Before Tim Berners-Lee said “This is for everyone” there were no emails, no internet and no Wi-Fi. The only hot spot was on my chin, usually after a cheap chocolate binge. Now, in 2022, we know that our digital world pervades and invades everything. It is a saviour, a provocateur, an assailant and an inspiration. But does digital weigh anything? Do all those trillions of terabytes stored on servers and fired between devices, swirling and swarming around our heads every second of every day, have a mass? Or a smell? Or a colour? If digital exists, what is it made from?
It has been an uncomfortable week. Some sad and difficult days for my family.
I ask these questions therefore not for the answers, but for the distraction. To let you know that I need a distraction.
Sometimes we need to be distracted by nonsense. Sometimes we need the safety of thinking about something small and inconsequential to help us live in a world of overwhelming uncertainties and undermining fears. Sometimes issues and concerns are so big that we need the distraction of something small to anchor us in a moment in time. We need to know that we can still find some things reassuringly ordinary.
I remember as a small boy watching the TV news with my grandmother one day. There was a terrible famine in East Africa and the pictures were of searing scenes of poverty, hunger and helpless distress. These appalling terrors were played out in front of us as we ate our plentiful tea off trays on our laps. As the news programme ended and we moved on to the weather forecast, my nan said to me quietly that she didn’t think the newsreader’s tie was very nice.
Many, many years later, I joined a company in the North West of England. My personal life was in a very unhappy place and the company I joined within six months of me starting had begun talks with a rival to take us over. At the time I had not yet relocated and I was living out of a suitcase in pokey hotels. I was disconnected from everything that was familiar and especially from family and friends. My career (such as it was) was fading into nothing. I literally could not think about the future because everything seemed to be a dark dead-end. However, I had a battered old tape-cassette player and I would play Born to Run over and over and over again. I would shout out the lyrics as if they were mine. Even now, a lifetime later, when I hear the opening drum roll play, for a second, I am lost to memories that hurt like hell, but within a song that anchored me until the darkness began to lift, slowly revealing the countless new blessings of my subsequent life.
Some things are just too big to solve quickly. Some things will hurt forever. We know there isn’t a formula for success, or a life manual. Sometimes we just need to find a way to get through the day. If that means finding distraction in the inconsequential, so be it. If we can smile at nonsense, be irritated by the banal, pause on the obtuse, or belt out a song, then in that moment we are not consumed by the storm.
These moments do not solve anything, but they are tiny little threads to tie us into normality and which hold us in place. When the waves crash over us, our only purpose is not to be swept away.
When my dear old nan noticed the newsreader’s tie, I know she wasn’t being heartless, she just wanted to protect me from something truly horrific.
When I ponder what an email weighs, I know no-one cares, but it takes me to a moment that is away from all the noise around me. And when the Boss starts to sing, I know I will be fine…
…’Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.
Please therefore love your distractions and hold them close. Love the little absurdities of our lives, and love our ability to be lost in a moment when our days are long and sad.
And please take the greatest care of yourselves because, whatever an email weighs, you are precious beyond measure.
Paul xx
