A (real) talk with one of my students (almost 19 years old):
Student: “Teacher, have you seen the last update for the Iphone?”
Teacher: “Not yet …”
Student: “It’s great! I updated my Phone yesterday and it is much faster now.”
Teacher: “How often do you update your phone?”
Student: “Each time a iOS update is released … Practically every second month …”
Teacher: “May I ask you when you read your last book not assigned by your teachers?”
Student: “Well, I don’t know … Perhaps five-six months ago …”
Teacher: “Right. And when did it happened to you to take a moment to pray or to meditate about the meaning of your life?”
Student: “Oh, well, you know, I don’t pray much and really I don’t have time to meditate … But I do it sometimes… let’s say a couple of times per year …”
Teacher: “How long did it take to you to update your Iphone?”
Student: “More or less one hour …”
I avoided telling my student that to have some meditation time would have taken even less than that hour he had spent to download and charge his iOS update: I don’t like to look like a sort of moralist (at least not more than what I really am).
Anyway, this conversation made me think a lot. Quite obviously for him (and, very probably for the vast majority of my students … and not only of my students) a iOS update was a priority, while to feed his mind and soul was not and, as I know he is not a stupid, I started asking go myself the reason of this.
The answers that came to my mind were many. I immediately discarded the ones related to a presumed “technological degeneration of our youth”: I’ve been working with teenagers for twenty years now and I really don’t think they are more stupid or “empty” today than they were in the past (including the time I was myself in their number).
I concentrated on one of the sentences of my student, the one in which he affirmed that his phone was “much faster” after the update: speed looked like being the answer! Speed what for? I suppose mainly to communicate with friends: constant communication with anybody seems like being the main issue for everybody. We need to be able to constantly exchange information with whoever we want and it’s surely not a bad thing in itself. The only problem is that we miss in exchanging information only with ourselves, with our Spirit. Why? Are we so engaged in external exchanges that we have no time to look inside of us, to ask for some fundamental info to ourselves? You know … things like which is the deep meaning of our existence and stuff like that… I’ not so sure of this: lack of time is, to me, just the excuse we give to ourselves… I’d rather say we are too afraid to take time for these questions: unsure answers don’t fit this precise, sharp, ultra-technologic age we are living in and give us a feeling of uncertainty that gets under our skin. What is dangerous is that the more we “forget” to try to investigate about these aspects, the more our answers will be unsure and the more we will be afraid to do it, in a sort of perverse spiral. So we’ll go on floating on the vast sea of life without even trying to learn how to swim towards any direction but, possibly, with our incredibly fast way to shout “I’m lost!” to our neighbors.
Perhaps, this evening, I won’t update my iOS as suggested by my student and I will try to update my soul, reading a book and trying to communicate with the Spirit inside of me: I’m not so sure my soul-update will get installed perfectly and certainly the process won’t be completed (will it ever be?), but, at least, I’m pretty sure I’ll get a little less afraid to swim in this wavy ocean of life.
A Unitarian in Italy 