Satellite

I loved this idea that flew into my consciousness the moment I read it in an email from a friend I went to school with and who after a few decades I have been reacquainted.  She has always been a private person.  If I googled her name, the most I will find today is company registration information and for all those like Mark Zuckerberg, who says privacy is dead, has not met my friend.  There are people like her who get on with the stuff of life without any need to add extra digital bits of complications and extended life upon the cyber terrain.

The idea was a simple observation that my email had landed in her inbox from the satellite. I found that observation to be a rather profound remark, that there was this physical thing hovering in the sky that was actually an intermediary between thoughts that instantaneously were traveling across the Atlantic or at least to whatever critical path the satellite was on.

It brought into my consciousness that without that technological fangled thing floating in space above the Earth, we would have exercised more formal types of communication, her typing to my thinking.  My head is in my hands, her hands are on her head and in between a Satellite.

We each think in different ways but the flow connects us with visuals and with meaning and in all that we are mostly blissfully unaware of all that work that machine in the sky is doing.  If we do think about that flying saucer, it is in questioning its purpose rather than appreciating its flow.  The former is invasion of privacy, the latter is networked intelligence.   It only takes the arrival of a solar flare to make us realize how much that satellite is both an invasive part of our existence and capable of renewing our existence through instant communications.

I neither like the telephone or the smart phone that can face-time, but at the local family level, of course I enjoy seeing my grand-kids and kids when they are living at a distance - but otherwise my world is private but not a lock-box.  Here my thoughts are open but they are not naked.  That is my sensibility and even this thought here will soon be transmitted via the PUBLISH button and yet again it will ping against that satellite, which my friend today awakened my consciousness to, and that with just a flow of thought that mentioned the word "satellite".

The work we do may not always mirror the nature of our privacy or the way we naturally flow to life but our DNA informs our flow and my friend was not actually addressing the satellite per se, but referencing where I am past that satellite as I think these thoughts.  Yet her words triggered the image of the satellite and that in turn triggered the reality of living in modern times, recognizing that satellites are not singular but are abundant in space, but just like the neurons in our head, does it matter which neurons are firing and which satellite this observation will bounce off when this is sent, but it matters to know that this is life in the 21st Century. 

Life in the 21st Century brings this magic of instant connection but it also leaves us the choice of what we deem to be the identity of privacy.  This changes the nature of what privacy is but it does not change the underlying value of those whose thoughts and way of life value their own privacy greatly.  Our friend the satellite up there in that yonder sky is not programmed to recognize that - it simply does the work it is meant to do - it is we who are the thinkers of life.

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