Most technology baffles me. It’s to me what Russia was to Churchill – a mystery inside an enigma inside a riddle.
I think my deficiency is genetic. If certain skills are partly genetic – making a cello weep, spanking a fastball deep into outfield, dancing high on a tight rope – then, I guess, so is technical proficiency. The ability to manipulate all the secret esoteric intricacies and mysteries of iPads and smart phones must be only half acquired. The other half – the genetic part – we either have or lack.
I lack it. I’m deficient in techno genes.
We just acquired our first flat screen TV. It’s a thing of austere beauty. The only problem is neither my wife nor I can figure out how to make it work. It turns on, but the channel program is all black emptiness. We read the instructions carefully. We fiddle the buttons endlessly. We wave, like a magic wand, the control stick at the screen, trying to pull a bunny from a hat. Or just trying to get a signal.
Nothing happens.
I’d chalk it up to some glitch in the TV, except for two things: my son had it working before he left town; and yesterday.
Yesterday, I tried for the second time in two days to engage two friends, both far away, in a conference call. Both times I got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of technology. Other people find these things simple, intuitive, child’s work. Me? I find them enigmatic, elusive, bedeviling. It’s like threading a needle with oven mitts.
But here is my consolation: the stuff of the heart requires no technical skill. To love deeply, to listen attentively, to pray earnestly, to give generously, to extend grace – all take skill, and work, and resolve, and discipline, just none of it of a technical order.
My son is coming back later today. He has the genes for technology (don’t ask me how). So hopefully he’ll do his thing, and soon the Great Portal will open. He’ll explain it to me, but likely I’ll forget. And my next clash with technology, I know, is only a matter of time.
But I’m thankful that, though sometimes it takes technology to talk with a friend, it takes none to be one. And we all got the genes for that.