Life's final appeal: Don't delay, simplify

Since turning 70 last February, day by day I’m living slightly askew.

For instance, this afternoon I received in the mail — yes the REAL mail, the one with stamps — yet another appeal to join my alma mater’s alumni association. I have resisted all such appeals for nearly 50 years.

This particular pitch urged me to become a “life member” for a mere $595. Its headline read, “Your membership lasts a lifetime. Don’t delay!”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

At first I thought that it was just me reading morbid meaning into the words. Then I realized that the copywriter was having some fun with me, or at least trying to. The university’s computers no doubt had marked me as being in some existential “don’t delay” period of my life.

And so, I didn’t delay and immediately pitched the appeal into the recycling.

Life really is too short.

No question the eighth decade has a certain “don’t delay” aspect. You could start with all those unread books on my shelves.  It is now undeniable: There is no way on Earth I will read them. At least not “on Earth.”

And I’m absolutely certain that City Hall isn’t going to underground our utilities in my lifetime. (If the Europeans can bury their wires, why can’t we?) Once, in my late middle age, I boasted that I would see to it that the City of Portland would underground our utility wires before the fates undergrounded me. It was sort of a joke, but no longer.

The overhead wires, like the unread books, will outlive me.

Then there’s my cellphone, a relatively recent invention in my suddenly long lifetime. I have never mastered it. It has menus within menus within menus. It has menus FOR menus. The deceptively small contraption is a veritable thicket of lists with arrows pointing every which way.

A dark confession: I’ve been known to curse aloud at the damnable thing when I’ve been trapped in its maddening electronic labyrinth. That’s bad enough, but recently I had occasion to discover, to my horror, that, labyrinth or no labyrinth, the devilish “little black brick” was working all along. It was carrying my anguished profanities to an innocent friend on the other end of the line.

“Rick,” she asked aghast, “is that you?”

Shamefaced, I confessed it was. I begged her forgiveness and, to her credit, she laughed it off. I hope she meant it.

I now have one of those “senior-friendly” cell phones which is only moderately so. It still has one or two menus tucked inside other menus. But he nice thing about this “simple” phone in addition to its big keypad and extra loud volume, is that I can “block” the menus.

There’s really no need to be led down the maze of “feature” roads, at least at my age. I don’t need an alarm clock in my phone. I already have an alarm clock — and a radio and a calculator and a calendar and a compass. Putting them all in one device has not made my life simpler.

High blood pressure doing what it can do, “smart phones” threatened to simplify my life by simply ending it.

Then again, if that happened, my alma mater’s alumni association, at long last, could quit warning me that I shouldn’t delay about joining.

Death is beyond delays and delaying.

Fear and my cell phone

Slowly, every so slowly, I’m developing a troubling, but under-examined relationship with my cell phone.

This little slab of circuitry is beginning to engender fears in me.

“What if?” fears.

What if I should find myself in a situation where I need it? Having it “on me” makes me feel marginally safer.

In the morning, when I consider whether I should hook my LG VX 5500 to my belt, I imagine dangerous situations I would never have thought of as recently as three years ago.

Sure, the cell phone can be a convenience, but my primal reason for having it is fear, a fear I never had before.

Increasingly I’m not even considering the option of leaving it at home. I am making my cell phone a “necessity” in a world that is suddenly more threatening — at least in my cell-phone state of mind.

My cell phone is changing me. I am less trusting. Without it I feel less safe. Some might even say “anxious.” Could Valium be in my future?

Did the cell phone’s inventors intend to make us fearful of our world? How about the manufacturers?

I’m sure fear is part of the marketing mix. (Also, being friendly, open, available and "successful"— which, in their own way, are causes for anxiety.)

We need cell phone-free days as reminders that the world is a kinder place than our cell phones would have us believe. (We also need a break to remind ourselves that we are friendly, open, available and “successful” even without cell phones — in the "old" face-to-face world.)

