My in-laws gave my family the 50th anniversary DVD set of The Andy Griffith Show for Christmas and I’ve really been loving watching these episodes from 1960s TV. Here’s Mayberry, which even 50 years ago was like a place stuck in the past; a slower pace of life, a simpler life. On the episode we watched tonight, Andy took the time to peel an apple in one long cut without making any breaks from the peel. At the end of the episode, Andy and Barney were sitting on the porch just talking and playing a song on the guitar. It ended with such a feeling of contentment that seems pretty rare these days. It really makes me think that with all of our great achievements, like the split-second communications of the internet, maybe we really haven’t gone all that far as we’d like to think. We are all very social animals, so now Facebook has been invented, texting has been invented, but while this communication does connect us in ways that were not possible 50 years ago, I don’t think it connects us quite on the deep emotional and satisfying level that sitting on the porch and talking after a hard day’s work would.
Henry Thoreau has long been one of my heroes and in Walden he said it best: “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. 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.” How hard it is to keep our affairs down to just two or three! I really like technology, but I keep finding that although all the bells and whistles are mesmerizing, it doesn’t bring the life fulfillment that we all need. I keep finding with all that I’m involved with on the internet, I’m constantly re-evaluating what I can get rid of so that I can make life simpler. Sometimes I think maybe I should just get rid of the whole lot of it, go to my own Walden Pond and build my own cabin.
Oftentimes when we are saying so much on the internet, we are really not saying much at all. It’s just the same mishmash of jibberish that doesn’t have any depth of meaning. As Thoreau said, it’s “as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.” He easily could have been talking about the internet when he mentioned the telegraph was an “improved means to an unimproved end”.
Is it possible to simplify our lives in this era of instant (superficial?)communication? Apparently, it’s a problem that’s been around not just 50 years since The Andy Griffith Show was produced, but over 150 years, since Walden was written. I don’t really want to say “down with the internet!” as a permanent solution, but overall we should look for ways to simplify and bring life back to taking time to peel and apple in one long peel while talking to each other on the front porch.
So, if you’re in Winston-Salem, look us up. Come by and have a sit-down for a while. Relax. Let’s all slow down together and enjoy some real “face time”. No appointment is necessary. Let’s do social networking the old-school way.
