May 1
Time Travelling
When there’s no substitute for the body language of presence.
I travelled back in time last week. A friend texted from New York and asked me to send best wishes to another friend — let’s call him Jack.
The text landed on me like a punch because Jack died last year but my friend in New York hadn’t heard. It was as if he was living in an earlier time. In his world Jack was still alive.
Jack had not been a fan of social media, so when he died his partner asked that the news was not posted online.
This meant people learned of his death when a relative, or family friend like me, rang, or wrote, to tell them.
I spoke to a lot of people, and each time it helped me to understand more of my own loss.
Waiting in silence as people received the news… the loss of words, lump in the throat, tear in the eye. (Them too.)
But it dawned on me that this had a certain rightness to it, that news this weighty demands a weighty moment. The death of a loved one is more than information or data.
Of course for many people living with serious illness, posting social updates may be a crucial way to stay in touch. A sense of people traveling with you in your own uncertainty can be balm for the soul…. offering consolation at bad news or celebration at hopeful milestones. A kind of talking therapy.
But digital media can talk too much and often oversells itself. Perhaps Elon Musk, who this week paid 44 billion dollars to buy Twitter, will transform the platform with the sort of innovation with which he pioneered electric cars through his company Tesla.
Or perhaps the sale will further tilt the tendency of these sites to grandstanding, attention-seeking and instant score settling.
The public square of social media rarely makes room for news that must be told slowly, that takes time to be received.
It’s not comfortable sitting with you in the silence. It’s already moved on to some new noise.
‘Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness,’ wrote the mystic Meister Eckhardt. I doubt he’d have been a social media influencer.
The emotional abbreviation of emoji — praying hands or sad face — are no substitute for the body language of presence, the vulnerability of the patient and personal. With the quiet time that we must give each other to receive the ultimate news of our own mortality.
‘The only reason for time,’ quipped Einstein, ‘Is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’
Some news must be received quietly, slowly, personally. ‘To everything there is a season,’ reads the book of Ecclesiastes. ‘A time to keep silence and a time to speak…’
Even on social media, some day
