What is the world’s biggest problem? Perhaps it is our inability to keep up with it. The world, I mean.
Inventions are often touted as a means to save time. Conveyor belts in factories drive assembly lines, while escalators and elevators transport people up and down.
Inventors built cars, trains, and planes to make life easier. With what result?
Our bonus miles earn airport security evaluations, baggage checks, and a trudge to the gate. Fellow frustrated travelers become obstacles — things not human — as if intended to disrupt everyone’s pace.
Within our intimidating cities, rush hour now covers much of the day. The distance from your town to downtown has increased. Overflow traffic creates more opportunities for gawkers, rubbernecking, and those who simply gape.
Lanes get added, and more drivers fill them. Highway restoration due to overuse is ongoing. Choose your season: winter or road-repair?
Do we save time? We have more books, computerized PDFs, blogs, and essays; more announcers, critics, podcasts, and talking heads. Everyone has something to say.
How does one determine what is worth reading and which voices reward attention? How do we distinguish the essential from the inessential, truth from fiction?
The wealth of medical information is ever-expanding. Physicians are often hospital employees on their own treadmill of high-speed patient appointments.
To our benefit, they are experts in various categories of practice, including dermatology, radiology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and urology, among others.
For the sick person, however, an appointment becomes the first step in a slow-motion relay race to multiple practitioners, before reaching the right destination.
Way back, doctors used a chalkboard for patients to sign in and wait. They were admitted to the office in the order of their arrival.
Telephones, Zoom, email, and texting enable employees to be available and respond to communications at all times and from any location, whether at home or away.
The days of cow bells or buzzers to signal the start and end of the workday are long past. Sunrise and sunset suggest the time, but not your work schedule.
The machines drive us, the calls and messages haunt us, and spam inundates us. The speed of change, the slippery ground, and the madness of kings create our Age of Uncertainty.
Should seeking balance unbalance us? One begins with required tasks, but who can tell us what matters and predict the future we need to fashion a plan?
Houses of worship, parents, scientists, and teachers carry down-sized authority. The competitor chooses the tune and the boss leads the dance. The government sells a witch’s brew of domination, newly manufactured each day.
Many people are held hostage by their phones, drawn by the camera or a person on a call rather than the people nearby.
Does anyone treat selfie addicts? Life has become like a walk through Alice’s looking glass, then the next, then the next, as we search for ourselves and the days ahead.
Do we “lay waste to our powers,” as William Wordsworth wrote around 1802? Doubtless, we find new ways these days.
What do we miss?
Thinking, reading, and studying were typical on the ocean liners and railroad transportation of times past. Teachers required memorization of poetry by their public school students into the mid-20th century.
An ease of life not dominated by on-time performance was the human experience before clocks and trains made timeliness possible.
Personal expectation of clocked efficiency has become a stick for self-flagellation.
Reading old books allows one to learn something new with each reading, provided the material is well-chosen and relevant. Making music was once a common practice at home. Telling stories enriches both the speaker and the listener.
Not each acquaintance should be considered part of your network or the kind of person who will promote your future success.
Success, I repeat, or call it wage-slavery, as you wish. Evaluate its importance and the cost in human terms, and the gain or loss in joy.
Talking to and getting to know neighbors on hot nights outdoors would be novel. Everyone cheered the arrival of air-conditioned coolness, but such conversations disappeared.
The gated, guarded communities of today keep us further apart.
We must search beyond ourselves and see into the depths of another’s sadness, past what he cannot utter. Embrace this stranger, as Leviticus 19:34 of the Hebrew Bible reminds us.
Beware the much-needed, self-imposed distraction as a substitute for reinventing your life. Meditate, too—every day.
Take up sewing if it’s a new craft for you. Build something with your hands.
Eliminate tasks. Slow down. Say no. Learn more. Stand up. Beat back your fear. Do not try to please everyone.
Maintain old friendships and make new ones. Write cards or letters in cursive. Play chess.
Hug the people and animals you love. Speak of love with those you cannot live without. Speak of it with everyone.
Pray for them, too.
I don’t do all of these, and I’ve listed too many.
Escape the grasp of our mechanized, categorized, bullet-sprayed world.
The Chinese proverb tells us, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
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The first image is that of A Nepalese Grandmother Preparing Food inside a Traditional Kitchen. This is an edited version of Mithun Kunwa’s work, as adapted by Radomianin and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
The following item is Metropolis, 1917, a painting by the German artist George Grosz. Finally, Elephant at Sunset in Amboseli, Early November 2024, by the photographic artist Laura Hedien, with her kind permission, Laura Hedien Official Website.
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