Locked in and Engaged
It was five-something in the morning and I was driving my son to a swim meet when the BBC’s World Book Club came on the radio. Too tired to turn the dial, we listened for a while to a discussion about why Norway is such a great place to be a writer. Towards the end, however, the panel expressed some trepidation about the future of Norwegian literature due to the fact that kids in the country aren’t reading as much as they used to. The thought was that everyone was too stimulated by the apps on their phones, which left no time to be bored. And that if you weren’t bored, you wouldn’t read.
I thought about that some because we’d recently experienced a four week long deep freeze here in mid-Missouri and despite almost never going outside, I’d barely made a dent in my stack of books and had not written any of these daily whatever-they-ares that I intended to for this upcoming season. Certainly the phone is to blame for my reading deficit (though you should see how many crossword puzzles I’ve completed), but why wasn’t I writing?
I wrote previously in this space that it’s while I am running that I compose these dailies in my head. So my aha moment was that because we were experiencing a four week long deep freeze, I hadn’t been running outside. Instead, I’d been using the newly installed office Peloton (shoutout and welcome to Permanent Equity’s new director of health Alex) to get my work in. And while that is fantastic exercise, you don’t have the chance to do a lot of composing in your head when Jess King is using “sassy and spicy” language to compel you to add resistance while Megan Thee Stallion thumps in the background.
The point is that I don’t necessarily agree that you need to be bored to have and explore ideas (I don’t think I’m that when I’m running), but that you do need to give your mind time and space to wander. And if we’re locked in and engaged all of the time, which is exactly the behavior our apps are optimized for, our minds can’t and won’t get that time and space.
After all, you can’t re-engage unless you disengage, but you also can’t disengage unless you’re mostly engaged. So figure that balance out.
– Tim
