Since this is a personal blog that, from time-to-time, I point people to and say "You can learn about me by reading over here!," perhaps it's time to do some personal life updates. Besides the obvious willingness to ignore several red squiggles produced by Grammarly, telling me that I should not punctuate the way I have nor make "time to time" into a one-word event by hyphenating, what should you know?
I started this blog a long time ago. And yes, nearly in a galaxy far, far way, because that was in Mississippi. Since then, my family has moved to Southeast Arkansas, East Arkansas, Central Arkansas, and back (again!) to Southeast Arkansas. While that's been happening, my children have gotten 15 years older, my marriage has matured by 15 years, and I've gotten...hopefully 15 years more mature.
Whether or not that's true is, of course, open for discussion. Our oldest child was 7 when I started writing. Well, actually, she was 6. She's now 22 and a college graduate. The youngest is a high school senior.
There's been a lot of change. The thing is, that's the nature of life. Life changes. You can try to minimize the change in your own life, but the world around you is going to bring that change anyway. In 2008, when I started blogging, Blackberries were the big thing in mobile technology: you could tap out emails, etc., and they were high-end. People used Palm Pilots for digital organizers, but only those with enough time and money to learn how to use a digital organizer!
Since then, the iPhone and Android-system phones have altered the mobile landscape. Laptop computers have gotten cheaper, lighter, more powerful, and we've gone from being a family with two computers--the older one for some purposes, the newer for the more important purposes--to a family where everybody's got a laptop. And we've spent less on that than we did on the last new desktop we bought, somewhere around 2008.
Even if you have managed to avoid the change in your personal life, it has swirled around you. Now your bank doesn't really need you to come in--just do it all remotely. You can come in, except for those locations that locked the doors in 2020 and now only let you use the drive-thru, as if they installed sanitizers in the tube system. (Maybe they did, I don't know!) Walmart works differently now.
The point? Change happens. You can resist it, you can ignore it, but it happens anyway.
The real question is What are you going to do about it?
You can try to get in front of it, but sometimes you look around and realize that you guessed wrong about which way it was going--that you've been so disconnected from the world around you that you missed what changes were happening! Imagine being deeply embedded in the best way to use a Blackberry. Or how awesome you made your MySpace page :)
You can try to resist it, but there comes a time when you just have to buckle down and figure out where you are. Remember when Walmart required you to wait on the only cashier on-duty to check out? Yeah, use that progress to a self-checkout. You'll get out of there quicker.
You can flow with it, mindfully. Which takes time and effort. But it's worth it. The effort will keep you connected to the people and life around you, rather than having you isolated. You're not meant to live isolated.
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