Punchy,
As I wrote yesterday, over the past few days we spent time out camping with the Stephenson reunion. I am sure that this will be a tradition you will always remember, even if it is not for a few years before you remember it.
On Friday night a few of us went shooting, it is not something I have done for a long time but it was a lot of fun, and may be something I do again.
While we were camping I had my phone turned off. Most of the time your mom and I used very few electrical things. Flashlights were really the only things we used. Part of the reason for that is that up in the canyon we did not get really good cell phone reception, and to tell you the truth, it is kind of a nice thing. If I had been able to have my phone on, it would not have lasted all day either way, but more to the point it meant that we needed to talk to each other, make real connections. Sit around the camp fire and tell jokes and riddles without being able to google them.
When I was growing up, we did not have all of that. The first cell phones I remember were a scout master who had one some time in the early 90's. At that time there may have been internet but very few people were on it. To find the answer to something you had to look it up at a library. or mail something through the postal service. Many of those things have changed. We are now so hyper connected that some small talk does not happen anymore since we can know from social media what is going on for whom as long as they make it public. We can find the answer to stupid things like "Where do I know that actor from?" at the touch of a button. Where we miss things is having real life human connections. We may hear a thousand things about what someone is doing over the course of a year, but may never say hello to them when we see them on the street. We may know that something happened to them but never mention it in in real life.
The age of the Internet has connected us in ways that were never possible before, but where we miss the boat is that there is an ability to hide behind a screen instead of interacting with each other really.
That is where it is important to unplug sometimes. Over the course of a day, between work, Facebook, Email, and the like I get many notifications. Most of them are trivial in the grand scheme of things. When we got to camp, I turned off my phone, and it did not come on until we were on our way down the canyon. During that time, the world did not blow up, we did not go to war with some new nation, the world changed very little.
What did happen while we were camping is that I was able to talk to people, spend time with people, (or alone) and not have the world at my fingertips. That is not to say I am turning off my phone all the time, but sometimes it is good to unplug. Be with the people you are in a room with, or read a book alone. Sometimes you need to unplug. Sometimes we need to disconnect from the world around us and connect with the world right in front of us.
Take time to unplug some times, you will find that the connections you make go much further than the ones you find only online.
Love you kiddo,
-Dad
