Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Missing You

Recently there was some sort of major "cyber event" that happened where I work. This cyptic language used by the IT folks simply alludes to the fact that some person hacked our computers, did a bunch of bad stuff, and messed up our system. The event also caused them to turn off our internet for nearly two full weeks while the experts scrambled to figure out what happened. Of course this begs the question of the whole computer/network security system where I have to log into 75 different machines with different access protocols and change my password every 5 minutes. After all, its all about security. Clearly the hassle is worth it! (If you did not sense my tone here, I have used the literary techique known as "sarcasm" to express my frustration.) Anyway, as I point out above, and will say again here for emphasis, I did not have access to the internet for nearly two weeks. No ESPN, no CNN, no facebook, no blog, oh, and mostly importantly (in case the computer police from work are eavesdropping), no access to stuff I needed to do my job in an efficient and professional manner.

O.K., so I somehow managed to survive this lengthy outage. But I did learn something along the way. Sometimes we get so comfortable in our daily living, our unintentional drift from season to season in life, that we take what we have for granted. What used to excite us, arouse our passions, or pique our interests and full attention, can lose its vibrant intensity. Sometimes things diminish to the point that they can slip away as a ghost in a fog. Only then do we come to appreciate with full cognizance how much we relied on them, how much they were a part of us. Only in their absense do we fully understand the depth of our loss. Missing you.