exploring the details (and trying to be kind)

All kinds of fun you can have this year…

I lift the seat, he’s there. I put him outside in the yard, he comes back. Three times now (in a week).

He’s gotta be the same one, right?

Complex.

What if we’re really growing apart?

Weekly, I’m amazed by technology and our ability to connect instantaneously wherever we are. But I wonder if that’s what’s really happening – the connecting.

There’s a wonderful (and frightening) book called The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis). It’s a compilation of letters from one devil to another – a mentoring devil to a junior devil. It’s dizzying what it’ll do to your thinking because everything seems to be in reverse. If you want to push your brain, it’s worth your time.

So… What if it were true? If there was an evil force in the world, what would be its primary work?

It would attack love, wouldn’t it? And love is care. And wouldn’t one of the most evil ways to do that be to help us slip into a twilight state of sleep and indifference but at the same time make us feel as though we’re active and connecting with one another?

“Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.”

C.S. Lewis (1942)
from The Screwtape Letters

Okay, my band of evilness, here’s an idea…

Let’s make it so easy for people to connect that they focus on the quantity of connections rather than the quality of those connections… Devolve the meaning of friend. Devolution. Mmmmm.

Let’s give them some tools that allow them to find each other wherever they may be and let’s encourage them to be obsessed with those tools. So efficient. Wait… And then maybe they can keep track of those friends… In front of each other… Yes, a contest of sorts. So proud.

Let’s help them push human interaction to their fingers rather than their faces… Oh, so nice… Quicker less thoughtful communication eroding their ability to communicate at all, perhaps? Could it be that they may even shy away from talking completely?

Yes quicker, less thoughtful, less meaningful.

All along, they’ll feel like they’re making more connections but in reality, they’ll be growing apart… Becoming less able to connect in reality. Conversations will become acronyms. Discussions will become monologues and homologues. Listening, reflection, and thought… Pffft. Rush. Rush. Rush. 

Oh… To have them care more about telling their story than living their story… How wonderfully terrible that would be.

(Let’s be careful.)

“The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

David Foster Wallace
American writer

Those words are from Wallace’s commencement speech given in 2005. The entire text is one of the most moving (and inspiring) things I’ve ever read (especially knowing that Wallace ultimately lost his internal war with depression). It’s about 3000 words — maybe a 15-minute read.

I can’t tell you who spoke at my college graduation. Nothing against them, I’m sure it was me. Had Wallace been our speaker and given the same talk, I probably would have missed it because of my attitude at the time. (I wonder how many of those students heard and thought about what Wallace said that day.)

We have just over 3 million college degrees being given out this year in the U.S. I’m assuming (hoping) that the largest portion of them will start working and contributing to the needs of our world (people). I hope they’re Smovers.

At the same time, I hope we (the grown-ups?) remember to encourage them to do what’s right, work hard, and care. They’ll need it (though they might not want it) and it’s our job as grown-ups.

Below are my 3 favorite commencement speeches. Pass one or all of them along to someone who’s graduating (this year or 3 years from now). Help them become more aware… earlier. Make sure you read them first (you might find Wallace’s to be too harsh). Then be sure to follow up. Sit down and ask them what they think. Then listen. Then have a conversation.

This Is Water : David Foster Wallace, Writer

Find What You Love : Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. Cofounder

The Love of Learning : David McCullough, Writer and lecturer