observing Remembrance Sunday
20 years ago I would have been standing outside Northaw Church in my Brownie uniform, grateful for once for the tea-cosy hats we had to wear and being amazed at how long 2 minutes can be.
Today I simply closed my laptop and the time seemed like no time at all. Perhaps that was simply the difference between observing the silence in the lounge and standing outside in November. Or perhaps I’m just more used to being still than I was at 9 years old, more able to value time to pause, to think.
I’ve just read Faster by James Gleick, a rather disappointing book on an interesting subject, the pressure we feel to live our lives at a faster and faster pace. I was struck that my act of remembrance was shutting the laptop, not just stopping reading and typing but actually shutting and putting it down, the latter act having only symbolic value. A lot of my life is spent with one computer or another. Computers are not yet vilified in the way that televisions are but what would I be paying attention to without them?