It's a time for rebirth, and for remembering that new beginnings make us human
A vintage Motorola "brick" phone in use in 2007. Credit: Toronto Star via Getty Images/Tory Zimmerman
A significant anniversary came and left quietly this past week.
It was 50 years ago that a Motorola engineer named Marty Cooper made the first call from a portable handheld cellphone. The device, the precursor of our modern minicomputers, weighed 2.5 pounds, was 10 inches long, and had 30 minutes of talk time. And when the battery was exhausted, it required a 10-hour recharge.
Appropriately, it was dubbed “the brick” or "the shoe," both of which worked as physical metaphors but each of which also had in common with Cooper's phone the status of a comparatively humble object that formed the basis of much magnificent achievement.
Cooper, listed as the lead inventor on the patent for the "radio telephone system," made that first call from Sixth Avenue in Manhattan to a man named Joel Engel, a fellow engineer and his chief competitor at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to let him know that Motorola had won that innovation race. It was a deliciously saucy mix of pride and moxie.
It's a terrific story that resonates at any time of year, but particularly at this time when concepts of birth and new beginnings are so front of the mind.
Part of that stems from themes that gird the great religious holidays being observed right now, which reflect the beginnings we see all around us in the natural world: the emergence of flowers, the nascent tree buds, the songs of returning birds, the warming of the soil and the planting of seeds, the sudden presence of insects, the tipping of our days from darkness to light.
There are new beginnings all around. And these beginnings put us in a frame of mind to notice and celebrate them. But the truth is that there are new beginnings all around us at every time of year. We're just not conditioned to pay them as much mind.
New beginnings are essential for us humans. We call it turning over a new leaf, getting a new lease on life, remaking ourselves. And it's that act of reinvention that makes us human.
Bob Dylan nailed it when he wrote that "he not busy being born is busy dying." Dylan knew that stasis is stultifying, inertia enervating. Life is a gauntlet of challenges in a cloak of uncertainty that we meet best by reacting to them.
Pop culture phrases capture this in stark dichotomy, each pairing leading to the same ending:
Change or die.
Charles Darwin predated Dylan by more than a century, and studied the animal world while Dylan peered at us. And Darwin came to the same conclusion, that the species that survive are not the strongest or the most intelligent but the species that respond best to change.
Once upon a time, finding a steady job with one employer was the dream — one that eroded the soul of many of its adherents. It's rarely the dream anymore.
American workers nowadays stay in the same job for just over four years, then move on. We have on average 12 jobs in our lifetime. And most of the times we change careers, it's not for money. It's for satisfaction. It's how we stay fresh. It's how we stay alive.
But amid all that reinvention, the more profound changes are the ones that take place inside us. The ones in which we learn to see things in a different way. The ones in which we become a little more compassionate, or a little less tolerant. The ones in which we discover that we've misplaced our priorities. The ones in which we realize it's more important to make memories than make money, or not.
Here's to the busyness of being reborn. May it lead each of us to become better versions of ourselves.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
