Yesterday was travel day and was primarily spent in airports and on airplanes. I had my knitting, the first sleeve for Aiko, and my book The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman.
Here is the first sleeve, so far, extending about 1 1/2 inches above the elbow:
As I would get tired of knitting, and k2, p2 rib can be kind of mind numbing at times, I would turn to my book, which is quite interesting and I would get all wrapped up in reading, but then I would find that I needed to put the book down and let my mind do a little purling of its own, so I would pick up the needles again and knit and purl, and contemplate the ways in which the world is changing and what it all might mean.
In many ways the book is nothing new except that the world has moved ahead, while I too, to quote Mr. Friedman, was sleeping; kind of embarrassing for a retired programmer and engineer. While I was caught up in all the many things that life has been throwing my way the last few years, the world has made a giant leap forward. Of course I was getting a glimmer of this as I have been recently exploring the web more and looking at blogs and websites and all the wonderful tools and languages out there, thinking I need to play with XML and so many new things.
Friedman is causing me to think about things in different ways and this is quite thrilling. He is also bringing up many worries that have been floating around the back of my mind for some years. Even when I was in grad school in the late 80's, engineering and math undergraduates were dropping off, and although the number of students pursuing advanced degrees did not peak until the early 90's, even when I was in school far more of those students were immigrants or children of immigrants than american-bred. This flatter, open communication world will have totally different boundaries and this presents great opportunities, but I wonder if enough Americans will be able to grab hold and rise to the top. If Friedman is right, the new world will be one in which we will constantly have to be learning and improving and striving to be the best.
As my darling husband says, it is the ones with a "fire in their belly" that will be the winners. I worry that the ones that don't have the knowledge and the education and the ambition will fall by the wayside unless we as a society make great changes to see that this does not happen. The answer may not be in protecting low level manufacturing jobs because those are not the jobs of the future or of success, but we have a long way to go before we can prepare large sections of our populations to be the innovators and to find the niche where they too can succeed in a world that changing much too fast.
So all these thoughts kept me knitting. As I knit it struck me with no little irony that knitting is a low level job that can really be done by anyone who practices, or by a machine even. Yet even though I love technology, I love the act of creating something that knitting provides. As we become efficient and more effective, and in many ways removed from the personal, some part of us may yearn for some basic human handicraft, something that puts us more in touch with at least a dream of simpler times. As we all know, simpler times weren't really simpler and life was much harder. We have a long way to go to decide what is valuable in this life and what is not, and we have a lot of work to do to insure that a valuable life is open to everyone.
One nice thing about coming home though is that spring is really here. When I left the ground was still mostly bare and not many flowers were out. Now everything is green and flowers are blooming everywhere, including these lovely primulas:
Doesn't that inspire a happy thought? Even out of barren dirt, something wonderful always blooms.
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