I was relaxing with a group of people in one of my friend’s front yards when we decided to come inside. Everybody filed through the doorway except for one girl who had to wait outside for her ride. Our little group sat on the couch and talked about whatever when, in the normal motion of a human head, my gaze shifted outside and I saw this girl sitting on the lawn. The scene struck me: rather than losing herself in the little universe in her pocket, she sat and absorbed the universe around her. I was humbled – why? – because I knew that, were our roles reversed, I would have sat and looked at memes and exercised my all-powerful thumb muscle on Twitter. She sat there with wide eyes and a receptive spirit that was, to me, the most beautiful thing in the world.
Sometimes I catch myself escaping into the quiet little world of my phone. On my Twitter feed, I can choose to see whatever I want; I don’t have to look at the ugliness in our world. I don’t have to see a polluted sky, heat rising off asphalt, trees not quite green enough. Why do you think we spend so much time on our phones, creating our own little worlds where we hear and see what we want? The world sucks sometimes, but I’d rather find some beauty in it’s brokenness than create a little cyber-world where, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”
Don’t mistake me for saying that it’s wrong to spend time on our phones – I fully recognize the potential value of such an activity. But never, ever, lose yourself in it. Never stop being enchanted by the world around you. Never stop absorbing.
The story I told wasn’t true; the wide-eyed girl never actually existed, and I suspect that’s why I wrote it down. She is my projection of perfection, the type of spirit I would aspire to know and become. It’s sad, but you don’t see many people like that today, which is odd because our cinematic and literary narratives seem to praise characters with that “enchanted” personality. Maybe our whole society is just musing that someday in the future we will take back the enchantment we seem to have lost. Maybe we can again be content to sit and listen and absorb. Maybe somewhere down the road we will collectively learn to put down our phones and widen our eyes and live in a society unafraid and undaunted – absorbed and enlightened.
Or maybe this is all the Saturday morning musings of a nineteen-year-old … but my phone is down.
