Did you miss me?

I’ve come to realize how very difficult it is to “get away” these days. Thanks to technology, one can be connected to one’s ordinary life – friends, family, news, business, hobbies – wherever you are. It doesn’t matter if you pack up on the spur of the moment or plan a trip a gazillion miles away. Odds are, you’re either going to have cell phone reception – and with so many people giving up their landlines and using cell phones as their primary telephone number that people aren’t going to think twice about calling you on the cellular number wherever you happen to be. Most of us have plans that are no longer limited by regional constraints but are instead based on the number of minutes we use in a given month, at a given time of day.

In addition to cellular phones, the proliferation of laptops and wifi has made it easy to know what anyone is doing at any time of day. We trade pictures, quips, notes, tragedies, and achievements at an unprecedented rate, regardless of where or when we are.

Where it was once the great impasse, geography has become irrelevant to communication.

Thing is, it was once possible to miss someone. They would go on a business trip, take a weekend vacation, and we would be aware of their absence from our daily lives, if only for a short time. We would wonder what – and how – they were doing and hoped they returned safely to us. These days, such a thing is a rarity. Thanks to technology, despite a person’s physical absence, we can reach out and touch them, find out about their adventures, what new things they’ve learned, what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong, all before their trip is even finished. When they do return to us, it is without the profound sense of relief that they are back, relatively unchanged for their time away. When they do return, there are no stories to tell, no experiences to share; all that’s to be done is the laundry.

Such is true of the trip I took over Memorial Day weekend. On Friday night, as I boarded the train to take me to Joliet, I called the friend who was to meet me at the station and let him know the train was leaving on time. There were reassurances that if something should happen to slow the train between my departure and arrival, I would call him en route. He would have no surprises about whether I was arriving on time or not.

Before I left, a dear friend died. My sempai. Knowing I would want to go to his funeral visitation, I considered canceling my trip, but I also knew that given his military status, the holiday weekend, etc., it was unlikely to be held before my scheduled return. So, I went on my trip. While I was gone, I checked the online obituaries and had my mother check the print obituaries in the paper at home. I talked on my ever-lovin’ cell phone to both my mother and to my sensei about plans for attending the funeral. Even though I was not home, my availability status had not changed. I was still there.

That has become one of the complaints of business men. No matter where they are, they’re working. Even when traveling, in a busy airport, aboard a plane, they’re on. Making deals, preparing reports, getting things done. We’ve become a nation of Type A personalities. People who don’t know how to take the day off, to kick back, to relax. To just be. It’s an art we need to relearn. We need to rediscover how to get away. We need to be missed, even before we are dead.