Holiday Letter

Before the holiday season is completely gone, and because it's all still true, I'm reposting a piece of this e-mail that I sent a year ago to family and friends.

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:03:31 -0800
Subject: Holiday letter

To my family and friends,

Hi! (For you Bostonians, Hahyadoooin!!)
In the midst of the holiday season, with its 24-hour Christmas channels and diabolically prevalent commercialization, I want to send greetings, and share some thoughts.

I came across the following passage in the context of my job. I am gathering research on writing instruction for elementary school children, to eventually compile into a document for internal use here at Score. This was written in 1993 by a teacher in New Hampshire named Donald H. Graves. Though he wrote it about children, I am stunned by how true it rings for adults, too. Replace "children" with "Americans" and it still makes sense:

Our children live in a world so invasive they can scarcely see and feel beyond the stimulus of the moment. Stimuli caress them, then slap them in the face. There is a world of people who calculate how to make children want what they sell. Most of their selling is deceptive, like that of Stromboli in Pinocchio. We and the children are told what we want in the plastic, commercial world that advertisers call real, and then are subtly cultivated until we are convinced that we have made our own decisions. We lose touch with the land and ourselves. We hunger for touch and weep in the boredom of our wants.

These are thought-provoking words. Especially striking, to me, is that part about the world being invasive. What an excellent way to describe modern life in America. We are chronically overstimulated by advertising, and by all forms of media, especially this new beast, the internet. And we have less and less privacy (anyone can find anyone on the internet, cameras are ubiquitous, and people hold personal cell phone calls where you are forced to hear every word). But it goes beyond that. A poet once said, "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." I feel that is truer today than ever. Do you agree? To some degree, we allow the world to invade. It's so easy to get bogged down in the mundane tasks and goings-on of life, which makes infinite small demands of us. Maybe our nation's capitalistic value of productivity extends into our personal lives, producing a need to do and achieve. Making us feel idle if we just want to sit still and be for a while. Too many things ask for our attention, and we both desire to and are expected to have enough attention to go around. The key words being too many things. Our lives are overfull. (It's hard to blame ourselves for this: we have more opportunities and choices now than ever, so naturally we seize them. But a room crowded with nifty things is still crowded.)

The passage struck a chord with me because I often feel that I have a crowded life. Sometimes I enjoy the lively pace of events. Other times, I sense that important things get crowded out, like reflection, or picking up the phone to call a friend. I think we have a responsibility to resist the "invasion" of world into our own hearts... to create a balance in our own lives between what occupies us on the surface, and what is meaningful. To do so may be as difficult for adults as it is for children, though for different reasons. But if we don't strive for that balance, we risk living an impoverished life. To paraphrase a popular saying, nobody goes to their grave wishing they'd spent more time surfing the internet or watching TV. They wish they'd spent more time with the people they loved, and doing the things most meaningful to them. In our busy lives, we must do the best we can.