Before Email

And Other Digital Lamentations

When I think about us, I think about how we wrap ourselves around each other. I think about getting lost in your eyes.

When Dean and I had been married for a few years, we fell into a routine. We’d sit with our tea in the early morning hours, talking about the day stretching out before us. I never failed to be delighted by my husband’s favorite question: “So,” he would say, “Tell me what’s in your heart.” And I would sit quietly for a minute, feeling and pondering before I answered. It was a lovely ritual among tea and morning newspapers.

Back then I still read at night. Schooled on the principle that one’s writing is a direct reflection of the quality of one’s reading, I devoured Eudora Welty, Wally Lamb, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison. It was not unusual for me to read several books a month. I adored the fact that Oprah Winfrey started a book club, and in her first year, I read everything on her list.

But all that was then, before the hand of technology grabbed our attention with a powerful grip of instant connection that we mistook for instant intimacy. Now, in the quiet early hours of the morning, business associates at the opposite end of the country send texts to my husband, compelling him to reply. I have to discipline and train myself to wake up and not view Instagram, not look at my emails, not reach for my phone and the promise of morning texts, or worse, word games.

I grit my teeth some mornings as I enter my office, where I open my current work-in-progress and look at the clock. My commitment is to write for two hours. Go. When I have finished writing, I am like the horse that cannot wait to get back to the barn. I open Instagram. Did anyone like what I posted yesterday? I fall into other people’s posts and videos like a drunk stumbling gleefully into another bar. At night instead of picking up a book, I often go back to my phone. My life is measured out in emails, texts, and Instagram likes. I race into the self-imposed stress that technology has brought to my doorstep. “Tell me what’s in your heart,” a lingering memory of a long ago almost forgotten time.

On a recent weekend, we were driving back from Dallas, sitting in the bubble of our car, untouched by the underbelly of the digital beast. Raindrops hit the windshield, and the wiper blades slid into rhythm. We put on Simon and Garfunkel and listened to “The Sounds of Silence”:

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again.

As the music of our youth allowed the floodgates of a life past to open, I recalled how the lyrics of Paul Simon had introduced me to the angst of introspection, unveiling the dark quietude I would come to value.

In my world today, there seems to be less space for the sounds of silence; so little time to contemplate a life or ask the question, who am I? That’s been replaced by phones that ping messages at all hours of the day and night. Even worse is the insatiable desire to answer those communications immediately. The meaningful question of “who I am,” has been reduced to a selfie on social media and the unrelenting connection to WiFi. Look at me, it says; this is who I am. This is what I ate for dinner last night. These are all my “friends,” and not a drop of introspection to be found. This is the golden age of self-promotion. That’s how business is done.

The thing about the Paul Simon lyrics is that they remind me of time in my life when I was straddling the worlds of childhood and adulting. Attached to that was a required amount of self-examination served up on a bed of grace-filled angst. I eventually grew into someone who enjoyed my own company, understood my flaws and my gifts, and wasn’t afraid to break away from the herd creatively, politically, or emotionally. My psychology wasn’t tied up in how many followers, friends, or fans I had, but in how well I knew myself and was true to the self I was discovering.

In younger years, I was blessed with poets and lyricists who modeled introspection. It was part of rite of passage into adulthood. What, I wonder, are the consequences of generations who have not known this process as part of their development? How do they summon and access the deeper resilience that life’s challenges inevitably require? How do they make the all-important distinction between their superficial inner voice that craves social media attention and the deeper voice that speaks its truth in silence? How can a writer capture the state of the human story without first knowing the depths of their own story?

What we give up because of technology, we must learn to reclaim through the expression of the human heart, or our very human-ness is sure to perish. “Ask me the question,” I say to Dean. He knows what I am talking about.

And then I close my eyes and see how close or far away the answer is: “Tell me what’s in your heart?”

Sharing some of my favorite “heart-felt” writers, who know the gifts of the examined life, and as a result inspire me:

@brookewarner @jeannineouellette @camillasanderson @deerambeau