do you remember stillness?

The bathroom door in my childhood home had a Native American lady carrying her son bundled on her back.  It was right there on the back of the door.  If I had been raised Catholic I’m sure it would have been the Virgin Mary.  Some days it almost became a dragon’s face. 

This is when I say “back in my day…”  You see, back in my day, when you needed to spend a few minutes in the bathroom you didn’t have a tiny computer to take with you.  So you sat there quietly and pondered life just as God intended.  If you were going to be a while, my dad had a collection of Reader’s Digest magazines and maybe a word find or two.  But for a kid with an imagination, the wood grain on the back of the door provided plenty of amusement. 

There was a lot of wood grain in the house.  The cabinets, the table, the hardwood floors all brimmed with fine wood grain.  Yet none of that grain became a mother and child.  The wood grain on the bathroom door was able to morph into imagery only because I was still. 

We’ve lost the ability to be still in modern life.  Obviously the smart phone is to blame for eternally occupying our brains and our eyes.  Saying this helps shift the blame away from us.  Yet in the back of our minds, just behind the news feed we’re scrolling through, we know that the phone is just a tool.  The tool is not to blame because the tool is not in charge.  The truth is, we’ve lost the desire to be still. 

All you need for proof is to go to the bathroom.  Before your cheeks feel the cool of the seat you’ve got your phone in your hand.  While you do whatever you went there to do, your thumb is scrolling nonstop.  Email, Facebook, Instagram and if it’s really serious you may even have time for Twitter.  Even if you just checked it. 

Ever go to the bathroom and reach for your pocket and feel the horrible dread of it being phone-less?  What an eternity.  Time stretches on and seconds drag on like months.  You sit there, completely helpless, wondering what you’re missing in the world of digital communication.  Did someone else like your photo?  What if someone is texting you?  What if you’re not the first one to leave a clever comment under someone’s post? 

A few feet in front of you there’s a skull emerging out of a camel’s body.  There’s a moose with an oversized and asymmetrical set of antlers.  There’s a monster truck with what looks like a poodle driving it.  But you’ll never see it because you don’t want to see it.  Because you don’t create the opportunity to see it.

Or you may be less visual than me.  Maybe you’re a thinker of thoughts.  Maybe you have a novel in you.  Maybe you’re hearing the notes of your next song.  Except you can’t because you wont create the opportunity to be still.

I’m not sure if life moved slower before technology.  I’m not sure if humans had less worry in their day-to-day lives.  I do know they had more time to think about it.  Perhaps that extra time and the ability to be still gave them more time to think creatively about their problems.  Maybe it allowed them to develop plans and to think of all their possibilities and arrive at the best solutions.  Maybe that explains why everyone seems to have more anxiety today. 

Each semester my studio is filled with students who are nearly paralyzed with anxiety.  They have so much to do and they have no time to do it.  And yet, every single one will have a well-maintained list of social media apps on their phones.  Many are maintaining them during my class.  But brainstorming and sketching ideas?  Ain’t nobody got time for that. 

I’m picking on students but I’m guilty as well.  We all are.  I may have picked up my phone twice while typing this.  But I can’t help but wonder what our world would look like if we were to be still.  Would we be as impatient?  Would we be as anxious?  Would we be more creative? 

What if we made a conscious effort to find out?  What if we created opportunity to be still?

phonaholics

The school is doing some construction outside the sculpture area causing the regular pedestrian patterns to be obstructed.  Some of us have changed our paths at least a little but others are more stubborn.  This morning the heavy equipment moved even closer to us and started taking down trees at the edge of the busiest sidewalk.  As the backhoe downed the trees and the Bobcat grabbed the pieces and dragged them away, we watched out our window as students continued using the sidewalk.  Several students had their faces buried deep in their cell phones and did not even look up to notice the dangerous and interesting events happening beside them.  One nice lady did not look up from her phone as she stepped over limbs and as the Bobcat sat and waited on her to pass. 

Y’all, these phones are killing us.

I guess if we get flattened by a backhoe because we’re taking a selfie justice has been served.  We all know what a tempting danger our phones pose as we are driving.  But I’m not sure we consider what our phones are doing to us on a more subtle level.

I got an iphone 3g about 6 years ago.  I loved it immediately.  I never talk on the phone, so the ability to call someone was not important to me.  I didn’t text and I was never a member of the Facebook cult.  But this constant connection to the internet was so convenient.  I could read and send email anytime from anywhere.  If I needed an image to draw or to show a student for reference, it was there in seconds.  And then there was the camera.  I never knew how much I needed to have a camera at my fingertips during every waking hour.  I’ve upgraded a couple of times and I’ve added Instagram and Twitter to my life.  Both of these things add a constant feed of photos and information that demands to be scrolled through everyday.  I’ve decided that both applications can be useful both personally and professionally but both also take up large amounts of time.  Even still, I wasn’t one of those people with “a problem”. 

I learned the importance of regularly drawing in my sketchbook in grad school.  Since then, I’ve kept a sketchbook in the rotation and worked my way through many of them and it’s been hugely beneficial to my work.  About a year ago I picked up my sketchbook to go to a meeting and when I opened it up I saw that the last time I drew something in it was the last meeting I had been to about a month earlier.  I chalked it up to being busy and moved on.  When the semester ended I told myself I’d have more time for sketching with a few weeks off from school.  When classes began again in January I think I’d filled two pages…and this is not a large sketchbook. 

While I still did not have “a problem”, I was ready to admit that I had neglected my sketching time.  For Lent I set out to deliberately sketch everyday.  I wont make you scroll back in time to see how that went – I failed.  By Easter I could admit where my sketching time was going.  The phone and it’s constant flow of information was slowing taking over my life.  Yes friends, I was a phoneaholic. 

Comparably, my students made me look like a beginner at wasting time on the phone.  They can pull out their phones to look up an image and within seconds they’ve texted two people, checked email, updated Facebook, posted a picture of themselves holding a power tool on Instagram and uploaded a video of me to Snapchat.  (In their defense, I do some really goofy things sometimes.) 

As the spring semester ended I made a conscious effort to keep the phone in my hand less.  I drew more and had a very productive summer.  The temptation is still there and if I’m not very careful I’ll find myself zombied out scrolling through a feed of images while all around me my kids are growing, leaves are changing and time is passing. 

I’m not alone.  A while back Justin Zoradi wrote an article on Donald Miller’s “Storyline” blog in which he argues for what he calls “Mobile Mindfulness” or “the art of deliberately tempering your relationship with technology”.  Justin ends his article with this line: “Use technology.  Milk it for all it’s worth.  Then learn to put it down, cultivate real human relationships, and get to work.” 

Of course I’m all for people getting to work but those human relationships are the things that are really important.  We grab our phones in a waiting room so people wont talk to us.  We “talk” to each other through cold text messages, tweets and comments on social media.  We have “friends” or “followers” that we’ve never looked in the eye.  All this while we walk past hundreds of people each day, never looking up from our phones to smile or say hello. 

I guess a hermit is not exactly the poster child for more human interaction, but if even I can see there’s a problem, there’s really a problem.  You do what you want, but I’m going to put my phone in my pocket and watch phoneaholics run blindly into things.