I find myself more and more addicted to the constant connectivity of the internet. I have a phone that lets me know when I have email and I check my personal and business accounts so many times each day when I am not at my desk checking it, that I would be afraid to know the number of times. I read 20 blogs a day, listen to music on the iPod on my way to work, and sometimes read a book on my Kindle at the same time.
I am starting to feel like I have become the Borg. For those of you who are not familiar with Star Trek, the Borg are beings that are part human and part machine, and are constantly connected to a machine that has an irresistible pull on them–the phrase resistance is futile is their motto. They are drones, connected to a single mind. It is the ultimate form of busyness. Keeping the mind occupied constantly is far too alluring and far too easy over the last couple of years.
Yet, with all the information I am absorbing, much of it in the service of work, I find it harder to focus and that busyness creates a buzz in my head that drowns out ideas.
Apparently I am not alone. The folks who live in the center of the digital world are starting to talk about what to do about this. Today in Techcrunch, there is a story about a site called “Do Dothing for Two Minutes” that has gotten a strong and immediate reaction, bringing in 20,000 unique visitors in the first 8 hours. Next month, there will be a conference in Silicon Valley called Wisdom 2.0 that brings together the thought leaders from the digital world, like Bradley Horowitz, VP Products of Google and Alana Kornfeld, Senior Editor of Huffington Post with the greats of the mindfulness community including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield.
Although it is more difficult to pull myself away to meditate, I find that when I do, it has a profound effect. The silence is stunning when compared to the onslaught of information processing. I start to feel more like myself without all the other voices of blogs and email correspondence and music in my head. And the one thing that I truly love about meditation is that the ideas and insights bubble up.
The idea that you can become more creative by doing less is counterintuitive. Yet, when you think about it, you can see how it might work. Ideas are just below the surface, but the space that they need to present themselves is taken up with random thoughts and constant inputs of information. There’s no room for them. The connections that I can make are based on all the information that I have acquired are more easily made when I meditate because the information has the possibility of being processed when my mind is not in quieter state. It is so common for ideas to arise when I meditate that help me be more innovative in every aspect of my life that I’ve started to keep a pad and pen nearby. For as soon as I start reconnecting with my computer, they fly away like dreams.
Related articles
- 5 Wise Guidelines For Your Mindfulness Meditation (medicineformindbodyspirit.wordpress.com)
- An Evening With Sharon Salzberg (medicineformindbodyspirit.wordpress.com)
