Hearth

Technology is an amazing thing. It allows mankind to achieve marvelous heights. It creates change, happiness, ingenuity, convenience, shortcuts. But amongst all of these wonders, you find that it also has the power to create separation.

A couple days ago, my house experienced a blackout that also hit Chinatown and parts of First Hill.
It hit me during a car ride home from tennis. At first I dismissed it as just being dark, but after hitting two dysfunctional streetlights in a row, fear crept under my skin. It was the fear that I would be helpless at home, stuck without electricity.
Arriving home, however; it was a different story. My mom and dad waited at the front door for me, expecting me to come home, a rarity in these days for just one of them, a near impossibility for two. As I had expected, my mom and dad had broken out the candles and flashlights. My mom gave me a flashlight on my way through the door.
It was the flashlight that wound up and while laborious, it provided a strange feeling of content when I wound that flashlight to make it work. It was something strangely out of place in a world of technology. In a world where windows rolled down at the push of a button, cranking out light by using sheer physical effort was something refreshingly new and almost... fun.
It was something completely different that inspired me to think back on that day though. It was the feeling of family; the feeling of closeness which could only be found during a blackout.

After walking through the doors and taking off my shoes, I started my "just-got-home" rituals to settle down. This time though, it was different .It was almost a strange feeling when my mom and dad started striking up conversations with me, with a worried tone but with a casual inflection. I rarely get to talk to my parents, and it's ironic that it was during this time of complete darkness and cold that I felt a warm feeling inside. It was nice being able to talk to my parents. Find out the who's and what's of each others lives. I felt like I could almost live in the darkness forever if I could just hold on to these feelings forever.
But with time came reality. The lights came back on within the hour and the T.V. turned on, the computer woke up, and the stove started humming. Technology was back, and so followed my feelings of conformed, expected loneliness.


To this day, I still think it's strange that even though I had no direction, I loved the journey I was going on.
And that even though the blind can't lead the blind, they can still hold each others' hands and inevitably

smile,
at the warmth.

Warmth