In The Time Before The Beeping

When I was a child, nothing beeped at you. We were left to our own devices to figure things out. When we spelled something wrong, no wiggly red line appeared beneath the word, nor did a green one appear should we use improper grammar (or rather, something Microsoft Word thought to be improper grammar). We were just supposed to know. The struggle was real.

Things were different in our day. You knew if your car door was open because you felt a breeze and it was kind of noisy. No need for a beep. You knew your lights were on because it was bright. You knew your seatbelt wasn’t fastened because—hey—nobody wore a seatbelt back then.

Microwaves weren’t constantly providing annoying reminders that they had finished the task you had assigned to them because there weren’t any. Perhaps computers beeped back then, but I couldn’t say for sure because, like most people of my generation, I had never seen one.

Games didn’t beep, they unfolded. Games didn’t make any noise at all, unless you count the sound of the rolling of dice or the spinning of a spinner. People made noise back then while playing games, it was called conversation. Believe it or not, games were something you played with other people. Sure, people occasionally played solitaire, but if people were caught doing it, they would explain their behavior by saying they were bored. Boredom, for those of you who are younger and unfamiliar with the term, was a state of mind that existed prior to deciding to get up and do something useful. Again, to explain to those of you younger than myself, solitaire was once played with a deck of cards rather than an electronic device. The cards did not beep.

Boredom was once a signal that something was not right in your world. It was a feeling of discontent with the situation you found yourself in. It was a necessary stage in the evolution from being unproductive to finding some activity that really absorbed your attention. I’m not sure that boredom exists anymore, we have replaced it with anxiety. Like a child who has dropped his nook, we are never really satisfied without a digital distraction nearby. We are never really satisfied when in possession of a digital distraction either, but we are to distracted to notice.

When I was young a song was not only a song but part of something larger, which we called an album. An album had an overall tone to it, quite often having an overarching theme. Songs were arranged in a certain way to provide an overall feel, the way flowers are arranged in a vase or gems mounted in a ring. The overall impression it made was far more powerful than could be made with a single song.

An album was not merely a sack filled with songs, it was a statement. It was an artistic expression—at least to those who knew and practiced the art—that captured the zeitgeist of both technology and cultural understanding. It was immersive: you put it on your turntable and then experienced it as you gazed at the artwork and read the lyrics. It brought you on a journey, the peak moments making you close your eyes in order to experience it more fully.

We don’t have time to take a journey like that anymore. There is always a beep to drag us back to the here and now, away from the timeless.

I remember visiting my grandmother who lived in a small town and all the stores being closed on a Sunday. My father told me that’s the way it used to be in most towns, though by the time I came along such a thing was a rarity. My parents also never allowed me to cut the grass on a Sunday. Such notions were derived from Christian tradition, and I can understand how, with a decline of a strong Christian majority, such practices fell to the wayside (though I still never cut the grass or do anything outdoors that is bothersome to the neighbors on a Sunday). While I understand the change, I still can’t help feeling we’ve lost something in no longer observing a day of rest and refraining from commerce. We need to set aside time for what is important, and slowing ourselves down and giving ourselves time to reflect is important.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and with the receding of Christian values, a new set of values assumed cultural dominance: the idea that progress is both inevitable and always preferable. It was not simply swapping out the sacred and replacing it with the secular, it assumed religious overtones itself. Technological progress was not merely an idea, it became a faith. Sure, we always seemed to lose something in the exchange, but the promised rewards were too great to ignore. So we set aside the way of life we used to know and stepped aboard a train that promised to keep going further and faster. It did not disappoint, in fact it took us further and faster than any of us could have anticipated. It took us on such a dizzying journey we haven’t ever had a chance to question the initial assumption that technological progress will always make us happier. When something came along that made us stop to think—like losing a job because of technology, or losing the ability to engage in meaningful contact with friends and neighbors—we only had enough time to repeat the mantra that technology is inevitable before moving on to something else.

We once lived on human time. Then we created machinery and were to a degree forced to live on machine time. Alarm clocks woke us up, traffic lights told us when we could proceed, and lunch whistles told us when we could eat. Now we have created microchips and live on digital time, where everything is broken up into fractions of seconds. We have become anxious we might miss that new message, the next “Breaking News” story on TV, or a response to whatever we just posted on Facebook. We have adapted, but it is not a conscious choice we made. The excuse is—it has always been—that progress is inevitable. I would suggest that what takes us away from feeling and experiencing life more fully is not progress. I would also suggest that nothing is inevitable except that which we resign ourselves to.

