Yesterday I Experienced Something Scaring
What if we were let down by what we are addicted to?
Where is the road towards the future?
I was alone, driving my car. I had been driving for a few hours, maybe I was halfway. I was on this all-day trip to get to our family cottage. I write cottage, but it isn’t really a cottage, but rather a house. Our holiday house.
It is a wonderful place in the mountains, situated some 500 kilometers away from where we live. It is a long drive, but i am used to it. And I like driving long distances.
So, driving that far was not what scared me.
When I drive long distances, I listen to music. And I think. I try to sort out what’s inside of me. Essentially, it’s about my writing ideas, and my feelings. It is not so much about what has happened in my life lately. Most of the time, I live a quiet life.
When I drive long distances alone, I have the occasion to go deeper into what seems to pop up from inside of me. And I can go deeper into how I feel on this particular day. It was a normal, good road trip.
So, driving for hours this special day was not what scared me.
Halfway I got a phone call from my wife. She told me that she had seen on the news that the road where I was going was blocked by a landslide. She had looked at the map for me, and she told me what she had found out. I thanked her. Because of the landslide I would have to drive a detour, nearly 200 additional kilometers across the Norwegian mountain landscapes.
But this was not what scared me. Really, it wasn’t.
Because of the detour I called my daughter who lives not too far from our holiday house. Maybe I would pass by at her place at once and deliver some toys I had in my car for her children? She invited me to come and say hello to her and the family if I wished to, but I decided to go to the cottage.
Later this week I will visit them, and maybe take another sympathetic walk in the neigbohood, like I did last time I was there, together with our 5 1/2 year old granddaughter and our 2 year old grandson. I really enjoyed being with them the last time I was there. The boy talked all the time, to me and to himself, and made the water splash in the mud puddles.
This was something I was looking forward to, and I still am. I’ll go there later this week.
I drove the 200 additional kilometers, and arrived finally, almost three hours later than I first had calculated, safely at our cottage. I stopped the motor, looked at the kilometer which showed 678, and jumped out.
I took the bag and my backpack with my computer in it. I was happy as always to be able after the long car ride to carry inside alle the things I had packed into the car.
Obviously, this was not what scared me.
I was happy like a small child thinking of myself the next hours, connecting with the writers on Medium and reading stories there. I entered the house and noticed that it was cold inside, despite of the high temperatures outside.
I started my computer and I noticed that it did not have WIFI.
I tried to connect, but there was no way. I took out the power cord and put it back, I tried everything I could think of, but without success!
This is what scared me!
I was here, alone, hundreds of kilometers from home, in the cottage, in the silence. All of a sudden, I was excluded from reading the news, excluded from sending e-mails, excluded from Facebook. I was in the incapability to browse the weather forecast, to log into my internet bank, and all the other platforms and sites I usually visit every single day, some of them several times a day.
And perhaps the worst of everything, I would not be able to go to Medium and read articles, enjoy the stories I am used to find there, every single day.
This is what really scared me. An evening without internet! A night without internet!
Okay, I could cope with that. After all I sleep in the nights, at least a few hours.
A list of things to do dropped down before my eyes. It was a list of things to do that I had never visualized before.
What was this?
Was it a sudden panic attack?
I saw nothing but unreadable words, a loose line of letters that told me nothing.
A strange thought came to me. What if I would have to be without internet connection for all the seven days I was going to stay here?
And worse, an almost unbearable thought: What if we would have to stay without internet connection on a permanent basis? What would that be like?
A terrible nightmare.
I admit that I lately have been thinking of deleting my Facebook account. I just considered deleting it, like someone I know has done. But this idea of deleting Fb, an idea that I have been playing with for some time, now became increasingly real. Not that I have any big reasons not to do so.
I could do like a writer here on Medium says:
Deleting social media has been the best decision I have ever made. It’s made me closer to my family, more disciplined towards my studies, eat healthier, work out more and has given me plenty of free time to read as many books as I’d like. Life is great. (Corey Simon: I’m 17 And I Deleted All My social media. Here’s What Happened)
The people I am connected to on Fb can also be reached through other channels. But it would be infinitely worse if I also lost the e-mail channel, if the internet suddenly let us all down. What would that be like?
The day after I arrived at the cottage, I called our internet company. They explained to me how to get reconnected, and so I did.
Everything came “back to normal”, but I still had some thoughts around this in my mind as I found, opened and read some of the new stories on Medium.
After a day without internet, I got back to normal, but still a few questions arise around this subject:
- I am not a 100 % certain that living without internet would be unbearable. After all we lived and probably also did fine most of the time in the periods when internet did not exist — i.e. during a very long span of time.
- I am confident I would do rather well without some of the features brought to me by the internet. There are some places where I from time to time publish a little and where I sometimes get “Likes”. But these channels are not indispensable. For instance, I imagine I would be able to live quite well also without Facebook (I know, I haven’t deleted it yet, maybe I will, maybe I won’t. This is no big issue to me).
- On the contrary there are in my eyes at least two fields where losing the internet connection would be disastrous. The first one is the e-mail system. I simply cannot imagine being without the possibility to read, write and send e-mails!
- The other channel I would like to include here, is the Medium system. Working with Medium and publishing through the Medium system is simply ingenious! In my opinion it has revolutionized interpersonal communication in general and publishing in particular!
Reading, writing and publishing has changed and I do not ever want to go back to how it was earlier!
I am a man who during almost my whole life has enjoyed writing and sharing my ideas through writing. I have published both fiction and non-fiction: novels, short stories, poems and articles.
In the late 1970-ies, when I published my first book, I had to do a long and exhausting work in order to arrive to the goal.
The creative process was then a long and winding road:
- Conceiving the idea and writing it,
- reading and re-writing the script,
- sending it by post to the publishing house.
- Then wait for weeks and sometimes months before it came back. Often with hints and advice on how to change, develop and improve the text.
- Then one or two more rounds, before the script finally was sent by the publisher to the printing house.
- Then wait for weeks and maybe months again before finally
- the product came back to me as a book and ended
- in the book stores where the potential readers could find it and have a look,
- and maybe buy it for money.
Now, with the internet, and with a channel like Medium, we writers can do almost everything ourselves. I write “almost everything”, because there are certain things we cannot do, for instance like publishing a novel on Medium or on a similar place. But otherwise — we can write, publish and read anything we want. We can read what others think about what we write, and we can read the communication between other writers and their readers.
Excellent! I read, I enjoy and I learn a lot!
I observe that as far as I have seen the way writers express themselves and the way readers express themselves on Medium, it all goes in a very sober and intelligent way. Haters have other channels, and it is my and certainly all Medium users’ hope that this remains so.
I see Medium as a great, generous and towards-the-future looking society of humans who together wish to bring the world small steps forward, which is also in the centre of my motivation for writing.
Let us together lift each other, making each other and the world better.
Thank you for reading!
Want to read more?
Try this: How I Write a Story — the Medium Lesson Number One
And this: Alone, yes — but lonely?
“Make Your Dream Be Your Future”
