It begins

A few weeks ago, I went for a nice Saturday morning walk in my favorite park. It was a beautiful day and it felt great just being alive. I stopped for a few minutes to take in a particularly beautiful view of a meadow. The week before, the field was filled with bright purple flowers. Now they were replaced with yellow wildflowers, but a few purple ones remained and I thought it was remarkable how the colors were perfectly complementary. The sun reflected off the blades of grass so that the whole meadow seemed to glow. There was a gentle breeze blowing through the grass and I could hear the soft rustling as I stood there soaking it all in.

In that moment as the beauty of that meadow washed over me, for just a second, I wished I had a smart phone. I could take a picture of that meadow and post it on Facebook with a cute comment. “My Saturday morning walk!” Then I could check and see who had “liked” it and know for sure just how nice a day it really was. Sure, my flip phone has a camera, but it wouldn’t do that meadow any justice and I hadn’t brought it with me anyway.

No sooner had I felt that urge to capture and broadcast the moment than I was chastising myself for being so distracted.  I said to myself, “can’t you just be present in the moment?!” Wasn’t it enough to just let myself contemplate that meadow and what it meant to me at that place and time? I laughed to myself and carried on my walk.  I hadn’t walked ten feet before I saw a guy crouched down on the ground with his iPhone out taking a picture of a caterpillar.

He introduced himself, his name was Artie if I recall correctly, and we had a short and pleasant conversation about how we thought the park was becoming overdeveloped before he took back off on his jog.

My initial response after this experience was to launch into an internal rant about how smart phones are eating away at our collective ability to “live in the moment” and I let myself revel in that righteous indignation. But now that this story has marinated in my head for a while I have changed my tune. Artie seems like a guy who really lives in the moment. He saw that caterpillar and was so enraptured by it that he just had to capture that moment digitally. I imagine Artie joyfully taking out that phone and sharing that picture surrounded by adoring friends and family. Perhaps more likely he just posted it on Facebook where his children, coworkers, and old high school classmates could see it and say to themselves “That’s so Artie to share a picture of a caterpillar from his morning jog.” Maybe he never even looked at that picture again, but the very act of documenting that fuzzy little caterpillar somehow brought the joy of seeing such a cute creature up just one more notch.

And so, I have now decided to set my inner Artie free. I’ll be posting about my latest obsessions, rants, raves, the profound and the mundane. I hope sharing these experiences will heighten my appreciation of them, but I’m not about to get a smart phone any time soon. Won’t you join me on this journey?