technology and tragedy

Even assuming that reincarnation occurs fairly regularly, it is highly unlikely that we will ever meet someone we knew in a former life. What with the constant turnover in cell phone numbers, however, it's fairly commonplace to find someone who knew your phone number in one of its previous incarnations, or at least thought they did. This happens to me about once a week, usually in the form of a call from a confused Spanish-speaking person, since I have a Miami area code.

This Tuesday it was a man calling from Honduras, trying to reach his father. Usually people just hang up after "No hablo espanol," but in this case he called me back twice, asked who I was. Things were getting emotional, even though the entire conversation was conducted in my dreadful attempts at Spanish and his equally limited English. There was definitely an aspect of "who are you, and where have you taken my padre?" I couldn't seem to answer this question in either language, yet I couldn't help feeling a human sympathy that kept me from hanging up the phone (I was also on night minutes, so it wasn't costing me anything). This man had something critically important to tell his father, and I had no way of helping him. Finally I did just have to say "lo siento, buena suerte, adios."

It made me realize how modern technology seems to shield us from human tragedy - armed with Google, it's much harder to lose track of your friends and family members. We haven't invented the search engine yet, though, which can permanently eradicate loss, disconnection, alienation. Sometimes it is even more painful to know that the ones you've lost are so readily findable - we have so many tools to reach each other by cell phone or e-mail, but we still struggle to reach eachother's hearts.