WILearned
patreon
Quote from "Reinventing the Wheel"
🕑 Added 2017-03-13 03:51:00 +0000 UTC Hey everyone, I thought I'd share a quote from a book my brother recommended: Peter Hershock's "Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age"No particular suggestion I'm implying by sharing this with you, just thought it was a rather eloquent way to describe the "fastness" of modern life:
We are aware, for example, that the pitch of our day-to-day activity is such that we often need a full two weeks of vacation before we can slow down enough to truly enjoy the sunrise or fully appreciate the silver play of moonlight on the ocean. If such periods of temporal detoxification were frequent and ofconveniently short duration, perhaps this "need" wouldn't be particularly remarkable. But they are not. We simply do not have the time to appreciate things. Tragically, it is a rare day that we dwell in any moment long enough for it to blossom in a fully meaningful way.
Recourse to various drugs--including but by no means limited to nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol--has become endemic to our way of life as a means of either "getting up to speed" or "unwinding" enough to balance our energy and offset the effecs of day-to-day life pressures. But finally they are manifestly insufficient to return a sense of meaning to our most common, daily affairs. Like our medical practices, they treat the symptoms, but not the originanting conditions of our discomfort. For the most part, we now accept this. The mundane chores and duties we take care of a matter of course are not supposed to be meaningful. That is one of the cold, hard facts of adulthood and self-sufficiency. But this fact, like all others, is deeply value-laden. Our control-biased and technologically accelerated pace of life is conducive to a reducation of both temporal depth and the quality of our attention and experience for the same reason that highway traffic signs are big and simple--at the speed we are passing them, they would not be able to effectively direct our attention otherwise. The faster we go, the less meaning any given sign can occasion.
Granted this, we might still object that the point, after all, is to get where we're going, not to take in sights along the way. That seems reasonable for some kinds of trips, but not for all, and almost certainly not for the one from birth to death. While some us do better than others, we seldom clear our body-mind systems entirely of the toxically attenuated forms of teporality and experience characterizing especially our work-centered lives, but increasingly common in our patterns of etertainment as well. Our pace of life not only makes it difficult to enjoy meaningful relationships in our daily affairs, it subjects us to effects not unlike the g-forces we experience on carnival rides. Only the effects are not short-lived and exciting, but chronic. In result, we suffer a wide range of both organic and psychic distortions gathered dogether under the medical umbrella of "stress."
Comments
That's an awesome analogy, Niels. I agree that moving is a more natural/preferable state compared to arriving or standing still. I recently was climbing Mt. Takao over here with a friend and the climb up was much more enjoyable than the brief satisfaction of making it to the top.
Niels Philbert
Great snippet and the journey/destination is always a worthy thing to think about – in all aspects of life. Recently I've been pondering the idea of when an airplane is in a "natural state"; on the ground or in the air. Sure it is standing still, when on the ground, which us humans often think is equal to being "grounded". And being in the air equals moving very fast, which most humans would consider stressfull. But if we look at the design of the plane, 90 % of it is based on it being in the air. So maybe - for a plane - being in the air is the "natural state"? And maybe the same goes for some of us; moving is a more natural state than sitting/arriving.
