Thursday, March 29, 2018

MY PHONE

                                                          

I recently purchased a new phone. After my wife passed away I felt it was important to have a phone on me at all times. Not just for safety reasons but for reference reasons because I had relied on her so much to remember things we both needed. Addresses and phone numbers. Birthday and anniversaries or appointments, you name it she was my go to gal.  So when I bought the new phone my old one was crammed with all of this information but the phone was dead. Through the magic of I-Cloud I was able to retrieve all of that and now I had a new phone with all of my old information that I had accumulated over the years downloaded into it.

That brings me to this. What if we could take young people that are going out into the world right now and give them all of the things we have learned that worked for us and, didn’t work for us, and say, “Here let me save you a lot of the trouble of having to learn this the hard way.” But wait, aren’t we doing that now with school and books. Yes, to some extent we are and it’s called history but they still have to accept it and learn it and that doesn’t always happen and I’m not sure how much schools even teach history anymore.  No, what I’m talking about is a mass transfer of information in the flick of a switch. Just like my new phone was programmed, you wouldn’t have to start over; you would all ready have the basics. You could expand on it or ignore it but you never really had to learn it.

Now the young people are saying, “Get out of here. We’ll learn it the same way you did.” To that I say. “Some of the mistakes I made in life were downright painful. Ordinary mistakes we all make and you want to make them for yourselves? If there were a way to make a drug addict experience the pain, suffering and shame of withdrawal before they ever started, most wouldn’t make that choice. If there were a way to make a driver experience what he would be going through when he drove drunk and killed someone, he would call a cab. I could give you a hundred examples.”

We are the sum total of our life’s experiences. The problem with that is a lot of us are over the hill before we really are, who we were meant to be. I have always said, “I want to be fourteen and know what I know now.” You see life is one big learning experience but it’s hard to read the book and learn anything from it when the story isn’t finished. That, for so many years, you relied on your likes and prejudice’s to guide you, and now you’re relying on actual experience.



What if we could delete all the bad preconceived opinions we once had and what we would download in these young minds would be only based on facts. That just like the information I downloaded on my new phone from ‘I cloud,’ it was only after I had gotten rid of the bad stuff.

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