I got home from helping with the Tour De Cure event here in North Carolina. When I got home, I stood and stared at the house, taking in all the details, as if not trusting what I saw.

I could’ve sworn that everything looked different. Everything was different. It had to be. And yet, I couldn’t quite identify any change in particular.

Later yesterday evening, I figured out that it wasn’t my home that had changed – it was me! I had departed Saturday morning to do something new – volunteer for a public service event. Because I had been willing to venture outside of my comfortable existence, the eyes I brought home saw everything in a different light.

Travel can do that for you, but you don’t need to travel. Just trust yourself enough to try something new and you will never be the same.

I just received an email from a developer in Denmark with whom I’m developing an application. It took minutes to type a reply to him, and seconds for it to travel halfway around the world.

I also converse regularly with a friend in Australia. In real-time. It seems like he is still living across town, yet he’s on the other side of the planet.

The Internet is still astonishing. At no time in history has the world been so interconnected, our planet so small. Everyday people have the miraculous power of instant communications from anywhere on the globe, to anywhere on the globe.

This is the world my daughter’s being born into. Her world will be one where national boundaries will be for convenience only, where any space can be traversed instantaneously. It will be exciting to see what kind of world gets built on this revolutionary foundation.

I finally got around to watching the special on the USS Liberty that ran on The History Channel last month.

I’d heard the story about the USS Liberty before. It was an American ship that got attacked by Israel during the Six-Day War. I had assumed that Israel would have come to its senses by now and admitted they bombed us.

I assumed wrong. The sight of Israel’s embassy spokesman insisting to this day that Israel had mistaken the Liberty for a combatant ship sent me into a seething rage.

Israel knew damn well what it was doing. It was attacking an unarmed ship in international waters. For all the blather about Israel and America being allies, Israel plays the U.S. like a fiddle. Israel gets what it wants from us and then thumbs its nose at us.

Israel will get no sympathy from me until sees fit to right this treacherous wrong.

So, the gloves are off in the Mideast. I’m only hoping that both sides wake up and figure out that violence isn’t the most effective way to influence people. Mayhem has gone on there so long that people are jaded by it.

Arafat isn’t in control of the Palestinians. Sharon isn’t in control of the Israelis. Well, Sharon could order the troops to stand down, but he probably feels pressured not to back down.

Politicians never want to be seen being bested. It’s important that a trusted outside party step in and mediate. Each side’s trust of the other has evaporated, as has each side’s trust in themselves to find a solution.

I was feeling in a contemplative mood today. Maybe it was the drenching the area got last night. Maybe it was the fun weekend spent with Kelly’s family. Maybe it was the gorgeous morning that greeted me. For whatever reason, it was a morning where I kept dreaming while I went about working.

I was starting to get into a programming task when a look out the window gave me a zen moment. I had a thought – a small knowing – that life is infinitely more connected than we humans allow ourselves to realize. The thought was one of some pity – that we deny ourselves out of a far more fufilling life. Another way of explaining it was that we have no appreciation of the worlds which are set in motion from our tiniest thought, act, or decision.

It was a thought I savored all day.