Imagine that you are on vacation or visiting a new country. You did not forget your laptop or your two mobile phones, but in your haste you DID forget your chargers. All three of them.
Of course a laptop or a smartphone works without charger. For a while. But after that “while” they are dead, you could have just as well left them at home.
We react differently to this, of course. Last time I discovered that I had not packed my mobile charger I was confused for a while. Then utterly relieved.
— Yes, that´s easy for you to say. I am sure you do not have a steady job where people need to reach you. But we others do!
Hello, “others”! True, I don´t have that kind of job. But if I had, I could have enjoyed that state of inaccessibility even more. It could have been even more sensual, in a sinful way!
Let´s say I am in the middle of the jungle… but let´s not exaggerate. I am in the middle of a country where I will not be able to find another charger for my phone. So what can I do about it? Nothing. And if I also forgot the charger for my laptop, BINGO! I cannot tell my 3000 friends on Facebook that they have to write me there, instead of phoning me.
I am totally cut off from life! Hurray!
I am not so stupid though as not to realize that I am NOT cut off. The other way around: I am just now connected to life FOR REAL. To life all around me: people, nature, winds, sounds, situations, sights, moments, meetings… And last but not least, to myself.
Myself as I am without the company, nay, the scaffolding of “others”. (“Others” in quotation marks because these others are not here. The ones that are here need no quotation marks.)
So now I am without these distant contacts, these tele-contacts. Good riddance and how wonderful to lose them for a while. I mean, I´ve had to live constantly with them, they´ve been on my back for — what is it now? — five years or more.
All this online life, this connectedness to what and who is NOT HERE has been my normality for a long time. And now, thanks to my forgetfulness I am rid of it.
I am HERE, and I am with all that is HERE. WE are here. The “others” are not even in my thoughts, because the sheer enjoyment of being sharp — like a photo with razor-sharp corners, not vacillating or oscillating between here and there — is so great that it fills me totally. No room for There, Then and Those.
And all this strange happiness just because I packed my things in haste and forgot my chargers.
Morale: never say that hurry and haste cannot lead to stunning results.
Of course, I might get fired when I return to work in two weeks, but hey! I didn´t like my job anyway. Good riddance. Actually I might never leave this new country. Very few Internet cafées around and nobody seems worried about things like Skype or Facebook (“what´s that?”) updates.
No, the updates around here… are here.
