I was recently in the Stanislaus National Forest living for a week among some of the tallest trees you will ever see. I noticed how there is a natural spacing between the trees and wondered - how does nature know how to space itself out? If so many pine trees are dropping pine cones and pine seeds, what controls which take root and which do not? If they all took root there would be no space between the trees and they would not thrive.
True to my theme in this blog, I quickly thought how does this apply to my life and the human condition? Just like trees and pine seeds, not all human seeds take root. I read somewhere a long time ago that the odds of just being born are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 350 billion. Stop and think about that for a minute - the very fact that you are here reading this means you are one of the lucky ones. What this also means is that all 7 billion people walking the face of the planet have all won the lottery of human existence.
Just like the trees, some of us will grow and thrive while others will not. So much depends on the circumstances we are born into and the circumstances we create for ourselves. Most humans are much more in control of their circumstances than most other parts of nature, but the general rules of nature still apply. What makes a tree grow? Fertile soil, sunlight, water, and space. What makes a human grow? Well, I could dig at that question for a long time - and grow vs. thrive is another long chapter. Generally speaking it has a lot to do with basic nutrition, sleep and avoiding disease. But so much has to do with meeting emotional, physical, and psychological needs. Another level above that to me is having a purpose in life and as Viktor Frankl once wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, if you have a why to live for, then you will figure out the how.
How does space relate to this discussion? Well I strongly believe that we all need a certain amount of physical, emotional and mental space to thrive. Have you ever had a day or moment in time that you just need your own space? I often get this way and just need to literally recluse myself in order to move forward. That is probably the hardest part of the life we lives we lead today, there is so much competing for our attention and taking up our space. Life was not always this way for me, but with kids and the information revolution, it is harder and harder to find space.
But when I do find space, I find my soul waiting for me. And with my soul I always find wisdom. Wisdom that is usually well beyond my years which makes me then believe that in those moments when I find space and I can plug into something bigger than my small little life, I actually connect with God and the bigger part of nature that we are all part of.
More and more I am finding it harder to get into space. Modern society is consuming us minute by minute, email by email, and tweet by tweet. Free time when we find it is filled with entertainment of all sorts. Whether it is television, computers, internet, email, FaceBook, Twitter, or those deadly time killers called Apps, our lives are more tethered to technology than ever before.
What is even more bizarre is we are more connected with each other than ever before, but I feel less connected to the people in my life than ever before. How strange is it that I can know everything my friends are doing without ever spending any time talking to them? Is that true connection? Is that our new human existence?
This all brings me back to where I started. I would say 30, 50, 100 years ago we all had plenty of space. Life was harder in some ways, but much less compressed. The demands on our time were far less than they are today. Sometimes I look at my personal email inbox as more of a burden than a benefit. If I wanted to get in touch with a friend far away 20 years ago, I would probably send them a letter or call them if I could afford it. There was a natural rhythm to corresponding via letters. You would write and mail a letter and it would take up to a week for it to get to your friend. By time they wrote back and it arrived, 2-3 weeks of your life would go by. By then you had a good amount of material built up to write the next installment. Email is so wham-bam-thank you ma'am, that the back and forth happens within a day and then you go on with your life for a few months before someone gets the impulse to write again.
While I make my living off of technology and in particular all things that torment me in terms of technology and speeding up my life, I do yearn for a simpler time. If we are all spending more time on the computer and cell phones than we were before, and if we have not given anything up, then we have lost our space. In losing that space, we are disrupting the laws of nature because we all need our space. Basically we are overpopulating the forest with trees and as a result most trees will not have the natural sunlight and space to grow.
I believe that will be the final result of this experiment called social networking. We will all feel super connected, but will have far less time to simply ponder our existence. Without truly taking time for self reflection, we will not know ourselves as well as we could and we will not get as much out of life as we could. Without understanding where we have been, how can we figure out what we want to change to move forward down what we believe is a meaningful path? Therefore, in the absence of space and time for self reflection, we will all grow a lot less than we should and as a result there will be far less meaning to our lives.
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