Technology is fashioning our behavior, we are not fashioning it. We leap to the sound of the beep the way a dog is trained by a clapper. I’m not suggesting this is some nefarious plot devised by a secret cabal, though I could certainly see the danger of it being used in that way. I’m simply positing that it is a trap that we have fallen into. It is a habit which has spread across society, not unlike the way smoking did a century or so ago. And like smoking, we can gradually come to see how it adversely affects our wellbeing and discourage the practice.

Technology is a tool we created to make our lives better. We are its owners, its masters. It exists to serve us. It has no will or drive of its own. It is up to us to decide what we want it to be. I would suggest that we have forgotten that truth. We have abandoned our choices in the matter and now we have virtually everything we do being recorded digitally through cameras, cookies, or a myriad of other digital footprints we knowingly or unknowingly leave behind. More than most any other invention of mankind, digital technology has the potential to both help and harm us. If we do not pay it sufficient mind, if we are too busy checking Twitter to take control of the digital world we daily live in, there are assuredly others who will shape that world the way they see fit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just heard a beep.

In Between The Tick And The Tock

“There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past”

I could be happy but for the ticking of the infernal clock which intrudes upon my silence, signaling the end of all things. Why must I leave, why can’t I stay here? I could be happy here, although I long for what once was. I would be willing to forsake the past if only you would let me stay where I am.

Once I was unaware of the sound, once I could tune it out. Once the gaps in between the tick and the tock were large enough to rest within, lose myself. Now a world once full of “someday maybe” and "one more time" is being replaced with “never again”.

Time is even more fearsome than death, for death can occasionally be cheated. Time can never be cheated. It is a vast machine that never breaks down, never misses a beat. It kills and then kills again. It brings death and then leaves the living no time to mourn. Blessed is the dumb animal that awakens each morning to a new day, unaware that it is being hunted, stalked. It is senseless of what time has taken from it, sees each new day as no different from the rest. Even as death approaches the animal perceives it as just another sleep.

Time sits at my table, unbidden, as I eat. It chews casually, cuts each bite into tiny portions. I can hear the cursed sound of its knife and fork hitting the plate at steady intervals as it cuts into the meat, the sound driving me mad. It eats, slowly, methodically. And in eating it robs from everyone else at the table, not allowing anyone else to eat their fill of any course. It steals from my plate before I can finish or become sated, clears the dishes even as it continues to chew away. It treats the dishes carelessly, breaking many. Sets that belonged together are no longer whole. Heirlooms passed down from generations are slowly stripped of their value.

And still it eats.  It eats and it eats and it never rises from the table, never finishes, consumes all.

It slips into my bed at night once I have closed my eyes, so that every time I open them I see it staring at me. It lies there quietly but it never sleeps, just stares at me like a vulture patiently waiting. And in the morning it shrieks at me until I awaken, proud to know it has ripped one more day from my grasp.

It toys with us when we are children. The gaps between each second were once so large that the waiting for the next seemed unbearable. Sometimes it seemed not to move at all. In the distance between the tick and the tock were vast fields of play, large enough to hold the sum of all the days now allotted to me.

And as a youth I spent such moments like a wastrel, though, to be fair, there was no way I could have saved them. Now the gap between the swinging of the pendulum has shrunk, or I have grown too large, or slow. Now I cannot seem to fit into any of them, where once they were so wide apart I could string up a hammock between them and rest in their shade.

Once they were of no consequence, like flies that buzzed about me as I went from task to task. Now they sting like wasps. Now I walk through life, acutely aware that one of them shall be my end, each a bullet randomly fired until the one comes with my name on it. For time never ends, but every timer has its final moment.

And still I hear the horrible rhythm, calm and patient, deadly and indifferent.

Daydream Believer And A Memory Of The Past

“There is no unstoppable force but time, no impenetrable object except that which separates us from the past.”

Please play the music as you read this post.