When strap on my cell phone, I occasionally wonder about those with concealed weapons. How do they feel as they holster their revolvers in the morning? Fully armed, how do they see the world?

Like cell phones, technology is not neutral. It changes us. We must continually study and be aware of how.

Lives of the Cell Phone

In my community college class this week, I asked the 22 students how many had cell phones with them at that very moment.

Twenty hands went up.

The two without cell phones were obviously different, but just how different?

I had some idea because I’d left my phone at home, as I often do.

But unlike me, the two non-cell phone students had made a decision not to have pocket communication at all. I suggested that in doing so, they were not alone, at least historically speaking. They were like virtually all human beings pre-1980. For starters, think of Plato, the Buddha, Jesus, Jane Austin, Thomas Jefferson, Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nary a cell phone among them.

But if cell phone users are absent in history, they certainly aren’t in the present; nor, if humanity manages to survive, will they be in the future.

I suggested to the class that having a cell phone, or not having one, helps define who we are as human beings. It defines how we feel about our relationship to the world, to time, to space, to privacy and to our fellow human beings. Indeed, as phones become “smart phones” (mini-computer terminals), they define what we do with much of our time — how we spend out lives.

With much else to talk about in the class, we didn’t explore the ideas further, but the topic certainly has an allure.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that each major communication invention creates a new “extension of man.” The printing press, the telegraph, the photograph, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the cell phone all change us and how we relate to each other and our environment.

In ways, the innovations make us more aware; in other ways they make us less aware.

McLuhan’s observation nestles neatly into the fascinating field of “media effects.”

In the class I touched on the subject of media effects by asking how we might go about measuring them.

One of the two non-cell phone students, Shelby, raised her hand. “Study what happens to people when they are deprived of a particular media device.”

Good idea. We could, in fact, study her. How was she different in her cell-less state?

I suggested that we might further, as an experiment, ask our horde of cell phone users to give up their phones for a week and then study them.

“Over my dead body,” snarled one student in mock defiance. I might as well have been suggesting that he stuff his ears with cotton or tie his hands behind his back.

He and the majority of the class, were clearly different — very different in some ways— from the technologically self-deprived minority.

But how?

Walking in the Moment

One of the joys of settling into a community is knowing enough people to recognize and greet them on my walks. And on this 10,000 Steps program,I’ve been doing a lot of walking for the past two months, and a lot of meeting.

Instead of measuring walks by steps I should measure them by encounters with neighbors. Today’s walk was a five-neighbor walk, for example. I'm never quite sure whom I will meet, which is part of the fun of it.

Often neighbors who are driving will just pull over to say “hi.” They frequently offer me a lift, but I explain that I have to get my daily 10,000 steps in.

The other thing that has been happening on the walks is that I have been having these oxygenated thoughts. I guess that’s a good description. They are almost little epiphanies.

Today, as I passed a group of pre-schoolers on their way to play in Gabriel Park, I made a point of looking at their faces carefully, trying to imagine each of them as their parents must see them – cherished, wondrous beings.

Twenty children must have filed by me. Each so different and each utterly cherished.

As I passed a fellow walker talking on her cell phone, I also got into the reality of carrying my cell phone with me. I’ve resisted it and rarely use it. But recently I’ve accepted having it with me as part of what it means to be a 21st Century human being. The technology has changed who we are and how we relate to each other.

Isolation is a choice we now must make, no matter where we are.

A final ‘walking’ thought is related to a post ("Time that 'slips off the mind'") from a couple days ago. I had remarked how in our culture fixation on the future consumes the past, while in other cultures the indelible past destroys the future. It is worth adding that in yet other cultures the present – “the eternal now” – is so important, so much the focus of being, that the concepts of past and future vanish.

Seeing the faces of those children, really regarding them one-by-one as they passed me, was such an experience of the moment. A momentous experience.

Final note: This is the first post I have composed on my new Neo. More about that tomorrow.