Last night I went to the grocery store to cash in my overgrown collection of coins. I kept the quarters, but 26 dimes, 29 nickels, and 176 pennies went into the Coinstar machine at my nearby Albertson's and I put it on an Amazon gift card to avoid the 9% service charge.
Afterwards, I sauntered around the store because it was almost after 11 p.m. and I had nowhere to go. I found an attractive deal on oven pizzas, so I bought a couple. The cashier was someone who I had seen at that store for seemingly as long as I have lived in Scottsdale, so I asked when she started working there. She said 13 years, so I explained mentioned how long I had been coming to the store, and then she saw my Coinstar slip and asked if I needed to cash it. I said it was going to Amazon, and she noted that she never knew there was that option on the machine, but her next statements were what caught me off-guard due to the genuine sincerity: "What is Amazon? I have heard of it, but I've never known exactly."
It was March 8, 2013, and I was interacting with a woman who had dutifully done the same job for the past 13 years at the same branch, and she was unsure what Amazon.com was.
It was a (timely) reminder of how vastly different people can live within the same realm of existence. The Internet connects us but it has not changed human nature: we will do as we've always done. We will make our choices and our mistakes and end up living the same basic lives as our ancestors. Same amount of smiles, same amount of laughs, same amount of tears, same amount of troubles, same amount of joy, same amount of fear; just different causes for each.
To take the long way into make my point, I did not watch the entire Super Bowl this year, although I saw parts of it. One commercial that seemed to capture most people's praise (at least in my circles, including my preferred media outlets) was the Budweiser ad called "Brotherhood" with a Clydesdale and its owner. It has had outstanding praises, including 2.5 million views on YouTube where I read through the past week of comments. Not one person acknowledged that the commercial was a remake of "Christian The Lion," a real moment with its own online following about two Englishmen and their pet lion who greeted them with a loving embrace after a year of living in a refuge in Africa.
In reality, the Internet is so vast that it leaves a huge disconnect among people. Even the closest friends can hardly share everything they enjoy online. Albeit, it binds us so that most everyone would know what Amazon.com is nowadays.
Life is what you make of it. Not in the remedial "actions have consequences" way, although that is where most people seem to stop, but it applies equally strong within a broader spectrum. Every time I hear someone say, "I believe everything happens for a reason," my first thought is always, "Neat, I believe in cause & effect as well!" Often those reasons the people are so blindly at a loss to find are directly linked to the actions of their past. Not to discredit God's influence, in which I wholly believe, but it seems as though a lot of what others attribute to God's greater plans are consequences from their own mistakes and carelessness that they are unable to accept. In those occasions, I sense God sees the struggle and shrugs and thinks "hopefully, he/she will use this opportunity to walk closer with me now," when it feels to them as though God is sleeping.
It reminds me of the (not-nearly-repeated-enough) final words on the misled Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien: "I hate cynicism – it's my least favorite quality, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen!"
