In Boston and New York with clients and friends. Grandparents on both sides buried in Boston; Greek and Irish. Fried clams, the Metropolitan Opera, the Frick Museum. Haven’t been to either city in years. So many thoughts, especially in the airport and subway. Travel and transitions: perfect time for reflecting on our fragile nature and the constant change in everything. But everyone’s got his or her head buried in technology. Personal phones and pads didn’t exist when I was in Boston last, and hardly at all in New York when I took Simon for his college tour. You can’t get anyone to talk on the phone these days, much less in person. When a poor person asks for money in the subway now, almost no one looks up. I know some people are texting and working, but many, maybe most, are distracting themselves.
Distraction and addiction to distraction: I fear that’s what we’re up against. Not that we weren’t when the phone and radio and television were catching on. They also pulled us away from reading and reflecting. But we chose when to lift our head and think with a book. The insistent nature of the new technology with its bells and whistles will not let us rest. Even when it is not insisting, phantom vibrations suggest that it is or soon will insist. How can we have anything of our own to bring to the table if we have no time with our own thoughts and feelings—no gestation time, no time to look off and muse over things? Too many of us take our phones to bed with us. Given the time we spend with them, they have become the new spouse. We are wedded to them, and dare not miss a demand. Whereas we should be in control of technology and its uses, the opposite is the case; we have forfeited our freedom to its 24/7 demands. And all because the commercial interests want our attention and, of course, our money.
As I have suggested elsewhere in these entries, GET A LIFE! Take back your life! At certain times in every day, and certainly in sleep, no one but God should be able to get you. And when your family and friends complain that they couldn’t get you, you can tell them that you are refreshed from your meditation or sleep, and are open for business now WITH SOMETHING TO BRING TO THE TABLE! You are not this addicted-to-technology-and-the-social-media being, overstimulated, exhausted, and unsure of what YOU think and feel about anything, not having given any time to your self. How can you give a self if you don’t have one? The world needs real selves, not shells of former selves. Pay yourself first, as the financial adage goes, but here we talk about the basic need of the spiritual self. Time to ruminate, gestate, and digest YOUR experience—not the vicarious experience had through technology and social media. Even in planes now when you could be having a moment of recognizing your mortality (takeoff and landing, and those scary turbulent moments), you are lost in the recently acquired nonstop access to phones and tablets and free films in the air. Anything to keep you from being alone with your self, from having a self that may be critical of the uncritical use of technology and the media! Our children don’t have a chance if we don’t give them good example and reasonable limits while they live with us. Good luck, my readers. Me, I’m trying to practice what I preach—to take back my life! I am going for a walk in the neighborhood for about an hour WITHOUT MY PHONE! Love and more love from Fecas