John Berger could have written a book called ‘Ways of Listening’. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It’s a generational thing. Lost forever, I believe.
Book Review NY Times: “She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shape Arundhati Roy. The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
We are no longer achieving an acceptable level of whimsy. In even the smallest corners of daily life, we are asked to abandon delicious inefficiencies — the archaic flights of fancy, the capricious nonsense — in favor of a totalizing commitment to the false idols of logic, regularity and efficacy… It is time, in a disorganized and utterly decentralized way, to fight back…let’s stop blasting holes in mountainsides — just let the damn road have a few switchbacks.
Our society is hooked on efficiency. People work to optimize their lives, multitasking every possible activity, looking to force every possible minute out of the day to be productive, turning hobbies into “side hustles” — and from this they suffer. That much, many seem to know. But do they realize how they also suffer from standardized plurals, from oh-so-easy math and from the abandonment of the little joys of an existence filled with unnecessary journeys down the side paths of life? “Was tennis not the same game it had been then?” the writer Jean Stafford asked in 1952. “Why did it seem, today, so much faster?” There is a joy in slowness and inefficiency, in lazily lofting the ball over the net rather than blasting it down the sideline.
That’s why pastimes and lifestyles that eschew more efficient options are resurgent. “Luddite” teens reject smartphones and Google Calendar invites. Vinyl record sales are exploding, the act of placing a disc upon a turntable preferred to the ease of tapping Play on a music streaming service’s meticulously engineered app interface. Renewed interest in film photography is so acute that some retailers are hiding rolls of film behind the counter to avoid theft; not so memory cards for digital cameras.
There is a whimsy in those lifestyle choices and hobbies, a whimsy in doing things the roundabout way. It is simple enough to argue that the most direct path is the best one, but humanity doesn’t really work like that. As a species, we learn by doing — and often enough, we find joy in it. Taking the time to master a skill, to understand a process or to have a conversation — even if it isn’t quite as fast — is consistently more rewarding than having something simply done for you. Efficiency-focused single-mindedness might make things faster, but it is a thief of life’s joys.
If the point of all this — state, trade, industry, culture, society writ large — is well-being and joy, making lives better, then, as often as may be, it should work on a human scale, embracing the winding trails of life over the direct highway bulldozed through the mountainside. That’s not to say there is no place for efficiency, but to govern people, who are by nature not particularly efficient, with too heavy a bias toward simply getting things done is doubtless a well-intentioned mistake. Our government should be as strange as we are, more or less…
Of course, this isn’t likely. The nature of business and government is to prize efficiency, to value cost saving and corner cutting and results-focused thinking (or whatever the consultants call it). But even outside of the sheer joy of taking a moment longer to perform a task — to take a longer trip home because you’d rather see the sun set over the bridge, to set the vinyl record carefully on the turntable instead, to visit your local takeout place and chat with the cashier in lieu of punching an order for 47 dumplings into an app — there is a beauty and (dare I say it) usefulness to inefficiency…
So next time I want some takeout, I’ll walk two furlongs and seven chains to the local Indian joint, place my order with the cashier directly, be annoyed that I can’t pay in a de-decimalized currency, and then sit and wait for an hour while they prioritize the Grubhub app-based orders over mine.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
A few months ago, I was teetering on the brink of feeling overwhelmed by life’s responsibilities, afflicted by the ambient anxiety that seems to be an intrinsic part of life in the 2020s. In an effort to maintain — or maybe restore — my sanity, I embarked on a personal endurance challenge.
Other people, at similar moments, begin competing in grueling triathlons, or head off on intensive meditation retreats. Me? I decided to give up listening to podcasts or music while running, or driving, or loading the dishwasher, or doing almost anything else. To just focus, in other words, on what it was I was actually doing, one activity at a time.
It was surprisingly hard. Once you’ve finished mocking me for treating such a trifling alteration to my habits like a grand existential struggle, I have one request: Try it. Identify the small tricks you use to avoid being fully present with whatever you’re doing, and put them aside for a week or two.
You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face. […]
At work, the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. “This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book “The Effective Executive.” “They do only one at a time.” Making a difference in one domain requires giving yourself permission not to care equally about all the others. […]
Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain. My gratifying new ability to “be here now” while running or driving or cooking dinner isn’t the result of having developed any great spiritual prowess. Rather, it’s a matter of realizing I could only ever be here now anyway — so I might as well give up the stressful struggle to pretend otherwise.
Turning, one evening, from my phone to a book, I set myself the task of reading a single chapter in one sitting. Simple. But I couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. No stroke or disease clouded my way. Yet – if I’m being honest – the failure was also not a surprise.
Paragraphs swirled; sentences snapped like twigs; and sentiments bled out. The usual, these days. I drag my vision across the page and process little. Half an hour later, I throw down the book and watch some Netflix…
So, it’s been unnerving to realize: I have forgotten how to read – really read – and I’ve been refusing to talk about it out of pride…
Online life makes me into a different kind of reader – a cynical one. I scrounge, now, for the useful fact; I zero in on the shareable link. My attention – and thus my experience – fractures. Online reading is about clicks, and comments, and points. When I take that mindset and try to apply it to a beaten-up paperback, my mind bucks.
Author Nicholas Carr writes that, “digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more antagonistic toward delays of all sorts.” We become, “more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli.” So, I throw down the old book, craving mental Tabasco sauce. And yet not every emotion can be reduced to an emoji, and not every thought can be conveyed via tweet.
~ Michael Harris, “I have forgotten how to read.” For a long time Michael Harris convinced himself that a childhood spent immersed in old-fashioned books would insulate him from our new media climate – that he could keep on reading in the old way because his mind was formed in pre-internet days. He was wrong.
