Inside My World...HFireman

A very eclectic and far-ranging blog. A glimpse into my mindset... things I find interesting, provocative and worth thinking about... things visual, things fictional, observations and commentary,... and questions that we need to be asking ourselves. Welcome to my world.

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Location: Houston, Texas, United States

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Being Busy and Living Virtual Lives... That's Progress?

Have you noticed how increasingly our lives are becoming virtual. Even my own and I am the guy who believes that the most important element in our lives should be the relationships we have with the people who are important to us.

Sadly, this phenomena goes beyond vegging out in front of the boob tube or playing video games. Now, with the accelerating pace of life these days, even our friendships by necessity are morphing into something that is virtual.

My best friend, Roland, has become a very busy fellow. He works full time and he is working on his Masters Degree. He is a dad with two beautiful girls and a husband with a lovely wife. He is knee-deep in redecorating his house. So he doesn't have a lot of time to spare these days.

I am in the same boat, it seems.

Roland and I are doing our best to sustain our friendship. We used to get together regularly on the weekends in the evenings and over a bottle of wine, we would just chill out. And in the process, solve the world's problems in the course of the evening, which could stretch sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. That doesn't happen much anymore. We do really well just to grab a few minutes on the phone or for us to stop over at each other's houses for a few minutes, stolen from our busy lives.

I don't like the word, "hate." I use it very sparingly. So I will only say that I am very distressed at how living such a cluttered life, timewise, has made having friends such a difficult endeavor. My friendship with Roland has unfortunately gone the direction that so many other aspects of my life have gone: it is increasingly virtual in nature.

Something has got to give. I am going to have to take a hard look at my life and figure out what things I really don't need to have or need to be doing. I do not need to be doing anything which is sucking up my time and giving me only a very small return on my investment. Our lives are so short and any distraction that causes me to squander even a second of the precious time I am allotted has got to go.

All of this gives a whole new meaning to the notion of managing our time. No longer is time management just a matter of maximizing our efforts or becoming a more efficient person. More and more, managing our time is going to be about taking back our lives and enabling us to be able to be with our friends and our family... to actually be able to live in the moment, to actually be able to experience and enjoy the moment with the people we love.. the people who are most important to us. Ultimately, how well we manage our time may very well determine whether or not we will be able to escape from having to live unsatisfying virtual lives... whether or not we will be able to enjoy lives rich in loving relationships and memorable moments.

Having a conversation on the phone with a disconnected voice or receiving an email from someone I care about is no longer adequate for me. I want my life to be real and the moments of my life to be real. I want to have moments in my life about which I can have real memories of the faces of the people there, of what we were doing at that moment and of the places I have been. Maybe that means I will not be using some of the playtoys that "progress" has given us as much from now on. However, if that is exactly what I end up choosing to do, I will be making real progress in my own life .

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