People my age and younger tend to take technology for granted. This was never made so clear to me as it was this past weekend when I witnessed a simple piece of technology affect someone in a way I never expected.

Leaving out details and such, I witnessed an elderly woman receive a digital picture frame as a Christmas gift. The people giving it to her took some time to pre-load about 50 pictures of various family members and such. As they plugged the frame in to show her how it works, the pictures began to play in a slideshow and she was, literally, moved to tears by it. This is the same technology that I scoffed at, so many times, as I put a number of different models out while at work. It just didn’t seem that amazing to me, yet, here was a woman crying because of how amazing this all seemed to her and how happy she was to be able to see so much family history right there on one little screen. It really blew my mind.

I guess that I sometimes forget to step back and really look at things from different viewpoints. It’s difficult to do so, but a moment like this really opened my eyes to how I need to appreciate the simpler things in life a little more often.