Perhaps the most evil thing about humanity isn't our propensity for malevolence but our ability to get distracted.
The other day I toured Henry Ford's replica of Edison's laboratory inside Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I was mentally transported to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Thomas Edison and his team created history in the form of invention after invention and gave me the artificial light by which I write this.
At the Village, I discovered that Edison and I could be friends. Near the historic buildings they have character actors playing the parts of these fantastic people, and Edison seemed like the kind of guy I could get along with (assuming he was even close to still being alive, of course). He was apparently intense and passionate and never, ever gave up. And... he was just a little crazy.
Yeah, we could definitely be friends.
So, during all this, I wondered where the light bulb of today is; I mean, the light bulb was completely revolutionary, has impacted the entire planet, and honestly hasn't changed all that much in the past 125 years. Where are these new ideas? Of course, we can put computers and the internet in this category, but cars and airplanes -- they were invented back in Edison's day, too.
In any case, my point with the whole "distraction" comment above is just that I wonder: if people wouldn't get so easily distracted by the pursuit of dollar signs, if the greatest minds on the planet could be harnessed to better humanity instead of dis-integrate it, if we could somehow look past ourselves and think about somebody else once in awhile...
What in the WORLD might we accomplish!?
I think we, as humans, find a lot of ways to distract ourselves. This idea probably doesn't sound too ridiculous if you stop and think for a moment. I think about what things really make me smile and then realize I spend most of my day NOT doing those things, and I realize that humanity -- particularly western "developed" humanity -- has created an entire ecosystem of material distraction.
It makes me sad, because what comprises the entirety of one's life can be almost nothing but a series of distractions from what's truly important to that person. Now, I hope and pray that at the end of our lives, this situation will describe neither you nor me, but I know a lot of people that already live in this place.
The thing about distraction, though, is that we always have a choice in the matter. By definition, a distraction is something that takes our focus away from something else. So I suppose the trick is to learn to recognize those things that uneccesarily grab our attention, and to not let them control us.
Easier said than done, I know. But it's a start.
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UPDATE: Apparently Edison might have also been kind of a bastard...!? Love the quirky eccentricity, but... yeah, not gonna be friends with that.
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(This post was mostly taken from a rare journal entry of mine back in August 26, 2003. It was just returned to my thoughts by this interview with Eugene Peterson.)
It seems to me that the masses of the American public, myself included, desire to live their lives in the magical moments of a movie scene. By this I mean that by our own creation of picturesque perfection and scripted scenes of everything from bliss to torture within films, our own hearts have learned to burn for the extreme experience and, at some mostly-ignored level, to scoff at the mundane day-to-day life that we generally exist in.
The romantic notions of an ideal moment: the memory recalled when you walk past a girl in a department store wearing the exact scent of your first love -- your high school crush -- and the lump that subsequently catches in your throat for a split second. Or a certain place that flashes an image onto your retinas and instantaneously pushes back through time into your childhood and the intense melancholy of a middle school memory. Or a line in a song... it was that very song you always danced to in his bedroom late at night, after his parents went to bed.
It's those moments that make us feel something and remember somewhere, and what we remember about that place always seems to feel just a little more right -- a little more like home, and a little more pleasant -- than whatever it is we're currently experiencing. And it feels like a movie, because for whatever reason, we remember it as being perfect.
Oftentimes, my life seems to be made up of endless droning moments of monotony spiked with occasional glimpses of something better. But these memories are never that; they are a kind of a romanticized version of my actual life, usually told with some phenomenal mental cinematography and soundtrack.
I wonder if it has to be that way. I wonder if, for some reason, human beings are indeed cursed by a need to be incessantly miserable, to not accept a reality that would be just a little more fulfilling. Sometimes I think we create our very own desert of the real, and we revel in our lonely, collective misery.
Also, are these magical perceptions contingent upon limited exposure? If I didn't have the mundane, would I appreciate the magic?
For example, I am totally enamored with the magic of New York City (a direct result of film, as I've only been there twice), especially in the winter with light snow falling and tall buildings jetting skyward on all sides. I can hardly even imagine anything more romantic. But if I lived in my very own dingy Manhattan apartment, would the city's movie mystique intrigue me so much? I'm not so sure it would.
Sometimes I think that when I'm walking down the street it sure would be a lot more meaningful if I could get some different camera angles and a good soundtrack playing in the background. Maybe one of those 360 degree sweeps around my oh-so-pensive facial expression and the way my brows are furrowed just-so, and a soft fade in of Josh Radin's song "Closer." Yes, that would almost be perfect... just perfect.
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Ah, the car pool.
Now, I understand that "pool" has different meanings, but for me it just brings to mind an image of the old community swimming pool back home, lined with fading chipped baby-blue paint and car grills and headlights bobbing up through the water. The scaredy-cars are cowering near the edges, and a Honda Civic is doing a flip off the high-dive. If nothing else, it's entertaining.
I was driving this morning on a pretty major highway in Denver, going to meet a friend for breakfast. It's technically rush hour, and I hate traffic. I'm approaching a stretch of the highway with a car pool lane (See 'em swimming!? Ha! Cracks me up.), and I'm getting excited for the traffic to thin out, open up a bit -- you know, give me a little more elbow room, alleviate my claustro-roado-phobia. So I get to where the car pool lane starts and wait for all the cars to thankfully move the hell out of my lane.
But nobody moves.
It suddenly occurs to me that nobody is pooling. My next thought is, "Why would they?" I'm not, myself, currently, "pooling," and how many people do I know that actually would be able to go to work together? I start counting, and stop quickly because I can't think of anybody. Then I get sad, because the obvious implication is that every single person on the road in front of and behind me is alone in their car. I start wondering how much brighter their day would be if maybe they had a friend to ride with them on their way to work. Maybe home, too. I know I'd like it.
Being unemployed, I'm alone most all day, every day, at least during the day hours (because that's when everyone else works). I don't really like it, but what choice do I have? "None," I tell myself. And I'm not sure most of these people around me on the highway do, either.
But, you know, I bet our lives would seem a bit brighter if we could find a way to not be lonely.
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