Do we move forward, backward or just slightly to the diagonal?

It began innocent enough a few months ago. I was trying to find a long lost friend who I believe still lives in New Hampshire. My daughter Jennifer suggested I try going on "Face book" and look. Only trouble was you had to join. We'll I'm a real private person who does not want to be in the spotlight. So I reluctantly was dragged kicking and screaming into this new age of connectivity. So into the digital age I dove! "Let's Reach Out and Touch Someone?"

I know in the past few months I've reached out and touched more people from my past than all the years in between. The nice thing about this is I can do this now when I find the time, between bus runs, and in the evening, now that I'm slowing my daily pursuits to a crawl compared to being on the go for 18/7 for the past 30+ years.

Our lives have many parts to them, almost as if they were individual lives of their own. We have our formative years of growing up and gaining our basic education, the college, military or early work years and then coasting until retirement.

Once we left High School the greatest change our worlds, in a sense, happened. Life after High school made us put the past behind us and gave us a chance to explore new directions. Sometimes, though, those new directions were at the great expense of those friends and acquaintances we had growing up.

The bonds of childhood and adolescence are deep yet under appreciated until well into adult hood. By that time a lot of distance has passed and the trail gets cold. Friends also have a way of taking new and different directions. And those paths can parallel, converge, cross or even be right there in plain sight without us knowing.

So now we enter the age of the computer and instant communication. Not saying the old Bell Telephone wasn't instant, I mean, poof, you're there. Marshall McLuhan and his global Village has really come to be. We can instantly reach out and touch someone seemingly worlds away. As an example, just think about dinner time, when that phone rings, and that familiar voice comes on the phone and says in a very thick accent: "Hello, my name is George, and I would like a moment of your time if you please?" "I have a wonderful opportunity I would like to share with you." Well you know just from his accent he ain't from around these parts, let alone his name being George!

For the most part I'm really noncommittal about all this instant juice running around. Kids tuned in and loosing sight of the world around them, people talking in the supermarket or some "clack, clack, clack, click click," sound from a person using their thumbs to communicate. Lost into a parallel dimension of neither sight nor sound, they've entered the "Text-it Zone!" Some day they will awake and find the world has passed them by.

So for me, the only positive thing I have seen from this instant communications age is that the cold trails of lost friends can be uncovered and found again. But this too is not without consequence. Imagine finding out your best friend from school married that "bitch you couldn't stand!" Or some old flame that would make a reunion seem strained at best. So now you have a dilemma. Go forward and connect or unplug and forget about it.

Unlike the face to face meeting we are able, through technology, to still isolate ourselves from those not so pleasant acquaintances of the past and escape without dreging up "Those Feelings." But with the rediscovery of dear friends of the past, we can now do face to face with digital TVs on computers. Oovoo, Skipe, just to name two.

So the race to be connected is really a double edged sword. We can relish in the light of re-found friends yet scorn the invasion of the privacy we once thought absolute. Do we move forward, backward or just slightly to the diagonal?