Going Home, One Way or Another

Years ago I saw the insides of a computer. What would you call them? Components?  All I remember is how tiny the parts seemed, so intricate and complicated. It was hard to believe that all those delicate innards of a computer could do what they did. I could not understand it. As for the human brain and body, forget it. I’m just not the kind of a technician it takes to investigate such things, let alone carry on the development of them. It’s hard enough for me to use a computer for my own simple purposes.  

I remember my dad’s old Underwood typewriter though and in a pinch I might be able to invent one if some unnatural disaster should finish off everyone but me in this world, or if I’d be catapulted to some earth-like planet as yet uninhabited. I’d have a lot to learn and reinvent but I’d definitely know how to use the principles of the inclined plane, the hammer, gravity, the pulley, the screw driver and, of course, the wheel. 

So, what got me started on this line of thought today? The fact that I thought today was Saturday, the day my friend, Joan, is coming from St. Louis to spend a few days of her vacation with me. I’m ready for her  now and that means I have a day to twiddle my thumbs, day dream or take a nap. Or write a blog about a better world, one of peace and invention. A world like the one an old song describes in these words: “...there’s no sickness, toil or danger in that sweet land to which I go.”

And then there’s the suggestion of a land we may have come from. Was it better than this one or worse? Does this “land of woe,” as the song calls it, resemble the one we came from or the one we’re headed for? What’s our purpose in being here? Is it to take charge and create a better world or to simply let the powers that be have their way? Are we here to participate in invention or to work our way back to the recollection of a perfect world where all we needed to do was discover, employ and enjoy?

Are the vicissitudes of this world a kind of testing ground or school in which we learn by trial and error, or are they simply guideposts saying "Do Not Enter?" I’m contemplating these questions because I want to know so I can understand and act correctly. 

I think that there must be a way to get around the computers of life. Even the brain, blood and bones body may someday become antiquated, obsolete, with the discovery of a better body that could prove to be our original form.

I suspect we’ll all have to be both dreamers and workers in the new world. In this world and in our own ways I think we’re all, as the song says, “just a-goin‘ over home.”