A very interesting article by a parent who believes that you have to be connected to the world through technology, that smartphones are not necessarily evil...but who also wants to avoid potentially dangerous distractions. Read on--and read the whole thing, it's interesting:
*************************************
It’s been exactly one year since I wrote Distracted Living.
In that piece, I described a night when I left my daughter alone in the
tub while I went to start the shower for her brother. I stopped to look
at an e-mail. It was just two minutes, but it could have been a
lifetime. She had fallen asleep in the bathtub. I could have lost her.
I had no idea that my story of that night would resonate with so
many. What was it that we were responding to? How it is that so many men
and women across the country saw themselves in that moment? What was
taking over all of us?
I have revisited this question many times over a long, wonderful, and
exhausting year. I believe there were two parts to my story that night.
The first was a feeling that I believe resonates with many of us — we
feel frustration or boredom in the day-to-day minutiae of parenting, and
we use our phones as an escape from these hard feelings. The other
piece of it was a desire to operate much like our phones, to try to do
multiple things at once with increasing efficiency. Perhaps it’s not
just that we’re glued to our phones, but rather that we’re becoming
them.
I regret that after all this time, I still have more questions than
answers. Are our lives supposed to have a headline, a main story that we
could, in effect, be distracted from? Or are we supposed to be living
in multiple places, spaces, and stories at all times? Were we designed
that way? Or are we adapting, literally evolving, from an evolutionary
place in terms of how we operate, based on these little devices we
almost always have in our hands, next to us, in our back pocket, in
front of our faces, on our nightstands, never more than two inches from
us.
I have come to realize that my desire to multi-task stems from a very
human place, not just an overly aggressive attachment or dependency on
technology. You see, what I missed in my post one year ago was that I
pinned the source of this inability to single task, this feeling of
chronic distractedness, as directly correlated with the rise of
smartphones and tablets. It was easy to blame this feeling on
technology, which felt like the likely candidate.
Sure, I think there is some truth to that – that there is some
sinister underpinning to the increasing scope of this stuff in our
lives. But what I undervalued is what drives that increasing scope: you
and me. Human desires, struggles, boredom, frustration. I wasn’t just
externally distracted by other people and places and things that needed
me, I was equally seeking distractions in a very human quest to evade
tricky feelings through enough apps and clicks.
Over the past several months, I have taken some steps to increase my
comfort level with the role of technology in my life, and to minimize
distractions. I have specific moments in my day when phones and tablets
are far away. These include: meals, driving, bathing, and bedtime
rituals with our children. I have deleted all social media apps from my
phone. If I want to check something I need to do so through Internet
Explorer which is more cumbersome and less user-friendly on a mobile
device. This is good because it discourages me from doing so too often
throughout the day. Perhaps most importantly, all of my notifications
have been disabled. It doesn’t hum or rattle or beep or anything. It
just lies there and does nothing, the way a piece of plastic should.
But this feeling of struggling to single task, I would be lying if I
said it didn’t still persist. It is hard to be okay with letting things
drop: being late, or messy or uncomfortable or letting little ones feel
impatient. It is hard to feel that you cannot help them all or do it
all. It is a hard truth borne from a slowly evolving realization that
doing less can, in fact, mean more.
I recently read an article detailing a scientific study that people who read books, or who engage in “slow reading,”
are more able to retain information than if the same thing is read on
an e-reader. The authors write: “As we increasingly read on screens, our
reading habits have adapted to skim text rather than really absorb the
meaning.” This perfectly sums up this feeling that I continue to
struggle with: this feeling of trying to do too much at any one time;
this feeling of skimming through life, rather than absorbing the
meaning.
Do you know this feeling? It is the difference between sitting at the
table versus being at it, or putting them to bed versus tucking them
in. It is the difference between eating your food versus tasting it or
raising your kids versus enjoying them. Are you truly there in mind and
body, or are you skimming?
Honestly, it’s harder than it looks. One year later, I still fight
the impulse to avoid hard feelings by looking down, or to just multitask
my way through the hours. Each day, I am at war with myself over the
misguided and culturally reinforced notion that having it all, in fact,
means doing it all. It is a hard fight. But I continue to wage my own
daily struggle with intention.
I fight knowing that this life and the people I love are worth it;
knowing how much better and brighter it will be to put down a world
filled with mindless to-dos and distractions that glow at me from within
my phone, to truly stay present in the world I am blessed enough to be
in.
Meer, a mother of three, lives in New England, where she writes her blog, My Jenn-eration. You can also find her on twitter @JennMeer.
******************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment