The Great Disconnect

We're approaching a full moon and I get pensive. The great orb in the night sky, hanging etherially, bearing messages of signs and seasons, gently beckoning the ocean to itself, is just an excuse for me to do more thinking than usual.  Its pale light sneaks into my room at night and so I awaken and the breath of the little one comes shallow from the bedroom down the hallway.  I don't toss, I don't turn, I don't exhale forcefully to protest against a sleepless night. I welcome this rare moment of solitude in this full house. It's not quiet even at night, beds creak, dogs saunter to the porcelain throne for a drink, crickets chirp below my window. Yet, quieter is restful, more than dead stillness.

I slide into my thoughts and follow a path within them that I don't particularly relish, but thoughts are cathartic in that sense.  Think it out and wrestle with it to make sense of this wacky journey of life.
I think of the great disconnect tonight, and how I feel it strongly these days.  How in the world are generations supposed to connect?

Having stood for the past two months on the periphery of a group of people ten to twenty years my junior, the distance shrieked at me, the grain grated my very soul as I went against it and even small talk was labored and painful.  And it daunts this foreign introvert with already these two major obstacles to face daily, to get up in the morning and see that another looms closer and, seemingly at least, gargantuan out of the front door.

My heart wants to make a difference, but how? How do you make a difference in this barrage of social media that deconstructs relationships to their very core? How, when communication has been reduced to frantically tapping minuscule buttons on a phone?  People say things and we swallow them whole.  They hurl their passionate responses to current events into cyberspace careless of the fact that measured words would serve them better. The premise, "I don't usually..., but..." cannot hold in the consequences of verbalizing judgement, of any kind.  There is no slowing down as the retorts come fast and furious and so it goes in this cycle of "fast food" thinking.  Funny how we're all up in arms about McD's health hazards, while our engorged minds swell out of proportion.

We live a marginless life, gliding on top of it, never delving into the most basic forms of communication. The nourishing cultivation of healthy relationships, accompanied by the exchange of ideas that would cross the trenches we've dug in this society has been swept aside. We insist on  compartmentalizing life and the trenches creep ever closer to chasm size.  The well established trend of separating people by age in all institutionalized parts of life, including and especially church, exacerbates the disconnect between generations.  We're leery of each other.  I confess it, teenagers terrify me.  I have no idea how to connect with them, because simple talk seems to no longer have a place among human beings of recent vintage.  I've also found that often participation across the age line is by invitation only, and more often yet, the exuberant extrovert is welcomed in because of his or her vocal personality, while the unassuming, quiet types are relegated to the "nothing to offer" side of the fence.

The pitfall of this accepted status quo is that the lethal mix of pride and forceful opinions is branded as wisdom, values that transcend time are deemed negotiable and we dig our trenches deeper in the intoxicating race to being right.  Relationships become relics.

I long for community.  I am genuinely interested in learning about others, to somehow connect...but after two epic fails in trying to "adopt" a college student through our church, I wonder if my place is in some other corner of community.

There was a time, not even that long ago, when children didn't sit at the kids table.  They went shopping with their parents. They conversed with other adults of all walks of life in real life situations in the course of the day. Their day was not hyper scheduled and there was time to be bored and therefore employ that time in constructive or destructive ways with relative consequences, lessons learned either way. But, before I wax too romantic about "the old times" my eyelids get heavy and I drift off thinking that, as hard as it would be for a Gideon at heart like me, I would really like to walk up to some of those young types and talk to them. Really, we're not that different, we're all flesh and blood.  I'd take my toe and erase that line drawn in the sand between us.  I'd like to tell them that there is more behind the veneer of opinions, that pointing a finger at someone else's fast-held belief, has three fingers pointing back at their own, that really the unhealthy fumes created by the heated exchanges in a forum that is rife with low blows and cheap shots, can be dissipated by face to face interaction. A place where opinion is encased in flesh and that engenders relationship.  Disagreement and respect become inextricable because all of a sudden you see a person in front of you and not some avatar in a little square. And it's a lot harder to insult someone with whom you have a genuine relationship.  No matter how 3-D you perceive the image to be, a screen is flat and, ultimately, it does flatten a living breathing multifaceted interaction with others.

I adjust the pillow and exhale heavy, the thought has run its course, but it snags on the fear that I'd probably get my skirt caught trying to climb the fence that divides us.