Arm’s-Length

We shake hands with people when we meet them as a matter of courtesy but do not embrace them; we do not embrace even acquaintances but only shake their hands. And embrace is reserved for friends who are intimate and who, we trust, will not do any harm to us. So the phrase of arm’s-length teaches us one thing: Keep people at a SAFE distance if we are not sure that they are trustworthy.

I happened to see my neighbor’s  daughter wearing spectacles, saying that she had short-sight. I was surprised to hear it as she was too young to have such a problem. To my query, she replied that she got an eye problem after using laptop-computer regularly. But I explained to her that the frequency of computer-usage was not the real cause of such a problem as people like me, who use computers regularly for work, should have got the same problem if it were so. I see many such children and youngsters wearing spectacles due to similar eye-sight problems though such problems normally visit people when they begin their journeys from 40.

How can we save our children and also us from such avoidable problems? Some technologies are like acquaintances that should not be embraced. Hence, we should keep an arm’s-length — SAFE distance, literally — while dealing with such technologies. Do teach and make our children, even ourselves, to practice to keep electronic gadgets like computers, mobile-handsets, etc. at an arm’s-length so that a SAFE distance is ensured to avoid any harm.