My young granddaughters were born with cell phones in their hands, or so it seems. Instead of a rattle or a key ring to play with when they were babies, they were given a phone to appease their cranky moments. Technology comes so naturally to them and they presumably think I am stupid because I struggle with these things. I live in a tactile world for the most part. I am continuously in touch with earth, with water, with nature in its many forms, and with the physical world in general. Needless to say, I was seriously befuddled when my computer crashed. I have a love/hate relationship with this small device upon which my writing life has come to depend. I love the ease and speed with which I can bring my words to life on the screen and at the same time I often resent the subtlety by which it robs me of precious time. I resist what I have been told by so called experts – that I must create an “online presence” and market my self-published writing without the expertise of a literary agent.
The acceleration of our modern world is difficult to keep up with. I do my best, but it seems that just when I have mastered a new trend, something new arrives to take its place. When I learned about saving things to Google Drive, I began to do that; or I would often save things to a flash drive, but I got busy and procrastinated even though I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I should be saving copies of my writing. My old computer (which was then my new computer) had Microsoft Edge and it began saving everything that I wrote in Microsoft Office to OneDrive. I was confused about the difference between The Cloud and Google Drive and OneDrive. I did not want every single thing I wrote to be saved, and it was confusing to keep track of what was saved where, so I disabled OneDrive, but I failed to manually save to Google Drive. Since I have been writing these blogs for nearly a year now, I had begun to organize them and had started printing them out, but then my computer crashed. Since I have been so busy in my garden, I would often write things directly on the computer, rather than in long hand as I used to do. I am desperate now, to find a person who can retrieve my documents and pictures from the hard drive, so they are not lost forever. This is what I know to be another lesson in Life’s school of hard knocks. In a few year’s time, I will leave my body behind for a new adventure. At that point, it is doubtful that my words will matter much to anyone, but then they have never actually been “my” words. I am merely the conduit through which the words find expression.
