Distracted Lives

 

Published 11/05/06

 

Todd South’s October 22 column “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation” is the type of writing that Americans should see more of.

 

In the column, he quotes Thoreau from “Walden” – “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

 

This is what I see as the most tragic aspect of American culture.  Rather than DELIBERATE lives, many people lead DISTRACTED lives.  Cell phone calls, text messages, the ubiquitous television (in our CARS, no less!), a constant barrage of stereo or radio music, videos, etc. are constantly calling us away from our lives.

 

To me, life can only be lived by knowing and understanding one’s self.  Knowing what I’m doing, thinking, and feeling at the moment and, more importantly, knowing WHY I’m doing, thinking, and feeling what I am puts me in touch with the divinity that animates all living things.  How much more “alive” can one be?

 

Yet, many Americans are too distracted by external stimuli to hear the “voice of God” within them.

 

Thoreau also wrote “If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.  When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence – that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.”

 

Thoreau, like Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and other great philosophers, saw that the happy life is the simple life.  Yet, Americans today seem determined to make their lives as complicated as….wait, my cell phone’s ringing.