Poles Apart

Yesterday I seemed to see and feel one of the great tensions that is currently pulling the world apart.

In the morning I read a NYT article (Hooked on Gadgets...) on the mental costs of computer generated eye-candy, follow-your-interest hypertext, instant gratification, and constant short-burst communications in a hundred different directions. The upshot is a brain that has lost the “literate habit” of sustained focus. It’s like a learned attention deficit disorder. Some authors (Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, for instance) feel that this sustained focus habit is responsible for most of the creative progress made to date by the human race. So, perhaps not a good thing to lose.

Then, in the evening, I attended a Native American chant and fire ceremony at the Birdsong Peace Chamber.

For 90 minutes we watched a small fire burn down to ashes, spoke a little about what this brought up for us, and then chanted for the positive resolution of things like the earthquake in Haiti and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Talk about slow, quiet, sustained, and reflective. In the progress of the little fire, I watched my life energy spring from small flames into the blaze of maturity and then dwindle ultimately down to coals and then ashes. I wondered exactly where I was in this progress. The ashes, the bones of the fire, seemed to speak of peace, of a life burned fully and completely to its best possible conclusion. Would that be me—my life? Somehow I felt it would.

I was struck by the contrast, the huge deep chasm between these two experiences. The chanting fire ceremony pulled me together. It immersed me in something deep and large and old that calms my rushing blood and connects me to the billion year old lifespan of the planet I live on. The article in the morning reminded me how agile and yet also distracted I can become. How, in some sense, I am sucked into the glowing screens with their instant, easy, external realization of that which I used to use my own imagination much more to reach for and create.

I wanted to suggest we chant also for those so immersed in, so raised on multitasking that they may never have such an experience. But I was too quiet to talk. What is gained? What is lost? How much of which kind of use of our brains will help pull our human-dominated world together?