1. This week: our "can't sit still" theme
This week there are two articles, instead of
one feature. Both articles deal with a similar theme: the challenge today of getting into the mental space where we can just be calm, and reflect on what we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. This is part of waking up; no longer just going through the motions in life. It's really important. Let me know what you think!
2. Who are we, and what do we really think, apart from the
pop culture and marketing messages that get drummed into us?
Why do we think some things are cool, and others are lame? Why does something seem so important or desirable to have? Too often it has nothing to do with the virtue or utility of the thing in question, but rather it's about the messages that have come to us from the outside.
Messages we blindly accept and believe.
What do I really think? What do I really want? These are surprisingly hard questions to answer for ourselves. What comes up is usually just the thoughts and wants we've been assimilating
over the past few months from the marketing, mass media, and social media we've been consuming. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with consuming media, and not that it's realistic to imagine that we could come up with our own opinions and desires about things without factoring in what we've heard and read from external influences.
But, as the quote below suggests, there's something more that needs to happen. We've got to take time to reflect on what we've been reading, hearing, seeing ... and sort out what is true and real, and whether it makes sense to us or not. If we don't do this, we become sheep, susceptible to the whims of outside forces that seek to shape our thinking, voting,
relating, and shopping. Here's a great quote:
“Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while
arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.”
― L.M. Browning
3. Am I the only one who's getting freaked out by the fact that nobody can sit still without taking out their cell phone?
I'm not sure why, but lately I've been noticing again how rare it is for people experience a moment of quiet or reflection without
taking out their phone and doing something with it. I know this is something people have been talking about for a while ... this is not new. I'm also aware that, a few years from now, we'll probably think it's quaint that someone would think this "cell phone distraction thing" is unusual.
But at least for right now, it's something new. And it sort of freaks me out when I think about it. Whether it's waiting in line at a grocery store, sitting on the train, driving their car in stop and go traffic, or sitting at the dinner table and there's a lull in the conversation -- people don't experience that moment ... they get out their phone and read or watch something on it.
I don't think this is good, particularly if it keeps us from letting our minds settle down, and live in the moment. Some years ago, before there was even such a thing as cell phones, the mystic and thinker Thomas Merton had this to say about our tendency to distract ourselves:
In reality, all men are solitary. Only most of them are so averse to being alone, or to feeling alone, that they do everything they can to forget their solitude. How? Perhaps in large measure by what Pascal called ‘divertisement’–diversion, systematic distraction.
By those occupations and recreations, so
mercifully provided by society, which enable a man to avoid his own company for twenty-four hours a day. …the function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused. …Absurdity [is] the anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less ‘well organized’ and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion,
pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos.
This is what immediately impresses itself upon the man who has renounced diversion. It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, he renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are
incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them.
Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning,
or asking if they have any practical consequences in one’s life.
- Thomas Merton
4. Quote of the week:
“The child will leave the nest.
The best paint job will crack.
The
best play will become boring.
The best work will grow tedious.
The best art will lose meaning.
The greatest creation will decay.
Behind all this, lies my true self.”
― Vironika Tugaleva”
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