A MOUNTAIN VIEW: Simplify or multiply?

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

—Henry David Thoreau

A cup of tea with my mother,
looking at each other,
enjoying our tea together….
The point in life is to know what’s enough—
why envy those otherworld immortals?
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

—Gensei, 1650

Time. How utterly, unspeakably precious this scanter-than-gold-and-more-valuable commodity—unavailable on the open market—grows with each passing season.
Perhaps age makes the value of time grow more apparent. Or perhaps the age makes it so—our technological age, in which daily complications multiply, almost exponentially, with each passing year.
“Multiply!” announces an e-mail my friends and acquaintances have begun sending in the past year, as they catch up with the teen generation’s manner of social networking. I don’t open these, assuming that some well-meaning soul has invited a list of his friends to what I’ll call a “space-book” page, where a growing network of people can multiply their links and connections, post comments and photos and announcements. It’s all very useful and expedient.
But I don’t want to Multiply. I want to Subtract. Don’t many of us these days crave less, not more? Don’t our exhausted souls (Teresa of Avila called them) want less surface commotion and more time to think a real thought with roots, with potential for bearing some kind of fruit the world can use?
I don’t care if the thought is not instantly new or posted in the last split-second; I don’t mind if it came from a Chinese hermit of a thousand years past or St. Paul or William Blake. In fact, aren’t these ancient thoughts usually more vivid, new and revitalizing, in our time, than any opinions posted on a Web site?
“Multiply,” moreover, is a misnomer. What is meant is “Divide.” “Friend Johny MacDougal Invites You To Divide!” would be the more accurate subject line for space-book invitations, calling your mind into yet another electronic arena for dividing and splitting the attention into more and more diversions, like exploding quasars in ever-expanding cyberspace.
It’s all wonderful, I know; these Web sites and links connect us laterally around the world in ways nobody could have dreamed a century ago.
But what about vertical links? —Between past and future, between our deepest thoughts and the angels, between earth and heaven? What about memory? Depth? Stillness? Inner vision? Time to think a complete thought without something blinking and billowing out more data, more graphics, jokes and opinions? Surely such time has priceless value.
I know that everything around us is growing increasingly complicated, because we have removed ourselves so loftily from the land, water and cycles of nature. Our lives and livelihoods now depend on a vast and complex network of connections, oil-dependent and global in nature instead of locally-sustainable. We’re so complexly interlinked, one power outage or water-supply contamination can bring an entire region to a complete halt.
In these matters, we have little say, other than growing a garden and trees, hanging onto family lands, protecting forest whenever possible, and urging our public officials to protect ground water, creeks and greenspace, and limit asphalting and sprawl. Even taking these “simple” actions can be complicated, because the problems and systems they’re lodged in are themselves complex.
But increasing one’s presence and personal time spent in cyberspace is a proactive choice, not a passive predicament—at least initially!
Most Internet-users I’ve talked to, from students to elders, have had the experience that never fails to astonish me when I shut down my computer and look around: an entire chunk of the day has been utterly obliterated. Simply reading and answering e-mails so utterly absorbs me, I forget which planet I’m on, much less how many hours are dissolving during my trip to space.
“It sucks up time like the old Hoover vacuum,” commented one older woman in the locker room at the local wellness center, as we all got into a cyberspace discussion.
Granted, it’s difficult to live without this tool today. Extended families keep up with each member. Investors monitor stocks. Public officials stay in touch with constituents. Church pastors send out announcements and prayer lists.
Few businesses exist apart from the Internet, and most employees have positions that require some hours, if not all day, online. Schools have become increasingly Internet-dependent, with online classes burgeoning and course postings now the norm.
Offices no longer have empty surface-space for writing or holding a book; computers take up all the elbow room. And when you pass a group of office cubicles, you don’t see anyone reading paperwork or using a pen, looking out the window or even having a two-person discussion; everyone is, rather, hunched toward a computer monitor.
This is why it puzzles me that we would voluntarily “multiply” these connections during our scant leisure time. It strikes me that we are still very naïve about squandering our hours, willingly adding our names to news lists and social networking sites that will quickly self-divide and multiply in every direction as time passes.  I think we will soon grow exhausted.
In fact, by next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if software and tech support businesses crop up not to Multiply but Obliterate your name and presence from the Internet, Subtract you from cyberspace and help you Add a simple hour to your life—enough for one cup of tea with your mother. May it be so!
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at .