In our home you will find those things you can find in just about everybody’s home these days: televisions, DVD players, VCR’s, a PC, an Xbox, CD players, etc. We’re definitely not unusual. Again, the stuff is cheap and plentiful.
I guess I’m not unlike the many other people who rely on technology for the convenience those little gadgets provide, and for the amazing things they can do. (Man, the iPod has to be the greatest invention ever — including the wheel and sliced bread.) And, fortunately, you don’t have to be wealthy to get your own gadgets.
All that aside, it does bother me that cell phones and e-mail, and all those other things that entertain us and occupy our time seem to have slowly replaced our relationships with each other. Now, instead of going into someone’s office at work, we just shoot over an e-mail, even though that person may be only twenty steps away. We learn how our other family members’ days went not at the dinner table, but over the cell phone. We spend time tinkering with our gadgets rather than interacting with other people, including our own families.
And how many times have you seen a mother in the store ignoring her child(ren) while chatting away on the phone? Or what about trying to enjoy dinner at a restaurant with your wife, only to be distracted by someone’s obnoxious ring tone two tables away, followed by that person’s half of some detailed conversation right in the middle of the main course?
Gadgets (and, to a larger extent, all material goods) are great, but one has to keep them in their perspective. Gadgets are not people. They cannot possibly take the place of people. You can’t have a relationship with a piece of technology.
There are times when I do want to shove it all aside and go into retreat like Henry David Thoreau — just escape somewhere with a few good books and a journal. Of course, most of us have families and can’t very well abdicate our responsibilities by going the way of Thoreau. But there are times when I long to take a couple of days, leave the gadgets behind, and take my family off to the mountains for some trail-walking and primitive camping in the woods. (My wife would never go for the “primitive” part, though.) Imagine a few days without our gadgets — no cell phones, or digital cameras, laptops, and even no iPods. Instead, there would be just the important people in our lives with no distractions.
Truth be known, my son would much rather go outside with me and throw around a $5 football than play with his Xbox, however much that cost. And, truth be known, I’d rather light up some firewood out back some cool autumn evening, roast something gooey on a stick and read stories than sit around and watch some mundane show on TV. And I know my wife would rather sit in front of a fireplace and talk about anything instead of talk into her cell phone for half an evening.
I enjoy reading early American history. I am fascinated by pioneers who went into uninhabited wilderness, cleared the land, built cabins, plowed fields, and started communities — all without the benefit of the machinery we use today. There’s a certain romance to that which I’ll never experience, which may be a blessing. I’m really a wimp when it comes to manual labor. To me, tilling the garden and spreading mulch are physical accomplishments. But still, there’s a part of me that — impossibly — longs to experience those times before modern machinery. Those were much harder times for sure, but they were also times when all people had were each other, when families sat around lanterns or candles or fireplaces and read the Bible and entertained themselves without the aid of battery-powered devices, and weren’t rendered helpless when the electricity went out. They didn’t have electricity.
One of my favorite books is “Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818-1937,” which I actually wrote a two-part column on here and here last August. I’ve read that book three times, and plan to again soon. It’s a fascinating story of perfectly ordinary people. While I don’t envy the hard times those early settlers endured, part of me does envy the simple lives they lived.
And so, I do want to escape for a couple of days to my own Walden Pond, take my family with me, and suck the marrow out of life. We’d go armed with no electronics, just a tent, some sleeping bags, a football, some fishing rods, and a book or two. Everything would be reduced to just the three of us, God, and our primitive surroundings. Doing so wouldn’t permanently disconnect us from our present-day responsibilities, but we at least wouldn’t forget how to relate to each other.
