Some Sapien is just waiting

Have you ever noticed how much time we spend waiting?

We wait in line for coffee. We wait for stoplights to change color. We wait for public transport. We wait for others.

Fully 25% of our waking hours must be spent waiting.

Some of us have found ways to use the majority of this time productively. Some of us use this time to simply entertain ourselves. That is, making wasted time more enjoyable. Some would argue wasting time is important for our health. I don't disagree.

However, making the most of this waiting time is only possible because of technology. Radio has enabled us to either be entertained or informed while waiting to get to our destination. The advent of portable audio media has allowed us to take control of what we listen to on the radio in our favorite transportation method.

The invention of the cell phone, though initially meant to help us communicate with astronauts on the moon, allows us to get in contact with folks much closer to us. Cell phones have become the Swiss-army knife of the 21st century. What can't you do with a cell phone these days?

On the other hand, what have we exchanged for this productivity? The saying "No matter where you go, there you are." no longer applies. For we can now be anywhere else we want to be.

We can be with our friends and family or we can be at work or we can be engrossed in some game, video or listening to music. We can know instantly the status of our closest friends, who are not close at all. We can be anywhere but where we are and with whom we are with. We have lost our sense of place. We have become detached from the very ground we stand on.

One minute we can be enjoying a latte at our favorite coffee shop. The next minute we can be raising awareness of the crisis in Darfur or raising money for our favorite political candidate. Is there something wrong with this? Who knows?

Rather than judging the rightness or wrongness of this situation, I believe we simply need to be more aware of the choices we are making with regard to where our consciousness is at any given moment. We can not allow ourselves to unconsciously switch from one context to the next. Otherwise we run the danger of undervaluing the experience of physical selves in favour of our digital selves and in the same moment under valuing the existence of our companions in the physical space.

This leads to behavior where we ignore the pain and suffering of our physical neighbor and focus exclusively on the drama of our virtual neighbors.

We don't want to be in a situation where ignore the man who was hit by a car, who is lying in the street, simply because he's not on our "Friends" list, do we?