I recently saw a cartoon that I thought was both very funny and very sad. It shows a young man, presumably the boyfriend, chastising a young woman, presumably the girlfriend. He’s telling her that he recently checked his texts, his voice mail, his Blackberry, Facebook, and Myspace and couldn’t find any updates from her, that it was like she had dropped off the face of the planet. He was practically distraught, he says. The girl responds by asking him if he has checked Twitter. When he does, he reads aloud, “Going to the bathroom. Be back in two minutes.” What makes it funny is how utterly true it is. What makes it sad is how utterly true it is.
I have a friend who has her cell phone synced to several people’s FB status updates, a half a dozen Twitter feeds, weather reports from four or five cities, as well as alerts whenever someone responds to her comments and updates and blog entries. That’s in addition to the regular influx of text messages she gets from however many friends she is in near constant contact with. It’s safe to say that if her cell phone isn’t going off every two to three minutes the battery is dead. I once (or twice or three times) suggested that she turn it off for an afternoon and spend the time going for a walk, alone with just herself and her thoughts. She informed that there was no way she could do that. She has to stay busy, she has to stay connected, she has to stay (my words) distracted.
And that’s what it really is all about. Staying distracted. For most people these days the scariest place on earth to be is alone, and the scariest person in the world to be there with is themselves. An hour of absolute, uninterrupted quiet time would be unbearable for them. The most foreign place in their world is their own mind. And so they fill each waking moment with distractions and deaden each sleeping moment with sedatives to keep from having to journey into that most unfamiliar place.
And what of that place? What is there that is so frightening, so foreign, so unfaceable? I really don’t know. I grew up in a farming community in the Appalachians. I spent many days wandering up into the hills and through the woods with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. I have spent more time in my own head than anywhere else on earth. That is a practice I have carried into my adult life. To take a break from the noise, the crowds, from the external , seems to me not just a natural thing to do, but an essential one. I have to get away from time to time to cleanse my mental palate. I walk the trails in our parks from every now and then and the other walkers I pass almost always have earbuds in, or are talking on their cell phones. Why come to a place of contemplation and then not contemplate? They are simply passing by on their way from one place to another. Their trip along this trail through the woods is emblematic of the trips they take through their own minds. Hurrying along, comforted by distractions, they are there out of some vague notion that this is supposed to be good for you. “Walks in the woods can be very relaxing,” says the article in Distractions Illustrated. “Cool,” says the distracted person. “I think I’ll take a walk in the woods. I wonder if they have Wi-Fi there.”
How did we come to this? I’m not sure, really, except that the media has told us we need more sound, more noise, more colors and flashing lights in our lives. We need to stay connected/em>, we’ve been told. And we’ve believed them. I’m not so old that I can’t remember a silent house. TV off by 9:00 PM, my parents on the porch in the darkness—my mom most likely smoking a cigarette and my dad most likely having a beer— and me in my room or, sometimes in summer, on the porch with them. Each of us alone in our own heads. And none of us distracted. Scary thought, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment