Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Radar. Wouldn’t it be cool to have your very own radar gun? You know, just whip it out and take a speed reading on random stuff zipping by on an otherwise nothingburger day?

Just gonna put this here in case Santa reads “Sunday musings…”

2) Mark. “You don’t want something you did at 18 to be your high water mark.” Ethan Hawke

I had a pretty OK year at 18. Thankfully, the best was definitely still to come. You?

3) Babe. “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” Babe Ruth.

You’re gonna connect. Keep swinging.

4) Haven. “Friendship is the vehicle that delivers innocent people to that space between the rock and the hard place where comfort might be found.” D.E. White

5) Memory. Like the Babe I’ve taken my swings, often and hard, at the corrosive effects of communication technology on human communication. For every time I’ve hit it out of the park–face to face over a glass of wine with Beth, a close friend, or one of my kids–I’ve whiffed on one that was low and outside, hurled by new tech. For instance, Snapchat came and went and got sold for a Bazillion $$ before I even really knew how to use it. I got singed, a full in-person facial a couple of months ago about someone’s recollection on something I was quoted as saying but don’t remember on a platform I only casually use.

I do not have an Instagram account.

Now, I’m hardly a Luddite. I’m sitting at a kitchen table littered with droppings from Steve Jobs’ imagination, pecking away at one of them while another serenades me, yet one more beckons for a response, pinging away impatiently behind me. It’s all really pretty OK though, because there’s no one here, really physically here, who wants or needs to talk to me at the moment. Even Bohdi, the world’s most mischievous Australian Shepherd, isn’t interested in chatting.

This is not a “be here/be now” lament about focusing on the real, live person who is physically with you rather than your phone and its irresistible access to someone who is somewhere else. Nope. I lost that battle as spectacularly as any swing and a miss by the Bambino, at least on a societal level, and for the most part in any group setting as well. For sure, every now and again, I hit a bloop single and get one of my kids to put down their phone and “be there” for a whole meal or make it through a business dinner without someone breaking away to manage said IG, but no grand slam big picture win on that one. (As an aside, who wouldn’t love to see a Sesame Street re-do of “Put down the Duckie” substuting “iPhone” for Duckie? Google it.)

This is about the most ongoing tech attack on the human experience as we know it–the “Selfie”. It’s not real unless you took a picture of it. You weren’t there unless you have a picture of wherever there was, whatever that was. And the most damaging of all, it wasn’t significant enough, it wasn’t truly magnificent or epic, unless you shared it with at least your first 4 degrees of separation on no fewer than three “platforms”.

The camera on your phone is stealing your memories.

But how can that possibly be? How can memorializing the momentous make my memories disappear? There are two insidious effects of the nearly compulsory grab for the phone and the shutter. The first is simply that you’ve stopped the moment in question, interrupted whatever is wonderful about that singular now. Everything stops for the camera. You’re frozen, right then, right there, in that exact click. Your flow is gone. What might have come next, following as naturally as your next breath, is forever lost as soon as the camera appears. The re-boot is as jarring as emerging from the breath hold of a frozen dive. It’s not really that I don’t get any pleasure out of the selfies per se, just that the “taking” is interrupting the memory making.

Memories, the good ones at least, are like poems. Returning to those memories over time is like re-reading a beloved verse. The basic facts, like the words in the poem, remain the same; it’s around the edges of the memory that we find the smiles. In poetry it’s the message between the lines. In music it’s the space between the notes. This is where the magic lives. We shrink these spaces in the memories that hurt but won’t fade, and we try enlarge them, to spend as much time as we can engulfed in the happiness that lives in the space around our best memories. How and what we were feeling right then. The potential for growth here, in this space, is being fully engaged in simply living in each “now”, feeling that now as fully as you can rather than engaging your cellphone camera to let what you were doing, rather than how you were feeling, be the memory.

You can’t really take a picture of how you feel, and in the end isn’t that what makes the best memories?

I’ll see you next week…