I pass a rose so beautiful in its placement in the shy sunlight of the morn. Yellow with red tips. I feel a loss, a spur of anxiety, I don't have my phone. I can't take a picture, pooh. Soon I pass the wash out with sunflowers growing straight out from the flooded waters. Where is my phone?! I have to get this and share it. Everyone ought to see it. Yes, this moment needs to be captured and shared....
Go back about fifteen minutes, I had grabbed my iPod and headphones when I was heading out for the morning run. Run. The iPod didn't work even though I swear I had recently charged it. Shoulder shrug, it is about 10 years old or something, maybe it is shot. So I walk. I speed walk because I don't have the tempo of Lady Gaga to keep my knees pumping. This is not a bad idea as it does allow me to notice what I am passing. Beautiful roses, sunflowers with their toes submerged in the water and geese flying Vs to the South. For a moment, I am irritate that I don't have a camera so I can share the beauty.
Oh, wait, it is my beauty, it is my moment, I don't need to share it. I am the only one here at this moment noticing and that is complete and perfect. As I continue my 3 mile walk around the Dry Creek greenway up to Lager Reservoir, past four schools, and a new city park, I think about the "why" of my agitation that I had no electrical devices in my presence.
Recently, I have been involved in many conversations and exposed to research and ideas of the effect of electronics in our world. School has started up and there is a blossoming of irritated messages of social media about switching over to electronics for reading, text books, math, testing, and other assignments. In my opinion after studying how the brain works through research, art teacher education, and my own brain surgery recovery, I concur that children do not learn as well from electronic devices. I know that most children, especially those favoring their right brain functions like space and intuition, learn by feeling, touching, doing. Typing in a "symbol" or two to make a word is NOT the same as drawing a "symbol" to make a word.
During an evening gathering with good friends Homa, Kristin, and Maureen, we discussed this topic in great detail. We came to a consensus that books and writing needed to remain and continue to be the primary source of learning in the schools especially for the elementary children. "Let me just ask this," I say,"is it possible that our children learning from the beginning of their lives to use technology in they're learning necessary for the Human race? Is it important for them to adopt and therefore learn differently then we did for their generations that follow them?"
Think about it. Most of my friends are between the ages of 35-45. We are the X-generation. In general, computers were these mysterious boxes that were placed in rows in a converted room near the library in our high school. Personally, I wasn't really sold on the need for a personal computer to take to college. Eventually, I found that typing my reports on my MacClassic in my dorm room was much better then the computer labs other folks had to haul resources and binders of notes through snow covered walk ways. However, I did have to seek the EEs who might be able to get these precious items off my disc and print on their printers. And, email! What the heck? You, Colorado State University, are giving me this sequence of letters, and I am supposed to figure out how to "log on" daily to get memos. Whatever.
Flash forward twenty years, and I find myself composing conversations I need to have in my head for the next moment I can pull out my phone and text someone. And, lets not even mention the hour every night we are glued to our devices checking the junk mail folders to make sure we didn't miss a coupon, following the news, and wishing happy birthday on Facebook to people we last saw 20 years ago. According to my office-worker husband and friends, they are bombarded by hundreds of thousands of emails a day. Communications that used to be held in the office or on an international phone conference, are now being held at the dinner table in front of little Hansel and Gretel. Yes, it is awesome I can speak to my phone and get information I need or dial a friend. Well, that is if "HE" can take requests at that current location and moment.
Life has moved forward. l have been studying "life" for as long as I can remember. Why am I me? I know there is something here with me, a Being without the Human body. What is going on? How is this important to us as a globe of Beings in Human bodies? My quest for global understanding began in junior high as I watched Indian TV at my friend Radhika Kannan, now Danesh, with her grandmother as I stopped by her house on the walk home from school. I learned about her rituals of body care and ornamentation as she got ready for a dance performance( She still teaches dance at Alarippu Dance School, California.) In high school there was my best friend Lisa Gouchnaurer (now Wagner) with her Japanese mother who parented completely different then my mother and had served awesome dinners. Then there was Kirk Akahoshi who was, at the time, the smartest person I knew. No, I don't mean math, for that I have no clue. I mean he was a thinker, a ponderer, someone else wondering about global and personal concepts. We'd go out to dinner and talk about how French eat rabbit, Buddhism, Christianity, and how things are really all just about the same when you get down to the nuts and bolts, or yin and yang, that hold us all together. College was Dave... hum, what was his last name? I know he got married to a Hawaiian helicopter pilot on the same day in 2000, as I did. Mitchell, I think. We both read the Celestine Prohpcies by James Redfield and "book clubbed" them with a couple of other folks. And Chad, the archeologist, who spent most of his time on dig sites in Wyoming and South Dakota. He tutored me in geology as memorizing minerial names is not my strong point. With his knowledge of how this stone and sediment layer became this way and therefore got its name, made sense.
Books, web-video media, Oprah Winfrey (yes, she has been pivotal in pointing fingers at wonderful thinkers and writers of our time) and continuous conversation with my brilliant mom, Christine Broers, added spindles to my wheels of conciousness. All these spindles in my complex, jumbled up noggin is filtered and stitched together during my yoga practice. Meditation during this practice is pivotal for working it all out and finding connections. The Knowing. I just know.
The other day, my mother set me a You Tube link of Gregg Braden (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=whKrENfkMEM) Woo, did this getting me thinking. No, Knowing. All of the spindles started to find permanent homes in my wheel. After two hours of listening while I was painting, I just wanted to jump up and say, "YES, that was totally what I was thinking. Now, I get it." Do be aware that if you choose to listen to the talk it may not speak to you in the same way as me journey to here is not the same as yours. The one nugget I prescribe you contemplate is to live forward with wonder and love.
How does this all relate to the anxiety over not capturing that moment that was mine, personal, only for me, and sharing it on my cell phone camera? I have begun the think of how technology has made a difference in my life. And, how it effects my children who have known it since they were conceived. Let's think about their children. Lets think about the children born after 2050. Doesn't it take seven generations for things to change. Let us face it. If we are talking about electronics, it is here currently shaping us Humans in ways we had not known before. Or, have we?
I, for one, vow to follow my heart solo more. Loose my tight grasp on what has happened and what used to work in education and wonder with curiosity what is happening now. I vow to let go of the fear; the fear that it is not the same as it is not. I will live forward fearless. Live forward from the heart.
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