Spradramble: Nostalgic for Lingering
Wise Mind for Accelerated Times
Spradramble Advisory: The following is a meandering aloud for those seeking to meander more often with a once-cherished lingering within which knowledge, wisdom, meaning, and joy can emerge. My thoughts are ever-evolving and shouldn't be read as static or polemical.
Do you have a nostalgia for lingering? Do you recall your history with your own rich silences of interval and thresholds that textured time with duration or the once-natural anticipations that were rich with delight or suffering? These seemed to fill the time with duration, with richness, neither diversion nor dissipation. Was there a time when we possessed an implicit skill for abiding?
These intervals and thresholds from memories: The ringing of the phone as love-sick youth reached across space and time in a yawning bid for connection; The leaving of the awkward voicemail. We once knew the depths of waiting by the phone for the answer or the scheduled call. And even the sending of letters, the deep disclosures made by hand to pen to paper, enveloped, stamped, and posted. Each letter was a word that carried a missal of heart and mind, articulate or stymied. Likewise, letters between siblings, or from grandparent to grandchild, and so on. There was a necessary waiting. No deleting. No use in anxious overthinking. There was among us a known acceptance. A willingness to abide in the duration of time.
And now, we're all in danger of acceleration and the flattening of moments into a strange sameness of artificial simultaneity. All happens now, a violence against time, a violence against lingering within which we once could savor the afterglow of an event or translate ourselves through new experiences in a fashion that nurtures a natural human pace toward the joy of meaning. The same violence that flattens time disallows us to integrate news and information in a fashion that allows for actual knowledge and wisdom. To wit, our reactions to mere headlines from a social media headline and our suddenly acquired ability to achieve "expertise" with hyperspeed. It is truly an accomplishment compared with our ancestors, who were forced to digest, practice, and master subjects and skills over decades.
More seed thoughts from Byung-Chul Han for my public meander-ment through his articulations of our present situation within our digitally saturated world where narrative gives way to information and acceleration. From The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han
"Being and information are mutually exclusive. A lack of being, a forgetfulness of being, is thus immanent to the information society. Information is additive and cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation. Information also dissects time into a mere sequence of present moments. A narrative, by contrast, brings forth a temporal continuum, that is, a story.
On the one hand, the informatization of society accelerates its de-narrativization. On the other, amid the tsunami of information, there arises a need for meaning, identity and orientation, that is, a need to clear the thick forest of information in which we risk losing ourselves. The flood of ephemeral narratives, including conspiracy theories, and the tsunami of information are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor."