Look at Me
My
five
year old son has taken to a new phrase:
“Look at me!” He
recently
wanted to show me a new pair of skates and how well he was
gliding around the
driveway with his hockey stick.
And until I looked up from my phone, he was relentless in
his
demand. It would have
done no good,
as we parents are prone to do, to insist that I did glance up
when he wasn’t
looking. Kids see right
through
that. They crave our
undivided
attention.
To
help
us be present for one another, our family has adopted a
technology agreement
with various sections:
foundations, time, and content.
As I pointed out last week, our smartphones and devices
especially challenge
our ability to stay focused on the people who are physically
near us. We try to
address this challenge with
the following guidance: “To
be a
good friend, and fully present to others, I will put my device
away when having
a conversation. I will
silence it
in public, especially at churches, restaurants, and movies.”
Jesus
taught
us, and most people I know agree, that we should love our
neighbors as
ourselves. How do we
love
ourselves? We love to
be noticed,
to have someone listen to us and understand us. We don’t like to be put on hold or told to
“wait a minute”
while someone takes a call or checks a status update. We love by giving ourselves, fully and in the
here and now,
to another person.
We
used
to know these things more intuitively. In the past if we had gone out to dinner with a
group of
friends, we never would have thought to take out a book and
begin to read. We
would’ve been thought anti-social or
worse. But as Christine
Rosen
observed in an article for The New
Atlantis, the opposite is true today:
“the group is never expected to impinge upon the
individual’s right to
withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses.” The friends need to “get
over it” if one
of their members is thumbing through Facebook while the dinner
conversation
proceeds.
An
attorney
friend of mine recently invited me to dinner at a private club. During dinner, as he
reached for the
smartphone in his pocket, he told me he received over 100 emails
a day. Bringing the
phone out on the table, he
quickly retreated and put it back when he remembered the club
had a rule that
patrons were to keep phones away during dinner. We will know that the human race has made
progress when we
don’t need rules and guidelines to tell us what we know
intuitively: we are
creatures who flourish when others
look at us and don’t immediately look the other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment