Inside Yoga 156 (18/1/2016)
Last week the media was chattering about (and reporting) how the Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne had declared that he had ditched his smart phone to help him “live in the moment”.
Redmayne is reported to have got rid of his smart phone early last year and replaced it with a basic analogue phone because “it was a reaction against being glued permanently to my iPhone during waking hours. The deluge of emails was constant and I found myself trying to keep up in real time, at the expense of living in the moment,” the actor explained.
Smart move, perhaps? The Independent newspaper reported that there is mounting evidence that the “always on” culture driven by smartphones is making us more anxious and unhappy. I am not surprised to learn this.
The Independent added that recent research showed that British workers are effectively cancelling out their annual leave allowance by checking their emails outside office hours. David Cameron’s former adviser Steve Hilton revealed last week that he hasn’t used a smart phone in years – and feels that he has left behind a “life of stress and tension and anxiety, fuelled by the device in my pocket”.
And for Redmayne his life was so much better, so much more present… during the day, as he found “I felt far more alive,” he said, but there was a catch to his happy go lucky day free of his smart phone, because he found that he was “tied to my laptop answering emails for two hours first thing every morning and last thing at night instead, which was a different kind of intrusion. I wasn’t very popular with (his wife) Hannah, so today I’m back on my iPhone and trying to master a healthier relationship with it.”
And there is the punchline of the story last week, as mockingly several media outlets mourned the death of Eddie Redmayne’s analogue phone.
Yet this story highlights something that is happening across our country and other countries, as it is quite possible that Mr Smith in Tunbridge Wells has had the same fight with his smart phone and the quality of his life, but no one reports on this. And countless other Mr and Mrs Smiths have had similar dilemmas about this “wonderful” piece of technology.
This story of Eddie Redmayne has highlighted how it is usually not the object or the process to blame for our unhappiness or our stress levels being through the roof, but our relationship with the object or process and how we manage it, as Redmayne is quoted, he is now “trying to master a healthier relationship with it.”
This in essence is what “being mindful” is all about; we learn to be present and aware of every moment so that we see what is really happening and what we are experiencing – and then perhaps make changes. We then learn to make an appropriate response – Zen Buddhist Reb Anderson said (on a retreat I attended) that the Buddha taught us about appropriate response, not a reactive state of mind. You could say that although it made a lot of sense to switch to an analogue phone for Redmayne this was a reactive decision and in the end his appropriate response was to go back to the smart phone and learn how to use it in a better way without badly affecting his life (we have to assume being a successful actor he has a lot of emails, more than us mere mortals?).
For many people they are caught in this reactive state, a slave to the machine – be it a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop or a pc – whereby our “usual or more relaxed way of life” is adversely affected by the need to answer/check/use our piece of technology which is stuck to us.
Picture this: the office desk in tray is where we put pending business and we deal with as and when we can. We know that there is stuff in the in tray and will deal with it in due course, and some days are busier than others. Now picture this in tray is stuck on our shoulder, and the moment anything, just one item perhaps, lands in our in tray we must stop everything and deal with it… either because it stresses us not to or we are just so excited that there is something in our in tray. Needless to say, that in tray is our smart phone etc.
In fact, for many this relationship with our “in tray on the shoulder” has reached a point that our responses are similar to Pavlova’s dog – as we respond and check our smart phones even when there is nothing in the in tray!
This is surely a crazy way of living? It is a form of madness which does need controlling as Eddie Redmayne learnt and continues to learn. How about you?
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