A few months past, a close friend of mine, through a series of unfortunate events, lost access to all forms of modern communication. His cell phone and laptop both bit the dust at the same time and, for one reason or another, he was unable to replace them for about a week. As it happened, my wife and I were in my friend’s neck-of-the-woods, but, of course, we had no way of contacting him. I was fairly certain that he was not busy so we stopped by his house to see if he wanted to join us for the afternoon. His car was in the driveway, but when I knocked on his front door there was no answer. Feeling certain he was home, and encouraged by my wife that “it isn’t weird,” I crept around the back of the house to his bedroom window. In true Romeo and Juliet style, I began tossing pebbles at his window. Lo and behold, he was home. Upon hearing the clatter of the stones, he popped his head out of his window with a surprised but joyful exclamation. He was delighted to see us and we were delighted to discover him at home. As it turned out, he was free, and so we spent the rest of the day perusing an autumn market, and finished off the day with an unplanned bottle of wine on his patio.What made this unassuming vignette stand out in my mind was that the encounter with my friend was spontaneous. Spontaneity carries with it a very real and human joy and yet it has become increasingly rare in our society. That rarity is due to the fact that we have lost the social contexts for spontaneous human interaction. There are at least two ways in which we have lost these social contexts. The first, as my story demonstrates, is due to the ease of communication. There is no longer a social need to find our friends and family without having first organized how we will meet. Because the need is gone, our behavior conforms to the path of least resistance: it is comforting to know beforehand if a friend is free.The second reason spontaneity does not bubble up in our society frequently is due to a