     I was nine years old and on my way from school to my position as crossing guard. I was moving quickly, intent on getting to my post before anyone else did. But more than that, I moved quickly because life was coursing through me. It was a day warmer than we had experienced for a while—the first real day of spring—and all of the world felt alive to me. The breeze, still cool but no longer biting, excited skin that was still sensitive, not yet numbed to the outside world by work and age.

     It was then that I first experienced it, the awareness of the miracle of being alive. Oh, surely I’d experienced the miracle before, experienced it in the way any frolicking young animal experiences it in the very movement of its body. But this was the first time I connected it to thought. I was alive and aware of the mystery of such a thing. And being aware, I felt more alive than I ever had before. I half-skipped, half ran down the road, and as I did so I sang, such was the intensity of feeling. The song was Daydream Believer by The Monkees, a song anyone of my generation will be familiar with, a wonderfully sweet, bouncy happy song.

     Special moments like that stick out in the memory. I’ll never forget that feeling of being young and having more energy than I had tasks to waste it upon, energy that seemed inexhaustible.

     Fast forward thirty-five years. I was coming home from work and heard the news that Davy Jones had died. Once again, anyone of my generation will know that he sang Daydream Believer. Hearing the news made me think back to the child who ran down the street on an early spring day singing a song that expressed all the joy in his heart. In that moment I realized that once again another of those impenetrable barriers that time likes to put between us and what we once knew and were had been erected. Never again would I hear this song and think of youth and new beginnings. Or rather I would, and then I would be reminded that it resides in that unreachable land that is called the past.

     You see, even though The Monkees as a band had already come and gone on the music scene by the time I was nine, the individuals were still quite young in the grand scheme of things. They existed in that world of endless possibilities and endless seasons, a world that only a child can see. There, things that get bad only get bad for a while before the natural order is resumed and everything once good is good once more. There are endless years in front of you for your favorite team to finally make the playoffs, for you to write that book and make that album and fight that war. There was time yet, time for The Beatles to get back together and make music again. Time for Greg Cook to recover from his injuries and become the quarterback he was destined to become. And the more the time passes the more remarkable will be the comeback when it finally occurs. All good things happen in the future.

     But then those events start to happen that make you realize that some things will never come to pass. John Lennon is shot and killed by a deranged fan and suddenly The Beatles will never be The Beatles again, except in memory. My uncle dies and I know I’ll never see him as long as I live. My grandmother’s home, the very heart and soul of a large and loving family, is sold to strangers who remodel it and strip it of its sacredness.

     They come ever more quickly it seems, the reminders large and small. The closing of a favorite restaurant. The final episode of your favorite show, the retirement of a favorite coworker, the house being built on the open lot that used to be your ball field.

     The older we get the more time takes from us. And as time passes and things become more dear, the harder it will be to say goodbye when the time comes. True, new things and people come into our lives to replace the old, but I’ve always been loyal and hate to think people are so easy to replace. In my heart I’ve never been able to let go. The people and things that have been dear to me will always remain so, even though I can never reach them except in thought and memory.

     But here’s the thing. I still feel that joy I felt as a nine year old singing a song on the first day of spring. And if that first moment of self-awareness made the feeling of being alive even more powerful, then the ensuing years of thought and reflection have made it more intense still. And like a child who loves his stuffed animal all the more despite the missing eye and the hole or two and the mange, perhaps I more fully appreciate that miracle of life that I first became aware of all those years ago. Only, occasionally, I need to be reminded that it can only be enjoyed when is fully in the moment. Because that’s the thing: we are given so many blessings we can never fully give back. We can only appreciate the moment as best we can. And when it is gone, do not grieve for it but embrace the time you have now, before it leaves to join all that has come before.

     Those memories we hold dear, let us not forget them but keep them as reminders of all the beauty and wonder that life brings our way.

The Eternal Now

Here's a short little bit of a book I'm slowly accumulating as I write other books. I have different names for it, including "The Laws Of Perception":

Patience

The journey shall no doubt test your patience from time to time. We have become accustomed to the ticking of the clock, the whistle that summons us to work and tells us when it is time to go. We are constantly reminded of the passing of time, of the value of time and the evils of spending it frivolously. But in the marking out of our lives in grids and blocks of months, days, hours, and minutes, we lose track of the actual flow. We atomize time until the actual living, the actual essence of the flow is chopped up. And as we chop up time into smaller and smaller pieces we begin to feel like none of these little instants are big enough to accomplish anything at all. In all of the pieces, the seconds and the minute and the hours and the days we lose track of the now, which is where everything happens. So take the opportunity to experience the now. Do you feel it? You are alive, and life is a miracle. Can you feel it? Allow yourself to do so, because that is why you are here. This is the now, you are experiencing the now. You are alive now. You feel good in the now.

