Coping with speed and complexity

Last night we were scurrying around to eat, get some errands done, and get to the theater on time. I felt an unpleasant amount of tension around this hurrying. And yet the choices I have made make my life a lot less complicated than others. I picture people with full time jobs, kids, demands of school, and I just can’t imagine how it’s done.

I tried to remember if my parents had hectic schedules. I don’t remember them hurrying, I don’t remember a mad rush to get out the door. My father came home for a relaxed lunch. At night, when work was over, it was over. The TV was in the basement and we didn’t spend a lot of time watching it (I watched it more than my parents did). Instead, we read, or puttered around the house.

One thing I am most nostalgic about from my summer vacations as a child is the sense of boredom. I used to whine about it a little, but I was stuck coming up with ways to entertain myself. That amount of free and open time seems like an incomparable luxury today. Somehow I’ve bought into a lot of the cultural messages about accomplishment and activity—I deeply disapprove of myself when I am not doing something productive.

The world is becoming more and more complex. Change is occurring so rapidly in so many systems, there is no way we can keep up with it. A German business magazine, brand eins, gave 8 ways to avoid complexity:
1. Do not do business
2. Reduce your activities to zero
3. Don't leave the house
4. Don't call
5. Don't talk to anybody
6. Stay in bed
7. Close your eyes
8. Stop breathing

I don’t want to avoid complexity, but I am very interested right now in trying to make sense of the way things are unfolding now, the combination of problems and opportunities hitting our communities and our world. If I try to simultaneously consider things like peak oil, global warming, and political changes, the amount of complexity rapidly exceeds my ability to make sense of it all. The only way I seem to be able to continue my sense-making activity is to reduce the stimuli, in some of the ways mentioned on the list above.

Those who are unable to periodically reduce the stimuli, to slow down time just a little, are doomed I fear, to understand things simplistically, or not at all. Art making has a healing quality in this overloaded world of stimulus in which we live. If we can focus our attention on sensory areas: visual information, music, touch or taste, we can cut through the mental clutter. I offer this as a hope for those who want to remain in the world, yet not be totally controlled or overwhelmed by the speed and complexity of these times.