The universe in the palm of your hand
eddy explains the single point of failure
I left my Samsung phone on the table at home when I packed eddy to go to church.
The church is the road on the Cradle loop.
Well over halfway there, is when I suddenly realised the phone was missing.
Bliksem!
I told eddy. You know how screwed we are when we don't have a phone. Everything is now driven by that little rectangular piece of technology. Banking, communication, navigation, authentication, photographs, appointments, even proving that you are who you say you are.
Ja, said eddy. Single point of failure.
The phones disappear & everyone will be walking around like zombies.
Hell, eddy, you make me feel like I'll be kaalgat on the ride today without my Samsung.
The breeze was up & I was concentrating hard on slipstreaming behind the cyclists in front of me. There was no time for meditation or philosophical discussions. Not when you're trying to conserve energy & stay tucked in behind someone's rear wheel.
But the thought stuck.
As I was driving back after the ride had finished, I started thinking about my parents & their generation. How many of them, and their acquaintances, had already kicked the bucket. Having only had that spawn of Satan in their hands only at the end of their stint on Earth.
Except for Oom Etienne Bruyns.
He was still alive & kicking in Ballito.
When I got home, I decided to give him a call via the Devil’s tongue.
He answered. Still alive, he confirmed, although he'd had all his knees & hips replaced. He still managed the occasional round of golf, which he rather wonderfully described as moer en soek.
We had a good chat about the old days.
About Ouma Joey & Oupa JT. Joey was his godmother. About how my mom's boet had artificially inseminated one million cows.
Phew!
That's a lot of cows.
He asked about my sister. I told him how worked up she'd become about retiring that she eventually ended up in hospital with diabetic shock.
Work is not worth that, we agreed.
Poor & alive is better than dead & rich.
I was going to tell him about eddy & how a bicycle has absolutely no concept of wealth or money. It doesn't care about your bank balance, your job title or how many properties you own.
It only cares whether you can keep turning the pedals.
But I thought the Oom might think I'm bossies.
He had already asked me how to spell psychosomatic when I explained that this was what I thought had contributed to Lyn's hospital stay.
After the call, I unloaded eddy & put him on his stand in the bedroom.
I had something to ask him.
eddy, what drives us humanoids to experience these psychosomatic issues that eventually manifest themselves physically?
Is it a modern thing? Or have we always been like this? Is it our sentience? Our ability to think about tomorrow, worry about yesterday & somehow make ourselves miserable in the present?
We have evolved to become incredibly sophisticated. We can put people on the moon, communicate across the planet in milliseconds & carry the universe's information in our pockets.
Yet we can also worry ourselves sick about a retirement date, a bank balance, a meeting, a missed call or something that hasn't even happened.
Perhaps that's the irony of being human.
We have minds capable of imagining almost anything, including our own demise. And sometimes the body gets caught up in the imagination.
Our brains don't always distinguish neatly between a physical threat & a perceived one. Prolonged stress can affect hormones, sleep, blood pressure, digestion, immunity & all sorts of other bodily functions. The mind and body are not independent. They're are like the branches & roots of a tree. The tree of Life. Maybe that is why all the hippies have it as a tattoo?
And perhaps we've simply become very good at creating threats where none exist.
I looked at eddy.
He had no comment about my retirement plans, no concerns about the economy, no outstanding invoices & absolutely no interest in whether I had remembered my Samsung or what tattoo I was going to burn onto my ass.
He just stood there.
“Mastelek, you humanoids have an extraordinary ability to suffer twice. First, you imagine something terrible happening. Then you suffer when it happens. Sometimes it never happens at all.
“You spend so much time worrying about keeping everything together that you forget to actually live.
“A bicycle doesn't worry about the hill ahead. It doesn't worry about the hill behind. It just deals with the road underneath its wheels.
“And one more thing, boet.
“Your phone might be a single point of failure, but your head is a whole gemors of unnecessary problems.
“Perhaps you should leave that Samsung at home more often.”
Bliksem.
I think eddy might be onto something.