JOY!

It was a moment when, after the frantic search, the bemoaning of the effort now facing me to replace things of actual value on it (which wasn’t much but there were some performance tickets), and the constant reaching to my pocket for a phone that wasn’t there…

I was free.

Free to ignore important news notices of the nonsense engulfing our country.

Free to ignore the emails telling me my $5982.47 invoice for Net Guard of Nigeria has been process and “dedukteded” from my account.

Free to ignore it all.

It was more the just being free, it was being completely oblivious to all the idiocy still imprisoning almost every single person I saw for the next week.

My stress over the lost items may have been mitigated by the knowledge that American Airlines had located my phone and was holding it for my return to Heathrow, but I was nevertheless emancipated for the moment.

What I noticed was remarkable.

It seems the entire world spends much of their precious time on this earth with their heads inclined down at a 45 degree angle as they remain mesmerized with their phones.  It seems that despite the fact the most social media postings are the equivalent of reading entries in an eighth grade poetry competition about love, people need them.

Being unable to just reach for the phone and Google some idiotic question that arose in my mind over how many rat hairs are allowed in Mounds Bar (1 per hundred grams) or how about what’s allowed in a Bloody Mary? (The tomato juice in that 14-ounce Bloody Mary could contain up to four maggots and 20 or more fruit fly eggs), I was free to to observe this compulsive attachment in others.

It was beyond enlightening. The unwanted but unavoidable overheard conversations can be hilarious and sad all at the same moment.

Watching an entire restaurant with heads bowed in prayer to the “neon god they’d made” to borrow a line from Paul Simon was revealing.

Under the heading, Mixed Feelings, I have my phone back. And the reality is we are never going back to time without instant communication. But might I suggest you do this, pick a day, warn your family and friends if you must, and lock your phone away for twenty-four hours.

Trust me, the world has survived without you being instantly available for eons and will continue long after you’ve sent your last text.

The freedom is invigorating.

It is as if one is in a place where the silence is the most beautiful sound in the world.

Just twenty-four hours. A wise investment of your precious time, and infinitely more rewarding than responding to the sound and fury signifying nothing that has taken us prisoner.

Otherwise, we are prisoners of our own making going silently and in isolation while surrounded by others into the night.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,   
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Copyright Credit: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright 1939, 1946 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.