The rocking chair

Conceptually a rocking chair is a wonderful thing. Moving back and forward while remaining in a fixed place let you and me burn off some nervous energy or exercise nervous ticks, while resting weary-ah so weary, bones and cartilage. But once in America it was more. A chair on the porch used to be the access point to the only social network that counted your neighbors. 

Once the rocking chair on your front porch is where you saw what was going on. On a warm clear evening one neighbor would walk across the street to ask if you knew about Frank. He just had a heart attack you know and is in hospital. Some other neighbor’s child flush with new money from a recently acquired factory job would blow by squealing tires in a tricked out ride. You made a mental note to watch that one.

You could see who passed by and try and sort out why a particular regular did not pass by. You could talk to other neighbors if you had business with them. You got connected.

The thing is that sitting on a chair looking in a passing neighbor’s eye and shaking their hand sort of gave you a measure of the person. You were able to pick up on who they really were as opposed to a digital media image that they nowadays paint of themselves.

In America we have gotten too busy in our race to the bottom of life to sit outside or the corollary to stroll around our neighborhoods on a regular basis anymore. We have Facebook, Twitter and television to suck us indoors and away from the art of conversation and the real connections we used to make face to face. We have become slaves to narrowing margins of time dictated by unrealistic work expectations, program start times on the tube and kid’s soccer, music and hockey schedules.

God I love the image of this chair. Ah but my heart sinks because it does not mean what it used to mean. It is as meaningless as a painted milk can on the front porch. Both of them are old, out of date and merely curiosities.

The questions we really have to ask is why we have allowed thismove indoors away from community to happen and who will lead us back out into a human society.  Technology brings changes in our life and will always bring changes. 

A student of history will tell you about the complete and utter upheaval in society following the start of the industrial revolution.  Shifting work patterns, human as machine components made daily life very negative.  Long hours, low wages and family disruption were the norm. Read some stories of practices in New England textile mills and you will say “Thank God the unions came along.” We are lucky trade unionism rose up to challenge the long hours and intolerable conditions that so quickly became the norm in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  

But what group will arise to help us return to a face to face society?

What has occurred now is pernicious.  We as a people have allowed bread and circuses (panem et circenses) to isolate us and divert us from community and responsibility.  The panem term was supposedly coined by Juvenal. He was trying to describe the cynical formula used by the Roman emperors to keep masses content.  Give us ample food (a pizza is just a couple of mouse clicks away) and entertainment (Lip Sync battle anyone?) and people lose sight of the importance of staying engaged, staying in real contract, staying informed and staying on a handshake level with other humans. Bellies full and minds diverted we become oblivious sheep.

I don’t know I am just ranting but we are the most electronically connected but socially isolated group ever and it can’t go on like this.

 

 

 

Solitary walking.

The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the real limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Not to embellish them with possibilities. Simply to set aside all possibilities other than those which are actually present and real, here and now. And then to choose or not, as one wishes, knowing that no choice is a solution to anything, but merely a step further into a slightly changed context of other, very few, very limited, very meaningless concrete possibilities. To realize that one’s whole life, everybody’s life, is really like that. In society the possibilities seem infinitely extended. One is in contact with other people, other liberties, other choices, and who knows what the others may suddenly all choose?

In society, in the middle of other people, one can always imagine one will break through into other liberties and other frames of reference. Other worlds. We have trained ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes. There is nothing we cannot have if we try hard enough, or look in the right place for it.

But in solitude, when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and new dimensions open up. The present is in fact, in itself, unlimited. The only way to grasp it in its unlimited-ness is to remove the limitations we place on it by future expectations and hopes and plans, or surmises, or regrets about the past, or attempts to explain something we have experienced (or the revived, warmed-up experience) in order to be able to continue living with it.

Thomas Merton June 19, 1966,VI. 309–10