Article
Attention
Culture
Digital
Easter
4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.
Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this. 

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes.  A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them.  The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock.  In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom.  Two in three men did. 

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here.  Our lives are over-stimulated.  To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird.  We don’t need to live like this.  Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’.  Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.   

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older.  But something seems to have changed in the last two decades.  A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there.  It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.   

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline.  And it is working.  Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information.  This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye.  Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped. 

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs.  After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off.  While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook.  As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information. 

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive. 

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us.  The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure.  How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer?  There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before.  In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there. 

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church.  A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged.  Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition.  They advise people to: 

  • Avoid technology 
  • Connect with loved ones 
  • Nurture your health 
  • Get outside 
  • Avoid commerce 
  • Light candles 
  • Drink wine 
  • Eat bread 
  • Find silence 
  • Give back 

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.   

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses.  We should also allow our minds to wander.  This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus.  Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention.  It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.   

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire.  But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena.  He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice. 

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current.  The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.    

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Snippet
Culture
Film & TV
Sport
3 min read

F1 feeds our need for speed

The high-speed life isn’t just on our screens

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England. 

Brad Pitt dressed as a racing driver stands with a car in the background
Brad Pitt stars in the F1 film.
F1.com

Our weekends between February to October are overtaken by a series of cars whizzing round a track. The Formula 1 season guides us through the summer months, taking us on a worldwide tour of cities. From Monaco to Barcelona to Las Vegas to Silverstone, these cars are steered onto our screens and hurtle through our comparatively slow lives.  

Before marrying Jon, I would have never dreamed of spending many hours watching those cars driving fast across our TV screen. It is true, they are going unbelievably fast, with track speeds exceeding 200mph. These speeds somehow mean nothing as they are so far beyond my capabilities – I feel shocked at myself and a little shaky if I hit a sneaky 75mph on the motorway. However, nine years into our marriage and F1 has sped into my life and taken up residence. I now know some of the driver’s names: Lando, Max, Oscar, Lewis, and Charles. I know some of the teams, although I always seem to get Williams and McLaren mixed up. I know some of the tactics, something about a hard and soft tyre and timing a pit stop to perfection. Jon and I have even graduated this year to an F1 wall chart on which we track our favourite driver's progress.  

Driving fast has always been of interest to sports fanatics. In fact, anything fast seems to pique our interest and catch our eye. F1 began with the world championship in May 1950 at Silverstone. And 75 years later, the celebrations include a new F1 movie with Brad Pitt in the driving seat.  

I wonder whether the pace of racing mirrors something of our lives. We run frantically from one pitstop to another. We love to be busy, to squeeze people in, and race from one appointment to another. Perhaps we even push others out of the way in order to keep our own track position or race intention. Perhaps we are drawn to speed because it stirs something within us - a worldly pull to pursue excellence, a need for speed, a competitive edge to work or home or social situations. Maybe all of us want to get ahead, go for glory, and at the end of the day stand on the podium and lift the trophy. Imagine a life where we would willingly waste all that champagne! 

Perhaps we more simply see something of ourselves in those crazy F1 drivers? We too are racers of sorts, navigating the twists and turns of life, taking the corners at speed and trying not to crash.  

Our fascination with fast has very ancient roots. Nearly 2,000 years ago, St Paul talked about racing too. He wrote of running the race of life with perseverance and fixing our eyes of Jesus. If we can accuse the F1 drivers of anything, then we can accuse them of perseverance. Most F1 races take about 90 minutes. An hour and a half of sweaty, restricted, pressurised driving at serious speed against terrifyingly good competitors. And behind the scenes, away from the wheel, these competitors put in thousands of hours of mental and physical training to race these machines. This is what it looks like to race with perseverance. Maybe we have things to learn from them after all. 

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