Contemplation can be defined as paying attention. It is about a way of seeing. We live in a world today where we are deluged with information. The emails come in. The mobiles ring. A text here. A website there. Excited by the process, we can all too easily become people who are skimming over the surface of life. John Naish has described our condition as infobesity, seeing it as a different sort of fatness and producing profound stress. There is a sense that we need to slow down, to settle and pay attention to things in a new sort of way.~~Chris Sunderland, The Dream that inspired the BibleRecently Cecily posted this quote over on her blog. My Tassie friend and I are often on the same wavelength even while we are in opposite seasons. It's kind of fun and sort of mystical how that works.
I shall let the quote speak for itself, and allow you, dear reader, to ponder it with me.
2 comments:
The concept of slowing down in the face of humanity's upward technological surge is as old as humanity itself. The invention of the printing press meant a circulation of information at a rate unimaginably faster than what was there before before it, when every book, pamphlet or whatever had to be copied by hand.
Of course the human race quickly accepted and adapted to this change, and it will continue to do so as humanity continues to progress. Certainly the culture of the Internet Age I'm growing up in has given up a degree of depth for breadth. While depth of knowledge in a topic you find interesting is great, you need that breadth to find what it is you're interested in. Reading superficially is the first step to reading in detail. That's what blurbs are for, after all.
Stress isn't how I'd describe reading at such a great breadth, I find it much more enlivening than sitting down and reading a 300 or so page essay or novel cover to cover (not to say I don't find reading 300 or so page books cover to cover unappealing, just a relative thing).
Peace,
TST
Food for thought!
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