Settle
Down
“Once,
history was a living sense of community, a reality in which one participated in
everyday activity…It is easy to see why and how we have forgotten who we are
and whence we came. We have become nomads in time.”
Diana
Butler Bass (Grounded, p.141; Harper One, 2015)
I’ve
been reading these two books for a while: Grounded by Diana Butler Bass,
who is a Christian historian, and The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer, essayist,
novelist, and world traveler, who writes about crossing cultures. While these
books are seemingly about different subjects, they support the same ideology—that
somehow, without our knowing it, we have become so absorbed by our technology that
we have lost touch with our history, community, and even ourselves.
Bass writes that we know
more about our ancestors and have more information about the past than any
previous generation, and yet, we have very little actual experience of true family
and even less historical understanding. One line from Iyer’s book based on his TED
talk galvanized my attention: “The amount of data that humanity will collect
while you’re reading this book [66 pages long] is five times greater
than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Anyone reading
this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a
lifetime.” (p.41) Let that sink in.
Nomads in time. We can
google almost anything; join genealogy sites that trace our family back for ten
generations, know how many soldiers were lost in any war that’s been fought in
the past half-millennia. But we have less connection to ground, to our lived experience
of time and place, to our heritage and our roots than generations past because
we move from place to place in nomadic fashion. We have a thousand times more
information about everything than any previous people, and less involvement
with it. No wonder we grapple every day with feelings of “not belonging” and
with loneliness.
We try to fill that void
by doing and consuming more and more, as though if we just hit on the right
thing the restlessness within will stop. French mathematician and philosopher,
Blaise Pascal, said, “All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple
fact: they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” According to Iyer, the
famous explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who spent five months alone in the Antarctic,
wrote, “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we
need.” In order to regain our grounding, to settle down, we must step away
from our devices, sit down, and quietly come back to ourselves. Pico Iyer says
that interruption scientists report, “it takes an average of twenty-five
minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet, such interruptions come every eleven
minutes, which means we’re never caught up with our lives.” (p, 41)
The conclusion is that modern
life moves too fast, and we humans are not built for the speed of our
technology; it frazzles our nervous systems. One solution is to consciously
become still and grounded and give our body/minds quiet time to catch up, to
recover from the incessant busyness, to stop the mental data collection long
enough to absorb at least a tiny bit of the information collected. Our constant
complaint is exhaustion. I’m reminded of what everybody gives as the reason for
quitting a stressful job, “I want to spend more time with my family.” What they
really mean is, “I need to catch up with my soul.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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