Between our hearts there are bridges and barriers; mine are all paved with words.
Something beautiful about Toronto is that while every year it seems people are a bit busier and a but more attached to their person networks, when you strike up a conversation with a stranger rarely are you met unkindly. The homeless man on King Street yesterday had a stronger desire to impart knowledge on me than relinquish me of my change, once I spoke with him as a person. Even he was not too busy to stay true to his roots and represent our city with the politeness people fly here for. Today, sitting here in this theatre, is testiment to the point that not only the seemingly insane are warm to strangers. Waiting for my date to arrive from her late work meeting I struck up the most delightful conversation with Helen, an older lady with a delightful misunderstanding of the importance of technology. If there's one thing I miss about my old job it would be the satisfaction of having a pleasant conversation with a complete stranger. I told her about my previous job in IT which immediately facilitated a discussion around her children and their misunderstansing of the importance of technology. I love being 30 because I feel my ability to relate to antiquity and modernity is immeasurable. I'm young and old enough to know thag we're all wrong. We do provide so much more but achieve so much less with our tools.
I know enough to feel both happy and sad at the idea that the way technolgy is going, there is harsly any reason for us to have to actually talk any more. How utterly analogue, the act of speaking. How much more our minds could achieve in this digital world. I was only 13 years old or so when I realized that the average picture is actually worth about 365,000 words, by Kb. As time and technology advance, perhps our ability to relate will ascend to a higher cognitive realm. Perhaps the things we hold dear will be up for more than simply discussion, or debate. We could instantly poll our opinion to know how the world felt about even the most minute topic. We could know what the atoms inside our science project actually look like, not just how we prefer to sletch them. I imagine a world before we hard words, where dance and growl and thrust and laughter were all we had, and so were cherished out of necessity. Now we growl less, we look less, we laugh less, and we talk more. But as this paradigm changes again, as our sonnets and ballads and orations fall the wayside to tweets likes and votes, it's worth wondering if we're paving roads or barriers.
Now the movie is over, I'm only herr typing this to you because my date is sending an important email from her blackberry that absolutely needs to get out before dinner. If there's one thing I dont miss about my old job...But this is exactly the debate of the day. On the one hand, we've just finished watching a movie that forced us to remember that in these days of modernity, we've forgotten how to listen. Only the innocent young mind, untarnished by modern values morals and logic could hear the simple plea of his wonderful dying old grandfather. It's true that in this age of noise, this age of more information and less words, we forget how to truly listen. We're too busy for listening. But maybe it's not so bad. I've lost nothing of my friendship with my date in the last 15 minutes; she is advancing her career and me my own quest. Sitting here shoulder to shoulder, phones in hand, she's discussing what she deems important and I the same. And by the looks.of it, she seems to be done, so perhaps now we'll compare notes the old fashioned way, verbally across a table of fried tofu and vietnamese pho. How wonderfully analog.
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