On the other hand

There’s so much political crud and negativity on my social media feeds lately I’m considering hiding some people until after the elections. My project at work seems to never end–and never get anywhere. On the other hand, life is very much worth living, and I’d be a fool not to recognize that a bad day in my life would be the best day ever in some other people’s lives. Just starting the day with a full stomach would be enough to qualify as a great day.

I live over twenty miles from my job, and I can get there in about half an hour. It’s not a job where my family has to worry about whether I’ll come home at night. The riskiest part of my job is that I’ll get fat, or carpal tunnel.  It pays enough that we don’t have to worry about whether we’ll be able to cover necessities each month.

We have a wealth of knowledge and entertainment–all for free–within walking distance of our home, or a six minute drive by car. We have access to more books on any one single subject than many people in parts of the world see in their entire lifetime. All three of our children’s schools are within walking distance.

I have the ability to make and communicate with friends all around the world, and through that technology I was able to meet and marry a wonderful woman from a country I’d never been to. When we first married it would have cost a fortune to call her parents on the other side of the world. Today they can talk as long as they want for free.

When I first started writing in my teenage years I had to use a typewriter, manually formatting each page as I went, and correcting any mistakes with essentially a little bottle of paint. I could only write at home because the typewriter weighed twenty pounds at least, and was as big as a small microwave–which didn’t even exist then. Now I write on a device that formats for me, tells me when I misspell words, takes corrections with almost no effort, weighs less than a single volume of an encyclopedia (which few even use anymore), and is only slightly bigger than a coffee-table book.

This blog post will be made public as soon as I click a single button, and anyone in the world will be able to see it immediately. Such instant, widespread communication was the stuff of science fiction when I was young. Today it’s taken for granted.

It really is an incredible world, and I’m fortunate to have so much of what it has to offer right at my fingertips.