Slowly rolling backwards again… That unsettling feeling of airplane mass compressing, of wings bobbing, heavy with fuel. Of the straining motor in the little tug. Its sticky wheels slipping on the wet tarmac. Tar MacAdam, that. The first brand name of roads. A style, a certification, a qualification. An approved method of assembly, specifying layers of differing sizes of rock, smaller rock, and smallest rocks, all covered by tar, when specified as in the above tar-variety. Pre-tar, McAdam’s roads were still the best in the world for carrying carryiages. Carriages. Cars, such as they were and became. But not Countachs. You need tar for them.
Discovery is beautiful. I’m surrounded by kids on this flight, but for many it’s their first flight, and the cheers and exclamations remind me that, yeah this is pretty awesome. Buddha called this Child’s Mind. Seeing the world for the first time. The things in the world. All the things. New angles on things. Down.
Our brains’ evolved programming seeks novelty and quickly gets used to anything repeated. Its a defense mechanism, of course. To conserve attention, cerebral blood flow, and calories. To seek efficiency. To save the squeals of wonder for the truly captivating. After all, a puma might hear and eat you.
It’s interesting when we decide to give attention attention. Lots of people do that for a living. Nothing triggers more squeals of joy from advertisers than the vacant eyes of a consumer pointed at their message.
Attention is the most coveted and therefore most valuable commodity. It can be extracted directly and remotely from minds through ever more efficient media, with increasingly blinken lights. The popcorn of instant novelty. The pulses of light which don’t stop when they hit your retina. Wiggling your optic nerve, the tail that wags the dog, and keeps it from dozing off. “Tiny danger! Tiny danger! Tiny danger!” The neurons scream in a rhythmic beat. A carefully chosen tune of light and sound. We squint our ears and try to ignore it. It’s a habit.
It should be, of course, coveted. Or at least valued. Exactly because we seek novelty, connection, conversation, communion.
A waggle dance communicates danger, but also sweetness, in the flowers to the left left left.
The berries in the bush by the river which are ready for picking can please many if the birds are bested.
Four score and seven.
Communication is what makes us a human organism. A community. A badly distributed hive mind, with a bandwidth deficiency.
It’s the moderator, the mediator of the moot. The words spit instead of bullets, to stop that other ape from tearing your face off. It is all things with meaning. It gives meaning to all things.
Without words we wash in oceans of open interpretation. We wrestle with recollection, losing the last light of a murky memory in a morass of muddle. We warn of danger, but the wild waving weaves a wrong warning and we wish we remembered the Neanderthal word for wildebeest.
The past couple of days I’ve attended to my attention, and unwound my unintended fingers from my phone. Intention overrides recent regulations, though, so I type this text on the object of my objection.
It’s not the tool, it’s the trifling. The tiny blinkenlight of timely notification. The squeal of corporate joy as my brain is reattached to the pulsing warning. That’s what I’m attempting to unplug from.
I’m rethinking my perception posture, and passing on passive absorption.
It’s hard. I’ve reached for my phone five times as often as I expected. I’m not going cold turkey, just lukewarm turkey. I’ll let you know how I smell as the turkey ages. For now it’s totally been worth the effort. It’s easier to find time when we don’t let it all leak between our scrolling fingers.
My current plan is to limit social media and web “browsing” to a few minutes twice a day. I set a timer.
It’s been like being on a plane for two days in a double edged way. More time to think, to connect with other minds in longhand, long form and slowly. More time to fight the discomfort of drifting attention. Of boredom.
I won’t say I’ve “been bored” since I’ve had plenty to do. Reading, writing and role playing are the three Rs of dominant attention so far. I’m not sad about that. And work of course, which has been better. Between conference calls I have a thinkle while I tinkle, digesting words while I expel the waste of digested matter.
I don’t avoid web USE, just the browsing. The rabbit hole of all knowledge, beckoning like a siren who knows everything and everyone. Also hard.
Email is allowed too, since I can’t avoid it, and I can interact at my own pace. The Digital Minimalism book I’m reading coaches a full purge of everything digital before letting anything back in 30 days later. I am trying my own path so far, and still reading the book on my Kindle. I don’t know if my approach will stick or not, but it’s been interesting so far.
Sitting in the airport without the phone was different. I noticed a beautiful couple feeding their little girl pork buns. His style was impeccable, every crease planned, tailored, designed, from his black hat to his red converse sneakers. She was simply but nicely dressed, wearing most of all the smile she showed her daughter, whose curly blonde dandilion afro wiggled as she laughed. I wanted to take their picture but I failed. Not for lack of ability but of asking. Of interacting in a waiting area in any way unexpected. As I thought about the how and when of asking permission, my heart was racing, which is my number one symptom of fear.
Social rejection can be deadly. Alone we get lost and puma-eaten. The tiny danger of, what, a rude response? No, of puma. Of being the last to eat, of being left out of the fire circle. This is where the fear comes from. That must be the next thing that evolved after language, the fear of sucking at it and getting your face torn off. Or sent through Puma Valley, now that it had a name.
I shouldn’t have mentioned food, my stomach is listening. 42 minutes to go. Blue chips are tasty but not very filling.
I do have my headphones on, just to cancel the noise. I’m long forming this post to talk to you, not my planemates. It helps with the pressure of the sound, the mental draining of chatter incompletely heard.
I shouldn’t have mentioned peeing. 19 minutes to go.
The ground appears as we descend beneath the duvet covering the Eastern seaboard. The seatback screen trace turns from green to yellow, our path slowly changing future to past. From then to this. Patience, we only get that minute once.
Someone yawns as the pressure changes. Everyone yawns. Communication. Not all of it is words, but this post is.
Landed.
“I want to do it again!” “That was an adventure!”
H
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