Recently an article by Oliver Burkeman in
the Guardian* made me think about how I spend my time and what takes my
attention. Burkeman quotes Adam
Greenfield’s account of a day spent with a friend inside Manhattan’s Old Town
Bar in November, 2015 when, while enjoying beer and French fries, their phones
started to vibrate. The article explains that:
In Paris, Islamist terrorists had launched a series of coordinated
shootings and suicide bombings that would kill 130 people, including 90
attending a concert at the Bataclan theatre. As Greenfield reached for his
phone in New York, he recalls, everyone else did the same, and “you could feel the
temperature in the room immediately dropping”. Devices throughout the bar
buzzed with news alerts from media organisations, as well as notifications from
Facebook Safety Check, a new service that used geolocation to identify users in
the general vicinity of the Paris attacks, inviting them to inform their friend
networks that they were OK. Suddenly, it was as if the walls of the Old Town
Bar had become porous – “like a colander, with this high-pressure medium of the
outside world spurting through every aperture at once.”
It made me recall a day in Montreal in November,
1963, when I was sitting with friends in a bar that I think was called The
Captain’s Locker, just around the corner from Aux Délices on Stanley Street
below Ste. Catherine’s. We didn’t have cell phones, of course but suddenly,
when the volume on television at the bar was turned up, we heard reports of the
assassination of President Kennedy. Whatever we’d been talking about seemed inconsequential,
our lives very small and insignificant in contrast to these events in Texas. My
friends and I, then in our early twenties, thought of ourselves as bohemians,
poets and artists who rejected convention and materialistic values, yet the
conversation quickly switched to the tragedy of the American president’s death,
international politics, the American nation, the economy. The announcers spoke
at length about the grief of the beautiful widow in her blood-spattered, pink
Chanel suit.
I knew that, although the news was from another country,
it was important for us and for the world at large, yet as I sat with my
friends in the Captain’s Locker I found myself thinking of another tragic
death. I had no way of explaining my sense of its importance to anyone else, but
it was this. Until I was 12 years old, I’d studied piano with a woman I will
call Mrs. LeClerc. She was in her late forties at that time, was once a beauty
queen and was still strikingly attractive. At my lessons she wore what my
mother called “hostess gowns,” long, flowing, low-cut dresses in dark green or
wine-coloured velvet. She was kind and encouraging, and I adored her. Mrs.
LeClerc had a handsome 24-year-old son, Bill, who occasionally drove me home
after my lessons, sometimes bringing along his pretty girlfriend, Linda, a girl
whom everyone loved. To me they were an enormously glamorous family and I was
thrilled when I was included in an invitation to Bill and Linda's wedding. Over 60 years
later, I can remember the church, the organ music, and Linda’s wedding dress. I also
remember her going-away suit which later that night would be splattered with
blood after the car they were driving went off the road on the Hope Princeton
Highway on their way to Penticton for their honeymoon. I can still recall how transformed Mrs. Leclerc’s appearance was when I next saw her. Everything in her life had changed, I
thought, in the twinkling of an eye. That afternoon in Montreal, it was Mrs.
Leclerc for whom I grieved, conscious that the ripples from her tragic loss
were minuscule compared to that of the First Lady’s bereavement and that few,
if any, would know about her loss. What was it, I wondered back then, that is important
in our lives? What was real? What mattered? Who mattered?
As Burkeman says, “We marinate in the
news,” and the crises we experience there “can feel more important, even more
truly real, than the concrete immediacy of our families, neighbourhoods and
workplaces.”
As it happened, just a year after
President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, I experienced a tragedy of my own
which led to my beginning a period of daily psychoanalysis. Every day, I
reported the dreams of the previous night, the way they connected with the
activities of my day, and the thoughts and associations they prompted. It was a
fascinating process which had the effect of making me view my life in relation
to my dreams and what they signified. Daily events became grist for the hourly
mills of analysis. It was seductive, and it might have gone on for years. Fortunately,
the man I would soon marry had come to Montreal and we began living together.
Somehow I knew that I had to make a choice between paying attention to
the reality of our new relationship and our life together or to
the attraction of the wide, speculative world of psychoanalysis.
I chose that man. That life. The everyday reality of it.
I was wise then. I saw the dilemma, and
I made the right choice.
And so why, now, do I let the small daily
details of my one and only little life be swamped and submerged by the barrage
of information that seeps in each day on my cellphone, my computer, my car
radio -- the omnipotent and ever-present news media?
Of course, in these troubled times,
some of the news is important and must be heeded. But now, more than ever, it’s
time to pay attention to what is near at hand. And to do what matters. Close to
home. The only place where you know you can make a difference.
