Birds of a Feather

"In Praise of Wasting Time" by novelist and physicist Alan Lightman published today! Discover that sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all: https://t.co/FzSYK4vSDB pic.twitter.com/A3hOl1WZsq

— TED Books (@TEDbooks) May 15, 2018

TEDTalks: By not giving ourselves the minutes — or hours — free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. https://t.co/UjgeJRzZMQ

— Robert Steininger (@RobJSteininger) May 15, 2018

Flight UA 862, Hong Kong-San Francisco. On more or less the same flight fifty years ago, the enduring monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The utter happiness of life on a plane. Quiet, time to read.” Thirty-five thousand feet has become our deepest sanctuary.

— Pico Iyer (@PicoIyer) May 15, 2018

TED Ideas published an appreciative post about Lightman's new book today. It contains the following words—

The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is an even more recent, and more subtle, phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation — all have happened quickly and almost invisibly. A hundred and fifty years ago, the telephone didn’t exist. Fifty years ago, the Internet didn’t exist. Twenty-five years ago, Google didn’t exist.

The situation is dire. Just as with global warming, we may already be near the point of no return. Invisibly, almost without notice, we are losing ourselves. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world.