Last week one morning I was walking on the street and there was this wonderful sky with a hint of sunrise fighting against the dark blue and it was really beautiful, so I thought how nature is probably the only instance that never ever fails to regularly and tenaciously find ways to impress me (no, actually also human ignorance, mine first).
I looked at the combination of the orange-pink-violet sky with the star-shaped lights of the Christmas market hanging from the trees and found it perfectly…pretty. Everyone must find such a view pretty, I thought. And then I imagined how many people would simply stop, rummage through their purse or pocket, extract their cell phone and take a (let´s face it, mostly quite unimpressive) picture. Sigh. And then probably upload it on facebook with a stupid comment like “this am on my way to work”. Double, no, triple sigh.
Shame on you, Mr. Zuckerberg. Mr. Jobs, Mr. (who
invented digital cameras?!). No, I mean, thank you all of you for incredible
inventions. But shame on you for taking us away the capacity of just looking
and feeling.
If you think of it, it is a very human and
somehow noble desire that of sharing what moves us with people we love, like or
care about. It´s not even only a prerogative of the human species, now that I
think of it, for many times my cats terrified my mother by bringing her as a
trophy half-dead birds clutched in their mouth: it was a beautiful conquer for
them and they wanted to share it with us.
Sharing is a nice, friendly, lovely and even instructive
act.
Compulsively sharing is the plague of our time.
We don´t watch our children anymore: we
photograph them and show them to whomever we come across that goes beyond a
simple “hello”, whether they might be interested or not .
We don´t taste our
food anymore: we take pictures upload them while the dish is getting cold and
afterwards even give grades to what we just ingested.
We don´t melt thinking how wonderful our partner is and how lucky we feel to have him/her: we
cover the world wide web with close-ups of us kissing until we break-up and
then we reluctantly unfriend the ex and change our facebook status to “single”
and everyone is “ooohhhing” us and saying how sorry they are for us.
We don´t
enjoy the view of a temple, flower, animal, person: we try to capture it with
our digital eye before it´s too late, otherwise we will forget the moment and
it´s going to be lost forever.
Yet, what we forget is that the strongest
memories are those of the moments which made it into our soul, which we allowed
to touch us in depth. For that, we need to give ourselves a little time, a
little peace, a little calm.
Let´s use phones for what they were invented
for: to telephone.
Let´s use our eyes for what they were made for:
to look
Let´s use our mind for what we exist for: to
reflect.
Let´s use our soul for what we need: to feel.
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