Seek And Ye Shall Find
Call up that Google search engine bar and pause awhile before you type anything in. Do you realize that whatever it is you’re looking for, you are more or less certain that you will find it? In that blank white space, in that little bar waiting to be filled, is that unwritten promise. The promise that ‘ye shall find’.
Sometimes, it’s instant – the finding, I mean. Sometimes it takes a while longer and sometimes it might seem to take forever….which in the virtual world is usually a couple of hours….max! Very rarely is there something that you can find nothing about. If that’s the case, it’s possible that maybe you’re not searching right. So type in those permutations and combinations and watch page after page of results emerge……..some of them, granted, will be utterly useless but if you pan them, you’ll find that little nugget hidden away somewhere. And you’ll want to shout ‘Eureka!’ Trust me, the great Google Rush is way better than the Gold Rush could ever have been!
My Patch Of Green
When I was so much younger than I am today, I read a book that made such a great impression on me. It was Trevanian’s Shibumi. The central character was perhaps a bit too good to be true but when you’re young and idealistic, characters like him and John Galt one tended to put on a pedestal and worship. The strange bit that stuck with me through all the years was the patch of green he retreated to in his mind whenever he wanted to shut the world out. It was his own special watering hole, his own inner sustenance, his own special space. No-one, but no-one could enter and no-one could take it away from him. Something even more strange, it was a triangular patch of green – for me in my mind’s eye, it was a perfect equilateral triangle.
I guess why it made such an impression on me was because it hit home. That little space inside was so important to me too. And was it because of Shibumi that it was always green? I guess so. The strange thing is that Google has always been green for me as well. Was it because somehow I see it as my escape, my space, a place where I can be myself, where I can roam freely but with my identity intact….no masks, no must-dos or have-tos? Has it in some way become my window to another dimension and yet somehow also to the world within? I don’t profess to have the answers. All I know is that now, I don’t need to lie back and retreat inwards to find that special space that invigorates me. I do that too….but I also have a search engine that gets me there. It’s my second road to refreshment for the mind.
Too busy Googling to write!
They say when you’re too busy doing it, you don’t have time to talk about it! That’s what I’ve been up to and it shows…..there have been no posts for quite a while. It’s just been a busy time with lots of work and therefore, a lot of googling. And as long as I’m googling, I’m on a high! Like I said before, it’s that magic key, knowing that whatever kind of information you’re looking for, it’s out there somewhere. And if you don’t find it, it’s because you’re not searching properly. There’s a method in the way to search too. You do it well and bingo – you get just what you want. For example, I had to do a number of articles on credit scores and an equal number on travel sites in Spain. It’s unbelievable how much information I unearthed. There’s just one problem here though. Sometimes you get so fascinated by what you find out there, you tend to meander, to go one step further, following that colourful butterfly trail of snippets of information and you suddenly wake up and realize that your work’s waiting and the deadlines won’t. The floating away feeling’s so fantastic. It’s the coming back to earth feeling that’s hard!