I’ve started a new book, Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. I’ve been intrigued for a number of years with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Do I really get more done when I’m engaged with five simultaneous projects? Or what about the four books on my nightstand? Would I be better off reading one at a time?
Johann’s book starts out with the author taking his godson to Memphis to visit Graceland. When he was nine, the godson was obsessed with Elvis Presley and ten years later Johann finally took him to Graceland. His godson had had a rough few years, dropping out of school at fifteen, struggling to carry on a conversation without being distracted. He spent all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens.
Why should I pick up this book at this particular time? Curiously, a good friend from Spain was in town a few weeks ago. As a travel agent she’s been thinking about coordinating some groups to come to Tennessee for a “Music Tour” hitting the highlights of Nashville and Memphis. We spent one day in Memphis, and she wanted to go to Graceland, a place I’d never visited.
My friend and I (as well as Johann) all had the same impressions of Graceland. It was lifeless with much of the charm taken out of the estate by the interjection of technology. Instead of having tour guides in each of the rooms of the mansion, we were issued individual iPads and earphones so that we could take ourselves on a “self-guided” tour. As we moved from room to room, our iPad voice encouraged us to “swipe left” to move to the next room. No one spoke as we were all watching the rooms on our iPads and listening through our earbuds. Noone was really looking at the actual rooms we were in.
Johann’s observations: “Occasionally somebody would look away from the iPad and I felt a flicker of hope, and I would try to make eye contact with them, to shrug, to say, ‘Hey, we’re the only ones looking around, we’re the ones who traveled thousands of miles and decided to actually see the things in front of us’—but every time this happened I realized they had broken contact with the iPad only to take out their phones and snap a selfie.”
I want to start paying attention again to the real world around me and the people in it. I’d like to think deeply and engage in deep conversations about important things and not just the things that the news media thinks I need to be upset about.
I don’t know where this journey will take me, but I hope it’s back to a better world than the one we have now.
Blessings, my friend,
Agatha