And now for something completely different…

Confession: I am a gadget whore.

Lady refers to my iPad and MacBook as my fifth and sixth children. I think I have had a new cell phone every year since, well, they began making cell phones.

I bought a Kindle. Then I bought one of the first iPads, but then I sold it and went back to the Kindle. Then I sold that in order to get a 7″ Android tablet. Then a 5″ Android tablet, specifically for reading. Then another Kindle. Then another iPad.

I’m pining over the Kindle Paperwhite right now. Dear God in Heaven, that thing looks sweet.

It’s not that I’m not a serial gadget purchaser who’s trying to make himself feel better. Truly. I’m not the guy who buys gadgets because it’s some sort of retail therapy. That’s not it at all.

It’s that I’m trying to find the perfect one. I’m trying to find the right gadget so that I don’t have to go looking for the right gadget any more.

I’m tired of looking. I’m tired of this quest for the holy grail of electronics. I like to have gadgets that work the way I want them to work and for all the things I need them to work for.

I got rid of the Kindle because I thought I could do my reading on the iPad. I was right, of course, but it wasn’t the dreamy experience I thought it was going to be. Then I got rid of the iPad because, at the time, it wasn’t the content creation thing that I needed.

I tweeted about it one time, asking what the hell my problem was, and a friend of mine (who knows me well) responded, “Your problem is that you’re a purist. You want the right thing for the right job and nothing less will do.”

Yep. That sounds about right.

This has been a problem for me my whole life. I say “problem,” but sometimes it’s a bit of a blessing. It comes in handy being the guy in the room that can cut through clutter and hype and get right to the heart of the matter. But it is a problem, in that I am never satisfied. I am never content. I am never completely sure that I am doing the right thing or have the right tool or am enacting the right plan. And so, I am always on a quest.

But I’ve come to see it as an okay thing. Not being satisfied means that I am never settling. It means that I am never doing what one is supposed to do simply because that it what one is supposed to do. I may never get there (whatever “there” is) but I will always be trying.

I’ll always be trying to find the right thing because the right thing has value, and I have come to believe that the pursuit of that value is about as good as it gets.

It’s kind of like Merton’s prayer in relationship to my spiritual life: I don’t know if what I am doing is actually pleasing God, but I have to believe that my desire to please God is actually pleasing to God.

That may be all I’ve got, but I think that’s good enough.