Ponder: "you are where your attention is"

“But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.”

Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being.”  New York Magazine.  20 Sep. 2016

Lullaby at the Font

“Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.”  Isaiah 43:4.

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,

Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.

If that mockingbird won’t sing,

Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.

If that diamond ring turns brass,

Papa’s going to buy you a looking glass.

And on it goes, that lullaby, with its gentle tale of generosity, abundance, and love.  It’s a good song to sing to a child, isn’t it?  What it says is this: I love you more than anything in the whole world.  I would give anything to make you happy.  You have nothing to fear, because I care for you.  All will be well. 

It’s a lovely song, one that sets a child’s life on the assurance of a parent’s love, the most solid place of all for a child to stand.  I would guess it was first sung by a poor man, to a baby wrapped in blankets a little too thin.  Men who know the price of diamonds don’t go on about giving them to babies.  There’s something of hope in it, the promise that it will all work out some way, that in the end, there will be grace.