Near Death Experience

I want to share a mail which I received a couple of days ago from HRinIndia yahoo group, sent by Lt Col (retd) RVS Mani, titled Near Death Experience.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last night my mom and I were sitting in the living room, talking about life... In-between, we talked about the idea of living or dying.

I said to her: ' Mom, never let me live in a vegetative state, totally dependent on machines and liquids from a bottle. If you see me in that state I want you to disconnect all the contraptions that are keeping me alive, I'd much rather die'.

Then my mom got up from the sofa with this real look of admiration towards me...and proceeded to disconnect the TV, the Cable, the Dish, the DVD, the Computer, the Cell Phone, the IPod, and the Xbox, and then went to the fridge and threw away all my beer!!

...I ALMOST DIED!!!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What a thought!

The onslaught of technology has made us so dependent on these items that they indeed can be termed as our “life support systems”. oh! But don’t most of us want to surround ourselves with these wonderful machines and feel proud when people address us as Gadget freaks? Let’s step back and think, what have we lost in the process – socializing (family and friends), reading, enjoying quite moments with our loved ones, getting some exercise / activity and health. Even though we are at home, we are engrossed in watching TV or working on our laptops or plug in the earphones of our IPods. Yes, physically we are present but are we listening to our loved ones or giving them enough time. I don’t want to answer that... OK, I know, we have heard this a lot of times earlier and I would not want to talk about this again.

But, can we plug ourselves out from these to enjoy the small joys of life? Can we enjoy the surroundings (oh! Not the busy neighbourhood roads or the honking and smoking vehicles or the door next to our apartment, but the beautifully made parks) and spend some quite time with our friends and family, actually spend time listening and talking about our day, laugh loud for some PJ’s or have dinner together. I can go on but I want to leave you all with this thought until next time and am going to shut down my system and off to watch what’s in store for Tom today? :)

I am trying..