Today was a beautiful summer’s day. Magnificent, warm, attractive. And I’m walking along the sidewalk, and I was almost overrun, crushed by a person staring at their cell phone. They didn’t even see that I was there. Wait a moment.
What is this about? I went to a gym a little later and I began to pay attention. Many people were running around, walking while staring at their cell phones. This is a tragedy and extremely dangerous. But it’s not the tragedy of staring at the cell phone that troubles me.
It’s the tragedy of not staring at life. What’s going on? Today, being that magnificent day, why aren’t you looking at the bugs, the bees, the ants, the world around you, other people? Why not? Because you’re lost in some fictitious time, some Internet odyssey that has absolutely no purpose.
I am quite sure there’s no value for the most part. I study cell phone users, you know, and I often look at what they’re looking at, and this profoundly irritates my friend. She feels that it’s a type of intrusion into other people’s lives, and it’s true. I’m looking at people and wondering what in God’s name truly is going on and I suspect nonsense. Nothing at all.
They’re just idling away time. And given that I can get everything back, my beauty, my money, my relationships, etcetera, everything back but time, I think I should be focused on time. Shouldn’t I? So what can one do to help? Well, gosh.
I think at the beginning, we’ve got to encourage our friends to put the cell phone down. Put it down. Now, Jim Quick, the great memory specialist, he tells us we shouldn’t look at our phone for the first one or two hours of the day. Allow the mind to be clear because as we’ve spoken about before, on the phone, the news, BBC, CNN, whatever it is, most of the news profoundly negative, profoundly unhappy, unhappy for the human mind when you begin the day. And I ask myself, what is the purpose of knowing about even more pain, even more collapse.
Nothing. Nothing at all. Get a history book. Read a little bit of history, and you will see that history has documented the pain of humanity. Usually not the goodness, mostly the pain, but that’s not the real experience.
That’s not the lived experience of you and me. Our lives are quite good, to be honest. Aren’t they? They’re pretty happy, pretty nice. My bed is warm and clean.
The water that washes over me in the shower is nice. My toothbrush is alright, etcetera, etcetera. Life’s pretty good. So perhaps, just perhaps, when I wake up in the morning and I make my bed and I write in my notebook and I say my prayers, then I sit at my desk and only then do I access the news. Only then.
And some days perhaps I shouldn’t access the news at all. Perhaps on the weekend for instance. I can work during the week. I can study the news during the week, and then on the weekend, it’s time to rest the mind. The news will continue.
Don’t worry. It’ll be there on Monday morning with its same negativity. Why has the news come to this? Well, of course, yellow journalism, we know that Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst created this concept. But more importantly, we’re susceptible to this kind of negativity, unfortunately.
Maybe it’s biological, maybe it’s cultural, but we seem to look at a car accident much more than we do a child walking, don’t we? We seem to be fixated on the negativity. So if that’s true and we’re aware of this, we can then begin to train our mind to see the joy that exists in life. And gosh, there’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of beauty all around us all around us.
Right from the birds to the wind to other beautiful people. There’s a lot of really beautiful people, young and old, that we can study. Both men and women that we can study as we walk along. And the faces are so complex in many individuals just like portrait paintings. Right?
So I think this is the point. We gotta put the phone down and study the beauty that exists around us. And once we do, we will feel better because as you know, on a bright sunny day, you feel much better than if it’s a cold, wet, snowy day for example. Right? Much better.
So go for the higher source in life, the more positive source. It’s much more real than the negative negativity and the pain. Right? Much more. And you know what they say.
You know what they say. Critical thinking is so necessary if we’re going to develop the the spirit, the individual self, and critical thinking is, of course, wonderful and great. You take care. Bye bye. God bless.