Transitions
The stages of life are interesting. As you go through them each one leads to more knowledge of the lifetime you’ve been blessed to have, or, in war torn countries, the cursed and awful reality of it all.
Some lives are short, others last about a century. The fascinating thing about the stages though is you don’t really know about each one before experiencing it.
Then you look back at the one you’ve just passed through, and congratulate yourself at how much more advanced you are these days.
The older you get the more mysterious you become. You’re being judged by those younger than you, and they’re all wondering how and why you keep on living. From their perspective, getting older is like actually lurking around the gates of hell.
Is it a must?
Seriously, what’s the sense of living if your fingers aren’t nimble enough to operate your smart phone with ease? If you can’t plug in your printer because you know you can’t get up once you get down?
Or if you can actually live quite happily without being ruled by screens of some kind each and every day?
Yeah, we, the older folks come from earlier places where the “global village” wasn’t yet thought of.
Where monks in remote places used to spend many happy hours in silent prayer with their Being.
Now of course they have smart phones just like anyone else. These allow them not only to do their prayer jobs with much more efficiency, but also to be wide-ranging in this world of high tech everywhere. And so it goes.
The global village
...has morphed into a global screen catastrophe. Infants, often less than 12 months of age, are mesmerized by TVs, phones and handy other devices everywhere they go.
The amount of vicious, tragic daily harm visited on each other in this world is startling. Where’s the feeling for the pain of others?
Ever wondered why brain scientists and the World Health Organization recommend NO screen time for babies under two, and only one hour a day for those aged two to four years old?
There is a lot of brain study research on screen use during these early years. What it clearly shows is that learning from other humans in a child’s life is massive. Learning from machines is quite different.
The big concern is how screen learning hijacks attention spans and compassion in children. That young brain needs time to process learning. When you read to a child they have that time as they listen to your voice. This does not happen when a child watches rapid, unrealistic movements on a screen.
When they hear you talk of kindness to others, and see you demonstrate it in your daily life it is a powerful example. As they observe your resilience when hard things happen and you rise above it they know they can do the hard things too.
Possibly one of the greatest things you can do for a child is interact with them as an interested older person.
Yeah, I know. We thought we’d done our share. But we hadn’t counted on screens and technology.
After all, these youngsters will inevitably run your country one day.
If they didn’t learn to focus, analyze and develop compassion for you in your older years, the future looks quite bleak for you.
I know. When you become of the senior persuasion you should try not to inconvenience the beautiful young ones with the bodies that still work as they should.
To be completely honest, for me to jump on an ice floe and make a graceful exit by starvation doesn’t exactly appeal to me.
Golden era
Selfishly, in my latter years I would like to be pampered, respected and loved. I’ve managed to outlive many so far, and enjoy weird things, like being alone at times, reading an actual book, observing what’s happening up in the skies without actually traveling, going for walks, admiring all forms of nature. And yes, appreciating technology that allows me to communicate this to you.
Would I have ended up being this me, if I’d been exposed to screens in my very early life? We’ll never know.
One of my newer friends, 94 years of age, revealed the secret of her long life to me. “Lots of sugar, lots of salt. Lots of laughter.” She said it with a twinkle in her macular-degenerated eyes. Humour. That’s another thing you only learn from others during your early years.
Lithops in recovery mode
Whether you’re plant or animal, it’s a tough going to reproduce your species. Particularly if the slightest wrong move means your death.
Here’s a week's progress in the poor little collection of lithops I presented last week.
Those young ones are bursting out at the lower levels. They really dislike the overstretched parenting examples they’ve been forced to live with. They’ve started to extract all the moisture from them.
Thanks...
I sincerely appreciate your company on this journey and looking forward to having you back again soon.
VickiW
