No phone, Internet, television, electricity or running water
The chaos of the unpredictable movement of the leaves overwhelms his brain-tumour-boosted ability to recognise patterns, and he finds rare respite from the onslaught of information his mind has been coughing up.
Now, isn’t that romantic?
Fortunately for the rest of us, you don’t need to be a super-genius to appreciate the beauty of overwhelming chaos.
Of course, the secret is that it’s not actually chaos, it’s just too complex and happening too quickly for us mortals to process and predict. Instead of freaking out our instinct to exert control over our environment, it shuts it down, tricking us into relaxation. Sleepiness, even.
That’s why many people use white-noise generators, recordings of thundershowers or waves crashing on the shore to help them sleep — it’s the same principle.
Unfortunately, the onslaught of information we are bombarded with every day has, for most of us info junkies, not yet breached that blissful barrier, and so when we do experience technology and information overload, it manifests not as a soothing respite, but a chronic malaise.
A few weeks ago I listed, at length, the constant demands on our attention enabled by pervasive, always-on access to information.
But then, just days after that particular little rant, I found myself transported to a bizarro reality where there were no phones, no Internet, no computers, no televisions and no radios. No books, no magazines, no newspapers. No running water and no electricity.
I was in the bush in Botswana for seven days. On a horse, mostly.
And it beat the hell out of watching stupid leaves blowing in the stupid wind, I can tell you that much.
An info junkie going cold turkey like that, you’d imagine the withdrawal would be torturous.
It wasn’t.
It was balm to the soul.
The persistently quoted anarchist and noted tuberculosis sufferer, Henry David Thoreau, who forsook modern living to go live in a cabin in the woods, gets trotted out to bolster the dreamy back-to-nature argument.
Thoreau wanted to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”.
Zing!
Here’s another: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
And more: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
These clever things have been culled, often and mercilessly, by debating teams, priests, politicians and, obviously, columnists, from Thoreau’s transcendentalist opus, Walden, since it was first published in 1854.
But I would respectfully point out that for Thoreau to pare his life down to the basics couldn’t exactly have been difficult. It was 1854!
What, exactly, did he give up? Okay, maybe running water. But beyond that?
Did he give up television? No!
Did he give up his cellphone? No!
Social networking? E-mail?
Twitter? Broadband?
No, gentle reader, he bloody well did not. And so perhaps I need not bat an eyelid when he rails: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Maybe I should stand up so he can kiss my ?
But no. See, that week in the bush really did dent my knee-jerk rejection of the Thoreau principle.
I have cancelled my broadband connection.
Not forever. Just until the price of uncapped ADSL becomes affordable enough for us to unleash enough digital chaos to numb our senses. Shouldn’t be long, right?
Until then, though, I’m going to enjoy the quiet before the storm.
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