Time to smell the roses....

I remember writing my first 'novel' when I was around 14 or 15 years old. I used to sit in the dining room with  an old tyepwriter which belonged to my mother, armed with a sheet of carbon copy paper, and correcting fluid.  It was a slow process.  You had to stop and pause at the end of each page to put in a new sheet of paper.  If you made a mistake it was out with the correcting fluid, wait for it to dry, retype the letter.  There was a lot of stopping and starting in those days.  Plenty of time to muse and think.  Typing was slow - the keys were heavy and if you tried to rush the process two could get tangled together.  There was no spell or grammer checker, no opportunity to repaginate at the end.  It had to be right.  Preferably first time.

Less than a decade on I had graduated, started work and had a PC. The internet was deadly slow, first there was the dial up, long wait, finally you could look at web pages.  But there wasn't that much to look at.  Search engines were clumsy and slow, and you would resort to using several different ones even for simple searches.  And being in the UK, the chances of finding a local business online were practically zero.  The USA had discovered the internet, but we were sadly lagging behind.

So what's my point?  Mainly that life was just slower. We were forced to deliberate more, take our time.  Think.   And now? The world is at our fingertips. We can research more or less anything without leaving our seats, we can comment on other people (nicely or not) in anonymity, we can interact with people we haven't met and aren't likely to. We can post our opinions out to the world at the press of a button.  Without pausing to think.

Better or worse?  The world is more accessible, our experiences are broader, we can achieve so much more in a single day.  But sometimes maybe we need to slow down.  Just a bit. To ponder.  Take time to smell the roses.