In other parts of life, diagnosis — the identification of the nature and cause of something — often removes a person from feeling terminally unique and alone, welcoming him or her into one kind of club or another.
The diagnosis that I've often received for my particular mix of klutziness, creativity, and spacial thinking is that they all stem from my left-handedness. Other members of the club aren't so shabby: Bach, McCartney, Nietzsche, da Vinci, Obama, and Zoey. Not to mention nearly all of the communications staff at ForestEthics at one point.
When my sister-in-law, Kate, was visiting us last month, she diagnosed our form of parenting as 'slow parenting,' which involves letting kids explore the world at their own pace and keeping things simple.
The label fits, and it's kind of nice to know that we're not the only freaky parents out there trying to slow things down.
We're nowhere near at minimal as this amazing woman I met who owns 33 things, including her car, bike, helmet, and pump, but when we pulled away from San Francisco with only a pickup truck full of belongings, we began a pretty serious affair with minimalism. And we're kind of smitten.
Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about stuff, specifically about how stuff, both physical and mental, can be so stressful.
UCLA’s Center for on Everyday Lives of Families just released a study that found that only 25% of average middle-class American households can use their garages for parking because of all the stuff they have crammed in them.
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| Photo From SF Gate |
The study also found that "managing the volume of possessions [is] such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevate[s] levels of stress hormones for mothers."
It wasn't uncommon for the researchers to count thousands of possessions in just the first one or two rooms they entered in each house.
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| Photo of one wall in a little girl's room - Photo From SF Gate |
The San Francisco Chronicle published a short piece on all of the findings here.
Meanwhile, at work, we continue to think a lot about mental clutter. A few weeks ago when we were talking at a meeting about our continued efforts to learn how to focus and be present, one person admitted that despite his best efforts, he can't stop checking his smart phone almost obsessively whenever it's nearby, which is always. I hate to admit it, but I can relate if I'm not careful. Increasingly, I'm turning off my phone in order to resist its call.
Addiction to technology is front-page news.
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| "Is technology making us crazy" |
The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways....
In less than the span of a single childhood, Americans have merged with their machines, staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day, more time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping. Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count time spent multitasking on several devices. When President Obama last ran for office, the iPhone had yet to be launched. Now smartphones outnumber the old models in America, and more than a third of users get online before getting out of bed.
Science backs up technology's addictive quality: because we are wired to respond to immediate 'dangers', our brains reward our quick response to each incoming digital ping that we receive with a dopamine squirt, making the e-siren's calls increasingly difficult to resist. The flip side is that the more time we spend distracted by immediate but unimportant stimulation, the less brain power we have to process critical, long-term issues. Or just to think.
Another great piece exploring the subject is Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, which ran last year in The New York Times.
There's another seductive factor at play as well: being busy can make us feel important. A few weeks ago I went to dinner with a friend; when she slipped off to go to the bathroom, I sat at the table and waited. Waiting used to be a normal thing, but these days, I often find myself checking my phone when I don't have anything else to do. My phone was in the car, and I noticed its absence. It felt weird to just sit there, and I realized I was out of touch with the experience.
The New York Times had something to say about this phenomenon as well in a recent piece called The Busy Trap.
An excerpt:
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
Sitting here, smack in the middle of a three-week vacation that my boss insisted I take, a vacation where I'm trying to spend a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing, (or wait, make that a whole lot of non-dopamine-squirting e-nothing,) I'm taking this quote to heart, and stream, and picnic blanket and tree.
"Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets."
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| The creek out back |
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| Small monkey resembling Zoey |
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| Joanna is here! |
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