I can remember sitting under trees, and listening to Cicadas,and wondering how they made that sound. I can remember taking walks in farm fields, and smelling the crop air, or the fresh earth moved by the tractor. I can remember wonderful dinners where there was laughter, and great food. I can remember walking over to a friends house to have a conversation about life. I can remember sitting reading a book, and thinking about what I would like to do in life, and trying to figure out who I was, and what I wanted to be like as an adult. And I can remember looking into the eyes of people I didn't know, yet spoke to, and felt their pain, or joy that only face to face I would be able to absorb. And in these now precious fleeting moments that I won't ever get back, I was able to enjoy them as they happened, and accept them as they were. And they defined my sense of being. Sometimes I had nothing to do but think. That was when the most important light bulb moments in my life came into play.
Wherever I am, I always try to look around me to see what people are doing, and try to read faces to try and figure out what they must be thinking, or what their lives must be like. It's part of my own personal way of connecting with people even though I don't know them. A face can reveal quite a bit of a person's personality, and when you see someone's face, and talk to them, you can't help but humanize them, and perhaps feel empathy when conversing, because it's the empathy that connects us more than the actual visual offering. People can be sad, happy, troubled about something, great senses of humor, or completely unlikeable folks, but seeing them and interacting, does wonders to flesh that out.
Often times I see someone alone outside sitting on a bench, walking their dog, or even within a crowd of people and there is one thing consistent with quite a few of these individuals. They are in fact all connected, but not to each other. To their phone. It's in their hand, on their hip, dinging from texts received, or on because of games being played. I've even seen and heard phones ringing in funerals and wakes. The over saturation of phones is everywhere, in every corner of American society amongst every type of person. And it is now sometimes impossible to look someone in the eye, for they are looking elsewhere, and focused on something else besides the task that is being performed.
These modern devices and the companies that make them always boasts about how they are "connecting America". But in fact they are doing the complete opposite. They are isolating the American mind, and making people live in a world where the instantaneous access to information allows them to not have to interact if they don't want to, and when they do perhaps interact, it is with unemotional texts that can and do get confusing, because there is no vocal inflection accompanying them. Unlike some, I believe that this is part and parcel to an end game of a dangerous trend in human culture.
A huge part of connecting with others is the ability to accept yourself and what you as an individual has to offer, and a big part of that road to discovery is just "being".The idea of just being as an individual is slowly eroding, as more people rely on these devices to keep them company, or to just randomly do things in a place that years ago would have been impossible to do it. The epiphany part of discovering yourself and what you believe your role to be in the universe comes from introspection during times where you can reflect, experience questions within you, and having moments of loneliness, and uncertainty that you must hurdle over. To define ones self means to just sometimes allow yourself to "be", and let answers come to you. Whether that moment or moments come from sitting under a tree, taking a walk, a conversation with someone, or performing some mundane task while your mind wanders, you must go through the act of some type of birth many times over before you as an individual can become well rounded enough to accept and absorb the complexities of life, and be able to handle them in mature fashions. We are becoming a society that is full of individuals who just cannot be left with their own thoughts, and their own fears and questions by themselves. They have to have these devices where they can randomly send some idiotic message to someone not for the urgent need to converse, but to cure the overwhelming silence of nothing going on. But there is something going on. They are being. Life is happening around them. and there are questions to answer inside them where if they would just be, they could hear these things transpiring.
You have people in crowded events and places not interacting with others, but looking at their devices, and not just enjoying the act of being, or what is happening around them. At concerts, at movies, at parties, or just sitting outside, the attention span of people is dwindling at a frantic pace. No attention span for the act of being, because our lives now need to be filled with information, and non emotional back and forth. The empathy is being drawn out of us because of conversing through text, facebook, and other social aspects that demand our attention away from being. The ironic thing about these connections is that it is actually disconnecting us from one another. We are words to one another, and not people with hearts and souls that have more in common with us than differences. The more we gain knowledge in technology for these devices, the more we lose knowledge about ourselves, because they are cold and heartless, and people can't even seem to do mundane tasks without checking their device for something so that they can feel like they are connected to people. But in reality, the connection is an illusion. Someone takes a walk in nature, and they post on Facebook that they are "Walking in nature". Why does anyone even need to know that you are walking in nature? keep it a secret, and enjoy it. Just be, and don't take the time to tell the world in your moment of possible reflection. The needless announcements of whereabouts, or situations in people's lives is ironic when people complain about lack of privacy. People living in the same house texting one another while in the household together at the same time, instead of walking up to one another, and conversing, and yet the total breakdown in the family unit is questioned.
People have presented an argument to me that it's wonderful to have a mini computer in ones hand to look up something that they don't know on the spot. Why is it a necessity now and then? Is there anything that is not life threatening that needs to be known instantaneously? Information overload is ruining the ability to ask questions, because some answer is right there at your fingertips waiting for you to accept it. These devices are not allowing human beings to enjoy the solitude of themselves, and the result may soon be people who can't handle who they may be, because they've never had the time and space with nothing to do, to think about it. "Nothing to do" should not mean boredom. It should mean that life has given you an opportunity to retreat a little from all that you have to think about, in order to confront things that you need to think about, such as your place in the world, and how it relates to others. Too many people make an announcement that they are bored, and that announcement usually comes from some device, and instead of allowing themselves to be, they have chosen to announce to the world that they don't know what to do to occupy themselves, when in fact the act of "being" is plenty.
We are raising a nation of people who are hypnotized by the glow of light coming out of their devices, and they don't know how to just enjoy anything. They are mesmerized by the idea of any information or whim that they wish to convey being accessible, and therefore communicating with individuals is unnecessary, and to some uncomfortable, so why do it? The less we communicate personally with people, the less empathetic we are to someone's idea, condition, or state of mind, which is crucial to identifying potential problems of mental well being. And the full circle is the fact that the lack of time with ones self is a major contributing factor in an unhealthy mind existing in a world going 150mph constantly, with information receiving and giving. Is it any wonder why we have so many unstable minds walking around? They cannot, and will not part without their devices for an extended period of time because with some, the idea of just "being" is foreign and unthinkable. It is boredom to them, and with all of the amenities that people seem to have around them, it really is ridiculous for someone to announce boredom. The idea of exchanging thoughts personally may soon be a thing of the past, and therefore the lack of empathy in our civilization is at risk, because people will lose the ability to look at themselves. So how can one see him/herself in another human being, and feel a connection? It is now considered almost a necessity for someone to have at least a cell phone with them, and if that person does not, they are looked upon as a possible questionable individual. When did that happen in our minds?
We are being left to our own devices, and becoming slaves to technology in ways that remove us from one another, and distract us from just moments that could transform our ways of thinking about ourselves and the people amongst us, and the universe around us. The more technologically advanced we get, the more we get away from our primordial instincts of community, taking care of one another, and personal need for connection with another being. The world is being tightened by cyber wire, but it is slowly coming apart at the seams spiritually-wise, because we are decidedly hellbent on chronicling every aspect of life as it occurs for the sake of not wanting to be alone with ourselves.
"I am"....What a wonderful sentence laced with the idea of just being. Soon to be an archaic statement.
