A funny thing happened to me on the way to picking up coffee the other morning: I forgot my phone. I got my favorite drink, a café au lait, and sat down to peruse “the news” and realized I had nothing to look at. At once, I realized I was like some creature out of time, not shunned but clearly an “odd duck”; I was the only single person in the coffee store not scrolling through my phone to check the inflammatory news or to see if anyone in the universe remembered or cared about me, as usual.
It was a shocking realization: that every other single person, along with several accompanied patrons, all had their heads glued to the screen. Obviously, as a psychoanalyst, I could imagine many likely explanations: certainly for single women, the phone is an anxiety reducer helping them not realize their state or their loneliness, making them imagine themselves so busy as to barely be able to attend to the existence at hand. For couples, such behavior can often reflect a dissatisfaction with the need to converse at all with the “other.”
For children, they are often encouraged to engage in electronic games, allowing adults some time to themselves. But at that moment, I was not struck by any need to explain the well-recognized phenomenon of the iPhone-as-crack. What struck me was the “loss of the moment,” the very loss of life, this behavior enabled. Somehow, we have allowed ourselves to block out the reality of our lives and sadly chosen a poorer substitute.
As I sat drinking my coffee, I thought of the myriad of sensory impressions that I had simply ignored in favor of my obsession with this remarkable tool. I can’t summarize them all, but they include how my stomach felt as it responded favorably to the warm coffee, how I felt about the architectural details in my coffee house—the doors and lintels, the worn chairs, one of which I sat in. But there was much more: being Saturday.
I saw white “tiger moms” looking efficient and surly in their rally hats, dragging their kids off to an activity I surmised was to help the kids get into Dalton or Harvard. One or two divorced fathers awkwardly tried to entertain their children while both adults and children were trying to avoid dealing with the collective tragedy that had befallen the family. There was a very obese woman shuffling across the street while smoking a cigarette; a man with an obvious bad hip swinging his bad thigh forward to allow for forward progress and wearing his exhaustion and pain on his face.
Finally, there was the joy I felt to be alive, to be able to witness all of this and realize how wonderful it is to be able to partake in all that it means to be sentient and part of this “circus” of life, how remarkable it is that we are here and can partake in it, how brief it all is, and how sad it is that it will soon be taken away forever.
Lose the mobile phone and deal with reality as it is. Yes, it is frequently painful and sad and lonely, but also exquisite, and sometimes, the awareness of this inextricable combination can foster new solutions to living and constitute a kind of mini-triumph for each of us.
Years ago, I heard a meaningful anecdote attributed to Norman Mailer when asked if he used a condom during sex. Leaving aside the implications for unwanted children, he responded in the negative and meaningfully added: I don’t take a shower with a raincoat on either.
Lose the mobile phone and take off the raincoat if only once in a while.
