I am a change agent. I have hardly worked on anything else in my career. I could just take on the job title “Corporate Renovator” and hammer it onto a shingle outside my office. But today I was faced with an unthinkable demon. Are there areas that I really don’t want to change?

I have loved technology, the ability to reach out, connect and do things that used to take days or hours in nano-seconds, but for once I have resistance that is holding me back. I love books, adore books, from the time I was seven and an enlightened fourteen year old boy loaned me his entire collection of the Famous Five, my world opened, expanded and never shrunk again. When I go on holiday, clothes and shoes have been left behind while 10 books get shoved in a suitcase. Not just any books, but novels with words strung together so magnificently that you have to sigh and re-read their sentences; business books with concepts that brilliant people have pulled together and made simple and powerful; spiritual books that have stretched my soul, widened my perspectives and watered my internal garden. I generally need at least several in each category if I go away, so that I can entertain every part of my mind or moods. So, it would seem that acquiring an iPad would be a logical move for me. But I am so torn. It is like asking me to trade my relationships for a long-distance love affair.

The inability to hold the book, turn it over, read the back cover, muse at the intentions of the graphics on the cover, feel the sensation of turning the pages, just seems too much to give up. And what of the sharing? I love nothing better than standing in front of my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and running my fingers along the spines of my books to find one that a friend MUST read. How do I do that when they are data bites on the inside of that magnificent, artistic device that is the iPad? Don’t get me wrong, I think the iPad is gorgeous and wonderous, but how, do I give up my love affair with the book? The practicality is a no brainer, the convenience beyond anything I could imagine, I could pack 3 extra pairs of shoes, but the loss, the loss…

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