True connectivity

A few days ago I was told a man in his late thirties had crashed his car while tweeting on his PDA and lost his life. It seems to be a very current paradox, to lose yourself because you’re connected to somebody who is completely outside of your immediate reality, doesn’t it?

And yet this paradox has become typical in our occidental web-connected society. The more we connect to internet and its fuzzy layers of intellectual (and intellect-less) chit-chat, the less we connect to real life reality, thus putting ourselves in potentially life-threatening situations.

I wonder what Eckhart Tolle, author of “The power of now” would say abou this incident. His best-selling book, appeared a good number of years ago, insisted on the importance of connecting to the PRESENT reality around us instead of constantly remembering our past or planning our future. And he was only the last of a long line of thinkers around the world who have tried to convince us of this principle for the last five to seven thousand years.

We are told today that “being connected” means tweeting and facebooking and youtubing all day long, to the extent that american families have started texting each other from room to room of the same household instead of reaching out to see each other’s face or hear a human voice. The rest of the world is fast catching up on this latest trend, I’m sure.

But that kind of connecting can get you killed if you’re driving, or crossing the street, or in any situation that involves risks to your safety. How on earth could we have strayed so far away from the evolutionary principle of adapting to our immediate environment in order to survive and thrive?

True connectivity is precisely this age old ability to stay in the present tense. To notice the hidden details and catch on to the undertones in a boss’s reprimand, the subtle movements of his body that indicate something else might happen any second.

True connectivity has to do with increased awareness of what is happening now. Around you, but also inside you. What are you feeling towards this person or that one, what does your gut tell you about taking the right avenue of conversation instead of the left one?

Emotions are our mammalian inheritance, acting as the life or death interface to reality that will keep us closer to life than to its opposite. They were developed with the limbic brain to enrich the basic reptilian response of fight or flight, giving us a wider and better range of responses, bringing us closer to  socially intelligent forms of life, where most of the menaces to survival no longer came from nature, but from our very equals. Equal based threats are more probable and far more complex in humans than in any other living species.

True connectivity is fast becomming a long lost art that we once excelled at as a species, but that we have abandoned in this intellect-obsessed XXIst century. All in the sake of what…tweeting with a pet?

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