HOW MUCH DO WE NEED TO KNOW?
Are you overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information you are exposed to daily? Think about that for a moment. What is the first thing you do when you wake up or the last thing you do before you go to sleep? Do you scroll through social media, do you watch or read the news, do you answer emails, do you put on a podcast, or listen to music? Do you watch TV? When was the last time you sat in silence? When was the last time you listened to the birds chirping or watched the sunrise or the sunset? When was the last time you allowed yourself to have a good cry or a good laugh at the wonderful absurdity of this human play?
As a Gen-Xer, I remember a time of less information overload. I remember silence. I remember watching the ocean tides come in and go out with no theme music in the background as I sat on a sandy towel. The only sound I heard was the ocean tide and the birds. I remember playing outside and riding my bike all around the neighborhood with no headphones. I remember climbing trees and jumping rope and no one put any pictures of it on Facebook or Instagram. I remember being given a quarter for a pay phone to call home if needed when I learned to drive and took out the car for the first time. My mom didn’t have Life 360 to observe my movements. Life was perhaps, to the modern observer, not as safe because we didn’t have all the information, all the time. But what have we lost with the ‘safety’ that we have acquired from all our information? Ironically, as ‘safety’, or the illusion of it, became society's highest value, we have found ourselves lost in a darkness of sorts, and feeling more unsafe and more threatened, than ever before. We find ourselves wrestling with endless fears, often about something happening on the other side of the globe, that we would have never had any awareness of centuries before. Or perhaps some microscopic organism that they say is going to kill everyone. Is that living or is that a living death? How is ‘knowing’ so much helpful? Especially when most of what we think we know is questionable at best.
Once upon a time, not very long ago, we would likely not know anything about what happened on the other side of the world. We’d live our entire lives in a tribe or small community, hunting and gathering food to be enjoyed at the end of the day around a fire with family or community with absolutely no idea about what happened several continents away. We’d have face-to-face conversations. We’d hold one another’s hand or hug one another. We might sing together. Our conversations might be of stories of old, our ancestors, the planets, or that panther we managed to avoid that day. We had real connections, not one requiring wifi, to one another, the earth, and the stars. We had no idea what happened in Greenland. Unless of course, we were living in Greenland. Then we’d have no idea of what happened in Peru or that there was even a Peru.
Life was hard in ‘the old days’, no doubt. It was not perfect then and it is not perfect now. Human beings have worked very hard to survive and thrive throughout history against great odds. Every day was a challenge to make it to the next. Survival was the objective every day. Everything else was a reward. As difficult as that seems, it also seems simple. Simple is where peace, healing, and connection are found. We may not have lived long, but we lived. I am not sure we are living today. Not in the way a human is designed to. What has knowing so much, all the time, accomplished? We are more neurotic, stressed, and sick than ever before.
WOULD YOU FEEL BETTER IF YOU KNEW?
Information doesn’t necessarily equate to knowledge. And it certainly has little connection to wisdom. Try this experiment. Look for one ‘news’ story on the two largest competing networks in the US and then look for the same story in several foreign publications. Your head will spin. You are not getting facts. You are getting someone’s version of it.
The tremendous and constant bombardment of information might have helped us to develop more technology but it hasn’t helped us to become better humans. It hasn’t increased our awareness or helped us to live more open-hearted lives towards one another. Not yet at least. So far, if anything, I believe it has caused us to fear one another and whatever is ‘out there’, more than we ever have. And all the damn time! That isn’t living!
We hold the illusion in our minds that if we know more we will feel better. We will finally feel safe. Is that true? Are you feeling better now that you have landed on some version of truth? Do you feel safe the more you know? Were you there? Did you see it firsthand? Do you know that person? Have you been to that country? Do you understand the culture? And do you know, for certain, that what you are hearing or seeing is true? Could it be a curated version to provoke a response or some sort of bias that benefits someone’s or something’s agenda? The questions are endless and NOISY.
We have become so uncomfortable with silence, our thoughts, and our emotions. Distraction in the form of acquiring information gives us an illusion of control or the false promise of its potential. It is a welcome respite from the pain mankind is collectively feeling, as we are told continually the world is spinning out of control. I understand. I seek distraction myself, more than I’d like to admit. Anesthesia has its purpose for a season but it then becomes addictive. We’d rather ‘sleep’, thinking if we just acquire enough or the correct information, we’d feel better, than experience the pain of uncertainty. But pain is part of the experience of what it is to be human whether we like it or not and so is uncertainty. You didn’t come here to sleep. You came here to live and to awaken and the acceptance of the unknown is part of that process.
Silence is painful when you’ve not experienced it in a while. Silence is like a bright light that illuminates all that is infected, open, and bleeding. We must give it space to reveal our condition to us. It is only then that we can heal and become wise like many who came before us.
We have large collective nasty wounds right now in need of healing and while I understand the desire to ignore them, and bypass the pain, through incessant information gathering, we must pause long enough to address them. Silence once it’s revealed the pathology, like the sun, heals and sanitizes our wounds. Once you understand this mere information will no longer satiate. You will cease to crave anything but the moment, for that is where the living are found.
Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain. Robert Gary Lee.
Embrace the Silence, reject the confusion.
Blessings!
April
Yes, yes, yes! More creative silence, please, and lots more unlearning.
It's all too much, isn't? Sometimes I feel like escaping all the information, all the emails, all the online engagement.