Sadness in the Cyber-Age

Though our means of communication and information-gathering have exceeded the futuristic visions we may have harbored just a few decades earlier, the human heart has not evolved beyond its primitive form.

Which is why it is disconcerting to experience intense sadness and pain at a time where it seems that we should have figured out the technology to avoid doing so.

I suppose the technology does exist, in the form of emotion-blocking medications...or even street drugs, if one so wishes.

The technology is there in the bottle of booze or in escapist pursuits.

I could go that route now. I have gone there before.

For now, I prefer proactive endeavors, like exercise and listening to good music. A skeptic about prayer in my adult life, I even talk to God in my heart of hearts, returning to a ritual of my childhood. Are you there God? It's me. I lift my eyes to the mountains. Where will my help come?

I try even to solve the problem, try to gather up the shards of the vessel that has been shattered, thinking that just enough care and compassion will allow me to glue the brokenness together.

What I am blindsided by is the discovery that the vessel is only one of several items that have been broken.

What I am taken aback by is the bracing reality that there is no reality when it comes to bruised hearts.

And what bruises my own heart is the revelation that underlying the bedrock of my own reality is a fault line, entirely man-made.