In a time where the digital age is not only upon us,
but is almost the standard, I still put a very large value on a hand shake and
phone call. I am not going to deny the
level of efficiency that we are able to sustain in our daily lives whether it
relates to work or our personal lives.
But as we all discuss how great it is to have texting, Facebook,
Twitter, and any other means of digital communication, we are forgetting how
important that “personal touch” is.
I want to use a personal experience in which I just had
a week ago to draw from. I have a friend,
Dan, whom I have gotten to know the past five years through playing different
leagues of pool with. Dan and I have
always talked about going on a bird hunt together but just never seemed to get
it done. I think most of the problem is
I am a city boy, from the city, and Dan is from outside of town, where I don’t
have the resources of good hunting ground.
Well I finally got a call a week after Thanksgiving asking me if I was a
decent shot with a .12 gauge. I said
yes, but that was with clay targets as I had not gotten out on a good bird hunt
for some time. He said don’t worry about
it, the hunt was an organized “Box Hunt” and he just wanted to get a fun team
together. So with jumping at the chance I
was also able to get fellow superintendent Nevin Kotera to go along, as we
needed one more person.
How this hunt progressed the rest of the day was far
better than I could have imagined. The
forth guy in our group whom I had never met happened to be a neighbor to
Nevin’s grandparents, small world! So we
had a dynamic group that just had a blast walking the fields that day. How do I know that? Well, when I forget my shotgun in my car and
the rest of the guys in the group are willing to trade off letting me hunt with
their gun while they walk empty handed. With
all that, we didn’t even see a bird for the first two hours. We didn’t even care because we were having
such a good time working the dogs on the hunt, telling stories, things you do
on a hunt together. And did I mention
that we walked around all-day in the rain?
The fields were so saturated from the 1.5 inches overnight that fell
there was no place for the rain that day to go but in my boots!
With the convening of the hunt we headed back to the
bar where all the teams in the “Box Hunt” gathered to count their scores and
hand in the birds. The best thing that I
almost forgot to mention was that the birds that were shot all got cleaned and
fried up for all us competitors to eat while sharing our stories from the day’s
fun. But the first thing that happened
when we got back to the bar and shed our wet gear where the handshakes
afterwards, the acknowledgment of the great afternoon, and how we all need to
get together and do it all over again sometime.
A lot of the activities that we do throughout our daily
lives we are able to have our cell phones on us, or we’re sitting around a
computer that’s on. We seem to always be
“plugged in”. Experiences like this past
weekend allow me to realize how important it is to pull the plug, get away from
the electronic life and enjoy what is in front of us. Instead of taking a digital picture of
everything, stop and try to make a memory out of it, in your mind. And when you’re really grateful for something
or someone, at least pick up the phone and call them if you can’t tell them in
person. I know that I personally try to
work with the same principles that governed that last hunt. Don’t forget that the sport of golf is the
same way! What’s the first thing you do
on the last green? That’s right, you shake hands…
