These days I notice the same thing everyone else does: Most
people walking (or driving!) along are in their own little world,
oblivious to the larger world around them, because they are
either talking on a cell phone with an earpiece in their ear or
texting. It's become a world of walking cocoons.
I'm woefully behind on all this technology because, while I do
correspond with friends on email, I don't have a cell phone
that texts. I haven't yet updated my antiquated cell phone
because Whitley and I, as business partners, share a cell
phone number (although he's the one who actually carries the
phone). When it comes to cell phones, I'm like someone who
is still using a dial, while everyone else is pushing buttons.
I'm still at the primitive stage of when someone I'm with is
talking to someone else using an earpiece, I will often answer
them, not realizing that they're not talking to me. Whenever I
do this, they always pause in their conversation with
whomever and gesture towards their ear, explaining that they
weren't talking to me, and I realize I've made a major modern
faux pas.
But not being a texter gives me the opportunity to do what I
like to do best: observe what is going on around me. As I
walk along, or ride in the passenger seat of the car, I see
streets and sidewalks filled with people who are totally tuned
in to their own worlds of business, friends and family. They
might as well be anywhere, since where they REALLY are is
inside a totally interior world.
There are good things about texting: People can stay in
touch with the people they care about (and who care about
them) on an almost constant basis. They can move through
the harsh, unforgiving world around them insulated from the
rudeness and car horns because they are wrapped in a
cocoon of love.
But I think they are missing something as well. The world
around us can truly be a nasty place: smelly, ugly and pushy.
Yet it is also interesting and there is so much to be learned
there. I have gained vast knowledge--about myself and
others--just from taking a subway or bus or from interacting
with someone in line at a coffee shop, insights I would have
missed had I been cocooned.
When I was a young Education student, we were being
taught about "the gap," which is the two year lag that so
many minority children have in school. Despite the best
efforts of teachers and administrators, many of them never
catch up. I was riding a subway when I noticed two mothers
enter the car, each with a child about three years old. One of
them was middle class. In order to distract her child and keep
him from fussing, she immediately began to talk about the ads
that were festooned above the windows of the subway car.
She read them to him, and pointed out the pictures, and
discussed what they could mean. Soon he was content and
interested.
The obviously poor mother, on the other hand, responded to
her child's fussiness completely differently: She told him to sit
still and be quiet and he did, staring straight ahead. She
didn't love her child any less, I'm sure--she wasn't harsh with
him, just firm--but she handled him in a different way that
immediately explained "the gap" to me in a way no classroom
instruction ever could have done.
Another time, I was riding a bus. This was when I was a
young student in the Gurdjieff work, in which we are taught
to be "awake." While sitting there, I "woke up" and realized I
had been totally immersed in the kind of thoughts that tend
to whirl around in my head: recriminations about what I've
recently done and obsessions about what I'm going to do in
the near future. I stilled my mind and sensed my body, as we
had been taught to do, and looked around at the subway car,
where I saw scenarios being enacted all around me. When
you go to the theater, you sometimes see a semi-transparent
screen, called the scrim, being raised just as the play starts.
When it's down, you see the actors dimly, but once it's
raised, you know the play has begun.
When I began to notice what was going on around me in that
bus, it was as if the scrim had been raised: People were
talking with one another, and while I couldn't hear what they
were saying, I could tell what was going on by their gestures
and expressions. I saw other people sitting alone and if they
were elderly, I wondered if they were lonely old lions whose
battles were almost over. If they were young, I thought of
them as the vibrant young upstarts who were ready to fill the
old ones' shoes. In the midst of all this drama, I suddenly
thought, "Sitting in this bus is like attending a Shakespeare
play!"
When I came out of my coma almost 6 years ago now, I was
given the message You must live out of love and I look for opportunities
to do this. I was sitting with Whitley at a table in our local
coffee shop, which is always terribly crowded because they
make excellent coffee. Since I wasn't immersed in texting,
when we were about to leave, when I noticed a young
mother with a baby carriage standing in line. I remembered
my days of pushing around a heavy stroller and
thought, "She'll need a seat and she doesn't have a chance
of getting one here." Part of me told myself to mind my own
business, but another part saw the chance to do something
good, albeit in a very small way, so I told Whitley to stay
seated while I walked up to her. I gestured towards my
husband and said, "When you get your coffee, take it to the
table where that man is sitting. We're about to leave, but
we'll wait until you come so you can have the table." She
was very grateful, and this gave me the chance to make a
small gesture of goodwill that could (perhaps) make up for
some of the unkind things I'd done that day, many of which I
probably hadn't even noticed at the time I did them.
I would have missed all of these adventures, and the insights
that came with them, had I been texting or talking on the
phone, cocooned in a world of my own. Since texting and
talking are not things that will go away, it makes me wonder
what the future world will be like. On one hand, it will be
much more intimate, as we stay in touch with our loved ones
throughout the day. But it will also be much more distant,
giving us the ability to pass others without thinking about
them at all. We will no longer need to think about who those
feet we are stepping past on the bus belong to or who is
behind the wheel of that car that cut us off before we honk
our horn at it. The daily drama will be gone as if the scrim
was lowered, obscuring the action taking place onstage.
Related Entries:
10-Aug-2010: A Trip to Crop Circle Country
27-Jul-2010: Marriage: Hot & Cold
06-Jul-2010: Marcelle
27-May-2010: A Trip to Esalen
11-May-2010: The Birds
13-Apr-2010: Staying Open
31-Mar-2010: I was an Angel for Easter
23-Mar-2010: Nuns I Have Known
16-Mar-2010: It Started With a Hummingbird
09-Mar-2010: CARma
