Beginner's Minding (as we Untether)

A few days ago I was sitting in the window of Cafe Vita, watching as pools of falling rain collected in the table outside.

I felt disconnected, because I was. The Internet had been off for nearly a month. I'd untethered from Twitter, a service that I'd come to rely on that had (imo) begun to unravel. In February, I blank-slated my blog. Here I was, sitting in a coffee shop, so completely alone -- untethered completely in the isolation of a digital sabbatical.

Have you ever had a moment when you thought you'd figured out everything, only to see that moment slip away? Well, July made me realize that the moment had slipped away. It's impossible to figure things out in a world that's constantly changing.

I have no idea what works anymore.

I'm a beginner. As I stumble through the new code on my blog, it feels like the first time.

As I scroll with two fingers on the new Mac OS through the foreign and yet familiar windows of Google+, I'm starting to see that the next evolution of the Internet is here -- and everything I created before (that wasn't timeless) is quickly slipping into obsolesce.

The opposite of untethering is gripping.

Gripping is the feeling when a car nearly hits us, and our entire body tenses up in a moment of reflexiveness.

It doesn't matter that we had no control over whether the car killed us or not. It's tons of steel, we're just human -- but we grip all the same.

As something starts to slip away, we grip it. We hold on tight in an attempt to make everything stay the same.

But the reality is that nothing stays the same, ever. The universe is constantly changing, and we're just a small part of that whole. We're orbiting each other for a brief second in the history of everything. In that brief second, we're gripping ourselves to everything that we never want to let go of, but will eventually have to.

I'd like to meet you, if you still read this blog.

What I'd like to hear?

Introduce yourself. Where are you living now? What are you working on?
What was the last thing you untethered from?
What was the last thing you gripped onto even though it was slipping away?