The mind is a labyrinth. Ever since the time change (especially), I’ve been waking with the weirdest dreams. One involved someone I haven’t really thought about for years. Someone I knew in college and who was a close friend, but who’s fallen out of touch. (And who would likely not approve of my evolving outlook on things.) Why she came out in a dream is a mystery to me. It does give me hope, however, that all those things I think I’ve “forgotten” are really still in there somewhere. A friend once told me that it’s not a matter of “remembering” but of “recollecting.” He claimed that the memories are still there. Ironically, I can’t recollect who he was, although I think it was someone I knew in college.
My generation’s ambivalent about the internet. Most of my college friends I simply can’t find online. I recall one of my best friends saying he would never use a computer. I suspect he’s had to backslide on that, for work if for nothing else, but he’s not available online at all. The same goes for people my age at seminary. Some I occasionally find through church websites, but honestly, most of them have better pension plans than I do and have retired to become invisible. We children of the sixties are likely the last generation that might be able to make it through life claiming never to have given in to computers. It took quite a bit of effort to get me over the reluctance. One of my nieces set up this blog for me nearly 13 years ago, otherwise I’d still be hard to find.
But minds. Minds can, and do change. My mind was dead-set against computers in college. For one class I was required to do one assignment via computer, and I did that task and that task only. Seminary was accomplished with a typewriter and snail mail. Even my doctorate, done on a very old-fashioned Mac SE, was purely a feat of word processing. Nashotah House was wired during my time there, but that was mainly email. My mind was slowly changing at each step of the way. I wasn’t becoming a computer lover, but I was realizing that I was learning something new. Now I can’t get through the day without writing and posting something on this blog and sharing it on Twitter and Facebook. And checking email—always email—to see if anything important has come in. And, perchance, someone I had a dream about might actually email me out of the blue.
