Living in both worlds - Macbook or notebook?

I haven't written for more than a week - I have been working! Fran said to me - having the energy to blog is what shows I am not working - I have time to be me. And these last 2 works, the driving, the training, the writing - they have all made it less easy to be me.

But now I'm at a conference now and I'm listening to a dynamic speaker - and I'm multi-tasking.

John Davitt has just said "We need to live in both the technological and the traditional worlds" He was referring to the notebooks he has always kept and written in and which he has recently scanned using a passport scanner and now has years of scribblings immortalised in jpegs of the pages. He asked a rhetorical question – which is more important – holding up the notebook in one hand and the electronic device in the other. I couldn’t choose, although many techies chose the digital device and technophobes chose the notebook.

I like gadgets – I would love an iPad or Samsung tablet. I love having a data projector of my own. My Kindle is great. I love writing this blog and publishing it. I love my iPod. I want an iPhone!

But I also love the scrappy brown covered notebook that Fran gave me last year that says “God recycles – he made you from dust” on the front. It wasn’t scrappy when I got it, but it is now – and there are only 2 pages left to write on. I love the notebook Mbali gave me when she left St Nics – it’s a beautiful, embossed gold notebook, with a wonderful magnet clip. But it’s filled with the same sort of scribblings. I love the notebooks I have kept when we have travelled – the black and gold one Pete gave me before we went to New Zealand last time, full of notes and recipes and scribblings about what we have done, the other notebooks that I have kept since I first travelled overseas 38 years ago. I loved writing in the Marriage Encounter notebooks, writing loveletters to my beloved Pete. And the prayer diaries and bible study books I have kept over the years.

Writing by hand has something special about it – you can scribble or write neatly, you can decorate the pages with doodles while you think. You can flip back through the pages and find something you have written without having to “Search.” Notebooks are organic – they don’t need filing, they are messy (or mine are – I am sure some people keep neat notebooks, carefully dated.) You can put a flower between the pages, or keep a place with a ticket stub. Sometimes I even can smell the perfume I used that day when I open a particular page. They express so much about me as a person.

I wouldn’t get rid of my digital ways of recording. It is easier to read, easier to find, better filed, more “sorted.” I still want an iPad – or the new Dell that can be a tablet or a laptop with the flip of a screen. I want an Android phone that does all sorts of amazing things. I won’t throw out the new for the old, or the old for the new.

I’m comfortable living between the two worlds – slipping backwards and forwards as it suits me. I can live in the traditional and the digital ages and make them both work for me.