Saturday, July 30, 2011

Conscience

Having been raised by a woman of great integrity and unbendable moral values, I have often found myself suffering from pangs of conscience.  I still feel guilty about the day when I was eight years old and cut school and lied to my mother about it.  I find myself obsessing about stupid things I have forgotten to do, or not done correctly, about things I have said that may have been misinterpreted…Why a mistake I made countless years ago continues to haunt me is unclear, but I find these things popping up in my head, or floating to the surface during a restless night.

There are these frequent niggling thoughts running through my mind, even in relation to the simplest everyday things  – Am I doing this right?  Should I be doing it at all?  What will so and so think?  What do I think?

Dogs don’t suffer from conscience;  they live in the now.  What brings an immediate and positive result is what is they do, and what brings a negative result doesn’t get repeated.  There is no sitting and recriminating on what they did and what they could have done differently or what they might do differently in the future, there is only what they are doing right now.  “Live in the moment” is a dog’s motto.

We humans are really good at misinterpreting our dogs’ reactions.  You come home and find that your dog, bored out of his mind at sitting there alone for hours on end with nothing interesting happening – and you haven’t even left the TV on for him! – has demolished a few of the decorative cushions from the sofa and the whole house is flooded with tiny bits of foam rubber.  Doggy takes a look at your face and disappears under the bed.  “You see!” you exclaim, “He is feeling guilty!  He knows he did something bad!”

Well, think again.  Doggy had a great, fun time destroying household property and has no guilt feelings whatsoever. However, being a dog, he is great at reading body language, and understands immediately from yours that you are really angry and that he had better get out of range. 

He has no pangs of conscience about having stolen a cookie off the counter top when you are not looking, or sleeping on the sofa when no one is home.  “But he knows he shouldn’t do things like that!” you exclaim.  “Doesn’t he have a conscience?” 

Well – no!  His guilty look is only an expression of, “Oh,oh, you caught me and you are angry!”  Discretion is definitely the best part of valor…

Life would be so much easier if I could just live in the present like Habibi, never obsessing about the things that happened in the past, and that in any case I can’t do anything about, and never stressed about what might or might not happen in the future, which is not really under my control either.  Wouldn’t it be great to just enjoy the now…Wow!

No worries...

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Connectivity

I can’t deny it, I am addicted to my computer, with all of it’s wonderful attributes.  I can’t imagine going back to writing on a typewriter and having to correct mistakes with eraser fluid or redo the whole document.  I can’t imagine getting along without Power Point and all of it’s possibilities.  I love the internet and the ease of finding information on, really, any subject in the world, and the speed of e-mail, and the ease of having friends everywhere, even if they are people that only exist in the computer for all I know.  How in any other way would I have been able to make contact with so many people from so many places?  I can’t remember the last time I have written a letter (and I used to write a lot!) – if you don’t have e-mail, you don’t exist.

I feel really significant and important – if you “google” me, you will get a lot of results!  I exist because I can be found on Google!!!! I remember showing this to my brother, who is not found on Google – he was very impressed!  One of the few things about me that has impressed him in a long time, I think….

But I have a problem with the idea that this machine is smarter than me and can mess up my life so easily. 

I can be working very happily, and suddenly, everything freezes.  The computer refuses to continue, and notifies me that the program has stopped working.

Fatal Error!!!!  One of the most blood chilling phrases that I know of!!!  Have I really killed it?  Will it be able to recover or has everything been lost????  Help!

Things that get sent back because of server errors, or all sorts of other incomprehensible (to me) excuses…I feel very stressed…And why does my email program agree to send some things and not others??? Or to receive some things and not others??? Why can I sometimes upload things to the internet and other times no tricks will help, there is just refusal time after time!

Then there was the wonderful program that I downloaded, for editing photos.  I was so pleased with the results I was getting.  And then, suddenly, one day it announced – “Your trial period is over, and the program has shut down.”  No advance warning, nothing – just gone.  The only thing left was the useless icon showing that once the program did exist on my computer.  And of course, in closing down, it took my photos with it into the black hole of cyberspace.

I still find the idea of viruses and all of these various diseases that infect poor vulnerable computers very hard to understand.  It is not so easy to understand viruses in living things – how can there be viruses that infect a machine?  How can there be people that spend their time developing these diseases?  Do they do it so that then there can be people who spend their time developing cures???

And then there is connectivity, a word that I never heard of before.  Suddenly, that little red light appears on the little black box (modem??router??whatever!) and there is no internet, no mail – I am isolated! I am alone! I am not in contact anymore!!!!

Habibi usually lies next to my chair when I am working on the computer, and finds it very amusing to hear me scream, “No!  Don’t close down on me!  I haven’t saved that yet!!!! Stop it, stop it, stop it!”  He knows I won’t get an answer.  Sometimes he gets up and shoves his nose under my arm to stop me from typing, and looks at me in pity – really, there are much better ways to spend time…after all, he is always here to connect with me…