Brave New World

I'm not going to talk about the novel by Aldous Huxley, but my foray into the brave new world of iPods.

See, I got an iPod for Christmas. It's not a new iPod but a "re-gift". Every year my family tries to find things that we have, but don't use, and "re-gift" this item to someone who can use it.

This is actually a good thing because the "re-gifter" can reduce clutter and make the "re-gifties" Christmas fantastic. This year, my dad "re-gifted" me an iPod. He's had it for a few years and just never used it. My dad is an audiophile (he's really into sounds) and the iPod just doesn't reproduce sound quality like his spectacular stereo system. Hell, if I had his ballistic speakers, I wouldn't need an iPod either! :)

Now, I've never owned an iPod before and I'm excited to figure it all out. But it's a brave new world to me. I'm sure my nieces and nephews would have this thing wired in about 10 minutes--me? Oh, brother! It took me an hour just to figure out how to hook the darn thing up and then getting songs on to it? Criminey! I'm so lost and the instruction manual isn't much help. Apparently, I'm supposed to lay my hand upon the manual and understand by some kind of magical osmosis. I tried that and it didn't work either.

What I figured out was I just have try things and when they don't work, try something else. As I was playing with my nifty new toy I decided the iPod was metaphoric--just as I try things in life and they don't work, I can try something else.

Nothing is written in stone. I can switch gears because I have nothing to lose. I could put all kinds of junk onto the iPod and if it didn't work out, I could just delete everything and start over. I can do the same thing with my writing. I've written pages and pages and then decided I didn't like them, deleted them, and started over.

So as I spent Christmas morning playing with my iPod I took stock of my life and the things that I do and realized nothing is cast in "forever" unless I allow it to be so. If I don't like my weight, I can change it. If I don't like how much TV I watch, I can change it. Oddly, I found learning about this handy-dandy device immensely empowering--I can change my whole life if only I chose to do so.

This segues nicely into my resolutions for the New Year. I would like to change a few things in my life and after programming and re-programming my iPod, I now know that I can change anything if I want to. The trick is that I have to want to change it and then take the time to learn how to change it.

How about you? Is there something in your life you would like to re-program this year?