energies and time.
Still, I love your heft as you sit in my hand, the easy way you slip into my pocket, the brightness of your face, the fervent 'yes' you say to all my 'can I?' questions, the ear you give to the conversation of all humanity, and the voice you provide me for participation.
So I tamped the unease I felt and said, I'm going to learn to live bereft, at least for a night. I didn't even complain to my wife. So I finished reading a book that I'd been lent by a friend, watched the first half of Prokofiev's War and Peace, made a list of some outstanding philosophical issues I want to think through in the next few days, grumbled to myself about not being able to write online, listened to the slap of rain on the windows (what is it going to do tomorrow?), and went to bed...to be wakened at 5:30, not by your alarm, but my own inner restlessness.
Here you are next to my classroom computer, as I thought you'd be. Messages for me? News? Quirky pieces of information I find myself needing from time to time? All there. Everything assembled, day ready to begin. Ah.
Still, I whose face shines blue with your reflection still have to find the course, and hew to it, that provides me fullness of life, that is, encounters. If you're up to that, come along.
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