Contact the living - My reaction to #untalented-adjustments

I was very moved by the “untalented adjustments” initiative in steemit. Not only by the individual stories (and I admit that I’ve only read a few), but also by scrolling down the feed and looking at the variety of faces. It is so wonderful to see how people from all around the world start to realize that it pays, to just be yourself. It reminded me of something that I wrote several years ago in my Hebrew blog.

So the text below is almost a word by word translation of that article. It is called, “Contact the living”, and if you are humming Robbie Williams now, that’s good.

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“The world is your exercise book”, the writer Richard Bach wrote in one of his books, “the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.”

The morning would begin with the pleasant sound of the morning newspaper landing outside the door of my room. My mother would put it there after she had finished reading it with the morning coffee and before she went out for her daily bike ride. It was about six-thirty. I would get up, take the newspaper, and try to find a convenient way to read the thin A3 pages without getting out of bed. The perfect alarm clock.

The old world. A world of typewriters, film cameras and huge printing machines. A world of one-to-many communication, based on to the considerations of the editing board. A world that is now quickly disappearing. Now my morning routine is similar and different. I still read the news every morning, but mostly on Flipboard, in a world of many-to-many communication. Or so it seems.

Perhaps it is only seemingly so because there is not really such a thing as many-to-many communication.

Only seemingly so because it is true that everyone have a camera and a computer keyboard and everyone share, express an opinion, support or protest, try to impact and influence. But in fact, not everyone know how to take pictures, and not everyone know how to write. The question arises, where is the place for talent? What distinguishes the good from the bad, especially when no one pays for it anymore?

Hard questions. People tell me, "You write well, maybe you should do something with it." Maybe. but what? In the old world I could have been a trumpet or loudspeaker, but now?

Now it turns out that there are no “many to many”. There are many "few to few". Maybe we're going back to Plato's academy? The polemics of the sages of the Mishnah? To the time when human stories were created in intimate gatherings around the bonfire? Not the big "Campfire" but a lot of little flares with stories that go round with the copper made coffee pot? "Mass intimacy", "Contact the living", listen, share, help, write it down .

And like so much of what's happening now, no one knows exactly how it is going end. There is no solution to anything except to deal so humanly with the inexplicable wonder, the search for moral meaning and goodness, the realization that my meaning of life is in the hands of others and of course, vice versa - and somewhere in the cosmic order, this is what is called happiness.