Happy 2012!
Happy January 1, 2012.
Isn’t it wonderful to be alive here today?
Isn’t it great to have all the amazing technology and tools at our disposal… especially things that didn’t exist 50, 25 or even 10 years ago?
I have spent most of the last 3 weeks pulling together the scans and information I have about my grandfather for the site I am building about him and the New Jersey State Police 1921 General Orders booklet he saved. My immersion into the days of his early adulthood have given me pause to really think about the changes in our world since that time. It makes me feel excited! It’s also heightened my awareness of a particular concern.
We have access to anything and everything information related. Every demographic can find content on-line, and we do. It’s now common-place to see TV commercials and programming referring us to Internet-based content.
On the one hand, for a perpetual student like I am, this is a feast for my mind. I’ve spent hours devouring information – both educational and entertaining – definitely adding up to solid months of my life, and maybe even years already.
On the other hand, as a mammal, I feel the decline of my stamina and endurance as a result of all the sitting I have done in the past 10 years. I know I don’t move as much as I ought to, and I make the effort to remember to do so (it’s good to have a dog). But, for me right now, starting out on a daring new adventure takes its form as this specific blog post… and while I am very happy to be fulfilling a recent commitment to myself to write and then hit “publish”, I also recognize the need to get out into the world again.
In 1917, my grandfather left his home and family in Wildwood, NJ and moved to Toronto, joining the Canadian Army to fight in World War 1. He was 17 years old. He had no Google Maps, no Trip Advisor, no on-line research or cell phone to fall back on. He had his wits and determination, an 8th-grade education, and books and newspapers to read.
My Grandfather, around Age 20
In addition to running away from home at 17 to go fight in a war on another continent, he also lied about his age, adding 2 or 3 years (varies by document) so as to be accepted for enlistment. He was taking risks on many levels, and I can only imagine how alive he felt!
He must have had some fears – he had to have! He never mentioned them years later…in fact, he never really talked much about those exciting days of his youth – like many very interesting people, he was not inclined to sit around telling old stories, even though I now wish he had! Any fears he had were clearly overcome in the process of his living life. Looking back now, I know that his risks paid off and he led an amazingly successful and long life, but he couldn’t know that from the middle of his setbacks along the way.
Contemplating that – my grandfather’s fears and doubts and his doing it all anyway – it occurs to me that life for him at that time had to be much like life now in many respects. Everything was changing rapidly then, too – the automobile was still quite new, and manned flight was just over a decade old! The Wright brothers had their first flight in 1903, yet there were fighter planes in World War 1, in the late teens.
1924 Wildwood Phone Directory - Sjostrom
Telephones were still new, yet most everybody had one. People then worried about their kids, crime, immigration, war, money, opportunities and change. People now worry about their kids, crime, immigration, war, money, opportunities and change… and Cell phones are still pretty new, but most everybody has them.
I think the biggest difference now is that we spend much more time living in our heads and interacting with screens, rather than taking physical action IRL. The fact that we even have “IRL” as a label to distinguish REAL LIFE from simulated experience ought to give us pause, don’t you think?
I recognize the irony that as I begin promoting my services building websites and email lists, I am advocating a step away from the world of electronic information. The thing is – we all gotta do something in order to have anything worthwhile to talk about, but so many of us are looking for the answers online, talking, typing, chatting… but not ever really DOING anything.
Go do something. Go have fun, and take a risk. Grow, expand, fail and try again.
But just go DO something.
XO 
Tagged as:
Do Something!
Today I watched some video by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income fame. He was talking about podcasting and how he actually received the most new visitors to his site as a result of his Podcast, which ranked among the top ten in its category on iTunes.
