© Another Day in the Country
A few weeks ago, I tried teaching the children in my world of art a new word: “discombobulated.”
It’s a good word to know but it is not a good feeling to have.
I have been discombobulated for about two months now, and it’s getting more intense because my old computer broke down, and I had to get a new one with a new keyboard and a new mouse, and I haven’t really learned a hoot yet about navigating my new iPhone.
That’s a lot of new equipment to get used to. So, you can see, I’m on a really intense learning curve.
I’ve adjusted to a lot of things in my lifetime, just as you have, but this is really annoying.
At the moment, this machine is trying to put words in my mouth — guessing what I’m about to say. It makes me nervous.
And then the reaction time on the keyboard is set so sensitive — and now I’m sensitive. And furthermore I can’t find out how to get that little bar that goes up and down the side of the page when I want to look at what I’ve already written — my history, so to speak.
My grandson, Dagfinnr, told me that the feature giving me so much trouble is called “predictive speech.” He gave me simple instructions on how to shut it off instead of shouting in utter frustration, “Just quit it!” Which I did!
“Quit it!” I yell at the predictive speech app. “You do not know what I am going to say next, so stop trying.”
Probably, if I had this machine programmed right, what’s-her-name could tell me what to do, but I don’t really like hearing voices, either.
Yesterday, for instance, I heard a voice talking to me when I was writing. I’d finished my column and was reading it back to myself out loud so I could judge the cadence, tone and words.
Out of the blue, Siri began talking to me, citing references, mimicking what I was saying.
It startled me so bad that I swore at her, something I’ve rarely, maybe never done to a real person.
Immediately I looked up “how to shut off Siri” and turned her off. Come to think of it, I’d often like to do that with real people, and they probably have felt the same way about me on occasion, but we smile at each other and try to be nicer.
I like pausing, as I write, pondering what I’ll say next, and it annoys me to see suggestions appearing in front of my cursor.
I’m talking to this computer again: “What I say next is my creativity, my will, my choice, so bug off, machine. What I want you to do is let me type in peace, please.”
We are all living, breathing, miraculous creatures called human beings — designed to be strong, capable, reasoning, and, hopefully, logical creatures.
Sometimes I’m afraid we’ve mucked it up with too much innovation.
We’ve neglected our offspring, refused to ponder our history and learn from it. We’re drowning ourselves in things and stuff, always reaching for some new magical panacea to comfort our souls but finding no comfort in the lot of it.
And right before Christmas is a really handy time for me to be talking about this, right?
We listen to podcasts instead of listening to ourselves, and we do not listen to each other with an understanding stance, hence we never seem to learn from what came before.
We are hiding in games when real life begs us to look up and engage. I find myself on a wrong path. Ooops, and you’re here now, too, on this page. We’ve got to do something!
I was stuck in a waiting room the other day, picked up a book about Tibetan medicine, and saw a quote right at the beginning from “His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.”
Someone asked him one of those open-ended questions I was telling you about last week.
“What surprises me most about humanity,” he said, “is man because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present, the result being he doesn’t live in the present or the future; he lives as if he’s never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.”
Instead of listening to our grandparents and our parents tell stories, we’ve been listening to constant news that isn’t news at all but the same old story.
We have trained up generations of followers who send “likes” to each other and don’t even know them really.
We’re just listening to, wishing we were able to make money like these poor rich influencers who are in most ways bankrupt.
As long as we live, I believe, we need to be changing and growing. I need to be grown up enough to endure learning how to use this darn computer. I need to read instructions and be resourceful enough to figure out how to get my old keyboard back so I can type. I need to be humble enough to ask for help.
When I did ask for help, it was not helpful. It was a program, not a person,
“I don’t need that kind of help!” I hollered. “I can still think and reason and tell stories on my own. How dare something or someone try to do this for me. It’s not your job.”
Like children who have to learn some lessons the hard way, we’re racing toward our choices in a new year, with a new regime, and a new way of being, and I’m trying to keep up. It’s scary.
I’ll tell you what I want for Christmas: I want a world that is real, not virtual — with clean air and clean water.
I want to smell the earth after it rains. I want to know the fragrance of good dirt and real lilacs.
I want our great-grandchildren to know what it’s like to work for their living, have loving companions, and be able to lay down their head on their own pillow at night and sleep without medication, waking up to another day in the country, their country, the land of the free.