This past weekend, I decided to travel with my friend ’39 Chevy Ken up to Wellsboro. The local Morris-Penna hunt club was having a pig roast at the Crossroads Tavern, and its members and families were attending.
My friend Ken always gets us tickets
I always learn something new on these trips.
Want to know what I learned from this trip?
I’ve been ‘absorbed by light’.
At the ‘Amsterdam Light Festival’ in the Netherlands recently a designer by the name of Gali Lucas who works for Design Bridge created a clever piece of art which was later made into a sculpture by Caroline Hinz in 2018.
This creation displays three people sitting on a park bench at night with one person on one end, a space in the middle and two other persons on the other end.
Their faces are lit up by their iPhone lights.
Lucas, in an uncanny way suggests, “In winter, when it gets dark so early, you see people all around the city illuminated by the light of their mobile phones.”
In other words, the only ‘light’ around is the glare from the operating ‘phones’ held in the hands of the three people sitting on the bench.
No conversations, interaction or glances between the three controlled by the light on their phones.
Lucas further adds, “In parks, cafes ~ even on their bikes. It’s quite eerie. This light that rules our lives, is sometimes, the only means of connection, yet it also ‘isolates’ us completely, it detaches us from the real world.”
I was reminded of this by my friend Ken this past weekend. He said to me, “Pete you spend a lot of time on that phone, texting, reading, or talking to someone ~ you can’t enjoy your surroundings.”
The autumn leaves were changing their color in the mountains.
I thought for a moment, and said to myself “Guilty” as charged. I was ‘absorbed by light’. Do you ever find yourself ‘isolated‘ in the same predicament?
If so, you’re losing your ‘physical’ connection with people.
I looked around the picnic gathering and saw not one iPhone in use among about 50 people. They were enjoying the picnic and talking to each other.
A mother interacting with her three kids; people laughing among themselves; conversations with each other abounded; the DJ was playing music, and a few hugs, kisses and dancing were there too.
It was a most jovial event, but one not often seen today without these mobile phones present or in use.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and we were discussing this technology. She told me she had taken her kids out to dinner the other night and seated at a table next to them was a family. Each of the family members, adults and children alike, had an iPhone in use, and they were all glued to their screens, much like the sculptured people on that park bench.
No verbal or physical interaction between them; prisoners handcuffed from the world on this night and its surroundings captured by the ‘light’ of their iPhone.
My friend, a very smart and astute observer, told me that she refuses to buy her children iPhones. She, for sure, is an exception to the norm these days.
And the iPhone users in public seem hypnotized by that light emitted; some while even driving I’m thinking.
I, too, was becoming a prisoner of this technology, and my friend Ken said so.
While was I spending so much time on my phone, I was oblivious to my surroundings.
I know people who even spend countless hours playing video games on the phone to occupy their time while family and love ones sit nearby ignored.
It was reported that the alleged assassin of political activist Charlie Cook spent countless hours on his phone playing all sorts of perhaps influencing and violent games. Know any teenagers or old men who do the same thing?
You can’t get a hug on an iPhone; can’t physically touch another human being; can’t get a small kiss here and there with your mate.
No displayed love was found on this park bench.
There is a vacant spot on that sculpted park bench for you, want to be absorbed by the light; your invited!
On the ride home from Wellsboro, my iPhone did not leave my pocket ~ I left it sleeping there and had good conversation with Ken.
My advice for you ~ don’t be ‘absorbed by light’.
If only you look up, the leaves of autumn are most beautiful.
