Outsourced

I listened this week to a lovely talk by the lovely, smart Rebecca Solnit. Rebecca Solnit loves maps, and as part of her talk she mentioned that we have outsourced our knowledge of our surroundings to our smart phones. People who do what Google Maps and Siri tell them to don’t learn to navigate, but people who look at paper maps do. By looking at maps, we become, she says, our own maps. By following a GPS, we merely learn to follow a GPS.

Tonight I went to a meditation class, where the Abbott mentioned Thich Nhat Hanh’s well known anecdote of washing dishes, the point of which is that our most mundane tasks are also some of our most profound vehicles for active meditation. That is, the mundane task allows us to both let our minds drift and to draw it back to the task at hand. Except, we’ve also outsourced most of those tasks, to machine or human domestic help, and when we can’t outsource them we do our best to distract ourselves from them.

What are we giving away, blindly, because it is inconvenient or time-consuming?