The ticking of the clock, the rain drops, the same sound of the wood burning when it pops. There’s no sound like that on digital clocks. And at the traffic light we converge for a time: everyone looking down, in their laps. There’s Jupiter Beard in the roadside shoulders, double stamp day at the coffee shop…but we remain elsewhere in all the minutes and seconds that consume the day. If we had self-driving cars we could work more, to stay on top of things: but it doesn’t feel like it’s adding more time or space, only taking it. The pressure, working in tech, to go as fast and far as we can but even when we do, it doesn’t satisfy. Maybe I’m too old and lazy, but I like looking out the window at the stop light: my mind needs natural things, and there’s more of interest for me there: though often banal, it’s always real.

Dawn went to the Microsoft tech conference in Florida and got her picture taken with Michelle Obama (who spoke there), got to hug her even: said she talked about what’s needed for business leaders, to find your passion so you can be authentic: that ‘authentic’ is rare, but you can sense when someone has it, or doesn’t.

Outside the elevator at work they’re testing directional robots that sense your presence and send commands to activate the elevator cars. There’s no waiting: the robot senses you and the car opens, and it feels good. The robots are about two feet tall and happy looking, like toys. We joke, that’s how it all starts…

And perhaps it’s those days I don’t feel authentic, I feel blank or randomized, I feel lesser…and have to go back to nature, to clear my head. Then, the clicks and pops in the trees from birds and squirrels, how the light filters through, how the forest gets quiet down in the valley, still.

September, a time of in between: is that all our life is now, “between?”

Sculpture/photo by Ralf Roletschek, Wiki Commons.

Categories: prose, technology

Tags: aging, Autumn, fall, mid-life crisis, nature and technology, prose, social media, social media addiction, William Pearse writer