A co-worker greeted me as she arrived at work Thursday with a casual observation.
She was having her roof repaired, she said.
“The biggest problem is they had to take down our satellite dish, so no TV, no Internet,” she said. She paused and smiled. “It’s the best problem we could have.”
I knew instantly what she meant and as I drove down to Macon later that morning, it occurred to me that the natural world understands this, too.
The scenery along the drive is not as it was even a couple of weeks ago. The fields have gone brown now and the trees have lost much of their fall foliage. The stunning hues of orange and red and yellow have yielded to the cold, naked skeleton of trees cast against a gray December sky.
The change of the season renders nature’s beauty in a stark, dramatic way, but a visitor from another world experiencing his first fall might naturally be startled by these differences. No doubt, he would survey the bleak landscape and assume that something had gone dreadfully wrong. To him, it would look as if the natural world was dying.
Of course, we humans understand nature is merely retreating for a season and we can grasp the necessity of it.
I imagine the spring and summer as time when the natural world is as busy as the humans who inhabit our earth, forever expanding, moving, exploring. Leaves and branches crowd and jostle for a strategic advantage under the life-giving sun. It’s all competition and conflict and energy and movement.
But there is an innate wisdom in nature that seems to have somehow eluded us modern humans.
Nature seems to rise up this time of year as if to say, “Hey, wait a minute. What are we doing here? Let’s stop for a moment and think this through.”
Yes, if nature really could think, the long winters would no doubt be spent in quiet reflection, in introspection, in taking stock.
Compare that to what we know about ourselves.
We seem never to be alone even when we are alone.
A study by a marketing group called eMarketer finds that the average adult will spend more than five hours each day online, either on a computer or mobile device such as a smartphone. That average adult also spend 4-1/2 hours watching TV. Think about that for a brief moment while you are waiting for your Twitter feed to update: That’s 9-1/2 hours spent looking at a screen of some sort. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that the average adult sleeps between eight and nine hours a day, which leaves a balance of 5-1/2 to 6-1/2 waking hours for things like work, school, meals, etc.
And for many of us, our lives are even more frenetic now as the holidays approach, what with all the scurrying back and forth for one thing or another the season seems to require.
But isn’t there some part of us that yearns for stillness, for rest and renewal?
If ever there were a time when humanity could benefit by retreating into quiet reflection, it is now.
The events of Ferguson, Missouri, and now, the Eric Garner case in New York, seem to have opened old, ugly wounds that threaten to divide black and white America. In Mississippi, the state’s increasingly extremist right-wing leadership seems to be waging a political war on an educational system it seems intent on starving to death.
Facebook is a war zone, even among “friends,” a vast wasteland of hot-tempered rhetoric, most of it wildly distorted and mean-spirited, completely bereft of value.
We react rather than respond because the latter requires considering the opposing point of view before speaking. You can shout in an instant, but discussion requires time. Well, we’re fresh out of time … we are much too busy.
Yet if nature profits from such a season of stillness, how much more could we poor, frenzied, reactionary humans gain from a similar retreat into quiet?
If we were all forced, by some calamity, to endure some real time alone, we might discover we were the better for it.
We might emerge from that season of solitude something like the spring that follows winter — vibrant, hopeful, strong, ready to grow.
As my co-worker observed, it would be the best problem we could have.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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