I had a wonderful vacation, but after settling in a little it's nice to be back. We spent the first week camping in North Conway and visiting friends in Montreal, and then went with them to Isle La Motte, Vermont, where we rented a house for 2 weeks. Being away, I was very aware of my relationship to technology. You could get wireless internet from across the street if you sat on the front porch of the house, and our iphones kept us connected (though very, very slowly) to the newspaper and our home email. So I was, comparatively, untethered. It took a while, though-the first week of vacation I was constantly posting on Facebook-Adah eats sand! Isaiah manages not to break an arm on the swing set! The sunset is beautiful! (somehow everything on Facebook seems to need exclamation points). By the end, I'd cut back-but couldn't resist putting up a picture of the Lake Chaplain duct tape boat races (it's what it sounds like-boats, made of duct tape, piloted mostly by teenagers).
I thought about it a lot--in one way, how nice to be able to share; my mother, visiting her sister in Sweden, could see what we were doing in New Hampshire. At the same time, when someone responds, you're back to the device; looking at what clever thing someone else has posted in response to your cleverness. Kind of narcissistic. My pile of books reflected my uneasiness.
My first read was Hamlet's Blackberry. Unfortunately, the title turned out to be more clever then the book, which was pretty superficial. I liked the historical perspective, though-it's about how innovation has challenged, and helped, human flourishing over the years. And every time, the next big thing is touted as the means to a good life, and every time, people get panicked about how technology is changing them. The early Greeks were stressed out about writing the same way many of us get stressed out over email. Same for the printing press, same for the erasable "tables" people used to jot down notes (Hamlet's device, of the title). Another book, along the same theme of discontent with contemporary frenzy, was lent to me by Gene Burkart: Helena Norberg-Hodge's Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. Applying 16 years of living in Ladakh, she writes about what happened to the "Little Tibet" region of northern India when international development set in. A formerly placid, contented society became infected with acquisitiveness, insecurity, etc. It was published almost 20 years ago so I would be interested in a second edition!
Though I turned to both books out of the same impulse--a kind of questioning of contemporary technological society--their underlying approaches couldn't be more different. In the one, technology comes out the victor--we just have to learn to manage it rather than being managed by it. In the other, technology was the problem, pretty much from start to finish ("human scaled" projects, however, like solar ovens were cool). Both, though, offered a vision of an alternative--the Ladakh book, certainly more so-that another way is possible.
It all comes back to the essential question: what do we value? How do we create, to totally contort a phrase from Dorothy Day, a life in which it is easier to do what we really want? What disciplines can we adopt and what choices can we make to encourage us to remember what it was that we really wanted?
I need church for that--and I'm glad to be back.
Blessings,
Sara+
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