more than watchmen for the morning

Wall E. is the harbinger of everything

There was this headline on BBC News today: “Toilet gaming technology targets urinal boredom”. 

They are putting games on the backs of urinals so that we can be occupied while we pee.  This doesn’t need much commentary, does it? 

But I just noticed that before my housemate alerted me to this tag on the internet, I had done three things:

1. Closed my laptop.

2. Set an alarm on my smartphone to go off in 1 hour.

3. Chucked my phone across the room onto the couch, safely out of reach.

I’ve realized that I have to do things like this because if I don’t then I will waste my life chasing a million other pixelated waterfalls until the hour passes that I need to crawl into bed.  

Sometimes when I sit down to read for a long period of time I find that my heart constricts a little bit, that my body is a bit tense with the discomfort of my stillness.  It makes me want to be the literal verb to the band’s name: Rage Against the Machine.

But you know me. Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook.  I pray to God that I learn how to be still. I pray to God that I learn how to be quiet and listen.  You know that scene from Wall E.? That not too distant future where everyone is strapped into hovering capsules endlessly watching television? We’re not that far away from it. The only thing that will save us is if we actively resist the chipping away of our attention spans, of our souls.  

People complain that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do the things that they want to do. I think the truth is that there is plenty of time to do the things that we really want to do, to be with the people we love, to read and write the things that we’re called to explore in our minds, in our souls… but we’ve been brought in by the shiny pictures on our TV’s/laptops/phones.  God help us, God forgive me. I want to breath a bit.

And maybe this is one of the reasons why I am not going home for Christmas this year. I need some time to reflect on the past few months and the past year.  2011 has been crazy and sad and wonderful, sometimes all at the same time. Going home will be fun, it will be manic, it will be noisy with every coffee shop and tavern meeting. It would be truly good. But if I don’t slow down for a moment and disconnect, if I don’t drive out to the furthest point on the British Isle and see nothing but the Atlantic Ocean spreading out for 4,000 miles and get lost in the web of my own love, my own sadness, my own joy, then what would this year have ever been for? How do I know who I am, what my identity is, if I’m never quiet long enough to hear my own voice calling up from my bones for me to listen?

At some point I pray that I have the courage to actively and passionately resist technology that achieves the seemingly destructive aims of their creators: to always be plugged in, to always be watching, to always be viewing. In always doing so, I’d set myself to live through a whole life and never know if it was lived in any kind of meaningful way.  

That’s not for me.