And in the time you have taken to read that last paragraph, you experienced many nows. It is a different “now” as you read this than the “now” I first mentioned. At least that is the way it appears to one who is concerned with the clock or the calendar. In fact, the now is ever constant and never changing. The now that you experience is the same now as you have always experienced. It is a place outside of time, a destination to which you can always return. It is where the aged you can discover the youthful you. While all the world changes, the now does not. It is a place within you of peace, faith, security, truth. It is a oneness. It is a spring that never runs dry.

You have time, my friend, it does not have you. You have time for all of the things you want to do, despite all the things you feel you need to do. It is a matter of perception, it is the difference between pursuing what you desire and fleeing from what you fear. The energy required for both is the same but the motivation makes the world of difference.

So please come with me on this journey inward. Together we will find the things that truly matter to us, beauty and truth and joy and purpose and a sense of being where we are meant to be. The path will not always be straight, direct, but no journey is. Sometimes it will feel as if you were lost or going in the wrong direction. Sometimes it will feel that the destination is not worth the journey. But more often you will find yourself distracted from the course. You will occasionally waken to the reality that you have somehow veered far from the path and wondered how you had forgotten about it. And finding it again you will realize the feeling it gives you is no different than the feeling it gave you forty years ago. The now is no different now than it was then. And finding it, you will realize you have returned home. When you are in the now, you are where you are meant to be. And despite what it may sometimes seem, you are always in the now.

The Fifteen Hour Work Week

“With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody.”

     This was written in 1905 by Jack London, a hundred ten years ago.

     What has happened since then? Mankind has invented the airplane. He has invented the cartridge pen and later the ball point pen. He has invented the electric typewriter, the word processor and now the computer. Where it once took weeks for news to circle the world we can now receive it almost instantly. Documents that once needed to travel by rail, by ship and by horse and buggy are now zipped by satellites effortlessly and instantly.

     And the machines of industry have increased almost unbelievably as well. The machine I now operate is twice as efficient as the one I used to operate, is ten times more efficient than the ones in the memories of people I work with. Easily, production has increased tenfold since the time Jack London wrote those words, proclaiming that there was no need for able bodied workers to work more than two or three hours a day. That should put our workday at somewhere between 12 and 18 minutes.

     So what has happened since then? How did we go from a married man working 50-60 hours a week to a couple averaging 100 hours or more a week?

     There are the labor saving devices we have to pay for, I’ll give you that. A washer and a dryer, dishwashers and garage door openers save us some time working at home. But they save physical labor, the kind that is healthy and for the most part stress relieving. Because we now sit at desks for 50 hours a week instead of doing physical labor, we now have to run to the gym after our 10 hour work day and get a workout in. So in the long run our riding lawn mowers and our snow blowers have not really saved us any time.

     What has happened to us since then? How did we end up a society that pays someone to walk our dogs so we can drive our SUVs to the gym to hit the treadmill for an hour? How did we get here from there?

     Sure, we all have televisions nowadays. Really big ones. But a hundred years ago, people would go out to see a play or sit on the porch and talk to our neighbors as they happened by, or played cards with parents or children. Was that a good trade we made?

     Granted we have food from all over the world now, and we can eat the most tropical of fruits in the middle of winter. But very few of us now have grandma’s preserves sitting on our shelves. Very few of us eat vegetables picked fresh from the gardens we or someone we know lovingly tended. Very few of us would even know how to raise food from the ground. Very few of us would know how to prepare an animal, to either raise livestock or hunt for our own dinner.

     We’ve lost something and I don’t know how we let it happen. And we’re all in such a hurry to get things done, I’m worried we’ll never find the time to wonder how it all went wrong. Life should be better than this. We should demand the benefits that our labor saving devices have supposedly given us. We should be humans again, take time to smell the roses, spend time with those we love, do the things that are worth doing and ask the questions that need to be asked:

     So once again I ask you--if you can find the time to come up with an answer—what happened?