Commentary
Trading Blackberry for Blackberries
Last week, the New York Times reported on five neuroscientists who had spent a week in May in remote Utah, rafting and camping and hiking in the wilderness. The object of their trip was to see how — and if — being both out of doors and out of reach of modern technological equipment might affect the brain. Does tranquility, they wanted to know, help attention, memory and learning? Does constant heavy multi-tasking with cell phones and computers and Blackberries fatigue the brain?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School profes sor, loves her Vineyard home not so much as a place to get away from it all as a place to think about it all.
“It’s a place to stand back and think big thoughts,” she said, seated on the patio of her home overlooking the Edgartown Great Pond. “We get so short-term in this country, so focused on the crisis of the moment.”
There is, she said, something clarifying about reconnecting with the timeless, something about nature that arouses a deeper contemplation of real values.
My wife and I spent the last week of July relaxing at the southwestern tip of Prince Edward Island. There’s not much there except a small harbor filled with lobster boats, a lighthouse, an inn, a restaurant (we stayed in a sweet little apartment above the restaurant — from our balcony we looked at the beach, the harbor and the Northumberland Strait), endless cropland stretching to the horizon in every direction, and 55 giant wind turbines towering over the fields.
After a brutal three years working at a job I can only describe as the equivalent of placing my hand in a meat grinder, I took the proverbial leap off a cliff. I quit my job and fell into the abyss of unemployment. This action was precipitated by a call I received from my sister who had just found out that my employer hired an armed guard to protect me at one of my business meetings. She asked one simple question. “What are you doing?”
Growing up on the Vineyard, I long ago came to terms with finding wildlife in my house.
Ticks, spiders, mosquitoes and moths in summer; mice (both in traps and scurrying across dining room floors) in the winter. Once, a pair of baby raccoons camped out in our yard. Had I opened the backdoor, they would have waddled right into our dining room.
But no amount of Island insects, rodents, or bugs could have prepared me for the Cambridge bat.
SPARE THE SERMON
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
Long before writer Peter Beinart’s birth, some felt that the influx of Holocaust refugees in the 1940s threatened the enlightened goals of Israel’s founders. Then it was the waves of Jew refugees from Arab lands in the 1950s, Jews from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the black Jews of Ethiopia in this century — who all threatened the “unique character of the Jewish state.”