Living the Distance

There’s a story where a boy doesn’t want to wait for life to take its course – he wants to skip over the boring parts to get to the good stuff. He acquires a ball of thread (“The Magic Thread” http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/magic_thread.html) that allows him to do just that. He keeps finding reasons to hurry up and get past the parts of life he doesn’t care about (skipping all the “little” details in the process) to get to his next milestone. In the end, he finds that it all goes by far too fast and those little things along the road really were important after all.
The journey or the destination - what are you in it for? We set endpoints as goals – how often do you set EXPERIENCING the journey as an objective?
Everything goes by faster now. Microwaves have replaced half-day dinner prep. We sit around that dinner table, busy sending out restrictive text messages, our eyes glued on gorilla glass instead of our fellow humans.
(This is another sign of aging – I have arrived at the point in life where I feel it’s necessary to tell everyone - especially “the young” - to enjoy what they have before it’s gone.)
We keep finding faster ways to jump from point A to point B. We get in a car or a train or a plane and sit there absorbed in our iPads and Gameboys while the scenery rolls by, vicariously experiencing where we aren’t instead of BEING WHERE WE ARE.
Star Trek isn’t too far off; I read in the last few months that the Chinese (among others) are working on teleportation – using string theory to communicate across a lake. Strings. Is this really better than a string and two cans? I have fond memories of that. (Or Toucans? Has anyone tried communicating with Toucans? That I don’t remember.)
Stop being in such a hurry – it will all be over soon enough. We should thank the people of the TSA for making air travel slower. Talk to them (someone ought to.) For that matter, talk to whoever you happen to be with while you’re waiting for the next big thing; you don’t know what you might be missing.
Life is what happens while we’re making plans; it’s not a sprint – it’s a distance event (the same thing goes for marriage.) You can fall down (several times) and still get up and finish respectably. We’re all born, and we all die; all those incidentals that happen between that start and finish are what make it unique. 
If you must have plans, then PLAN to pay attention to what’s happening around you. Don’t just GO somewhere – BE THERE AND EXPERIENCE LIFE.
Just saying….

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William Mangieri’s writing (including his latest ePublication “Mutiny on the Star-Bound”) can be found in many places, such as:

·         His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY

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