Forget ChatGPT and Bard, if you want to experience a miraculous technology try a kitchen sink.
I learned this the hard way a few nights ago when our sink backed up. No kitchen sink means no convenient place to clean the dinner dishes, nowhere to wash away the bits of food waste that we can’t scrape into the compost bucket. We had to find a new place to lug a scalding pot to drain pasta.
I spent a couple hours hunched under the sink in spine-damaging postures forcing a manual drain snake through pipes in search of the clog. Total failure. My snake was only 15 feet long. The next morning, a bearded, tatted, and skilled young plumber named Ethan used his electric snake to find and dispatch the clog at around 25 feet. I wash my hands many times each day, but I don’t remember doing so. As Ethan drove off to rescue some other family from sinklessness, the cool water flowing over my hands and then—oh, the glory—down the drain felt like the first time I dipped my hands into glacial runoff in a mountain stream. I won’t forget that moment.
We float, swim, and sink in digital oceans, but our physicality, our environments, our bodies, make analog icebergs that can disrupt our Automatic thinking and shift us into a more Deliberate mode of attention.
As I’ve written elsewhere, we humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, but we forget that we’ve adapted. We have adapt-amnesia until something jolts our memory, like when our smartphone drops off 5G back onto a mind-numbing LTE network, or when the song you want to hear isn’t on Spotify and you have to download an MP3 or (gasp!) buy a CD.
Or when you can’t use your kitchen sink.
In February, I had hand surgery because my right middle finger’s range of movement had dwindled. I could flip people off with panache, but I couldn’t hold a pen.
I was frustrated by my hand, but the pain when writing had snuck up on me so I adapted without realizing it. I didn’t recognize the extent to which my hand problem was also a mind problem. I couldn’t think because I couldn’t write. The main way I do creative “let’s figure this out” cognitive work is with cheap Japanese gel pens (one black, one red, one blue) and 8”x6” blank index cards.
The operation freed my finger. About three weeks later I could write again, noting, sketching, connecting. I felt my mind thaw, my thoughts flow. It turns out the hand surgery had also been a brain surgery. Once I could grasp a pen I could also grasp ideas.
During COVID lockdown, we were bodiless and embodied at the same time. We spent months with excruciating awareness that our fragile human bodies were vulnerable to a homicidal virus. Each home became a chrysalis out of which emerged bearded, long-haired men, women with undyed hair (“pandemic platinum” as one friend quipped), and children larger to an unsettling degree. Outside, we wore masks and worried.
Inside, work and school lurched along, stripped to two dimensions, our senses amputated to sight and sound. Meetings proliferated in an endless sequence of decapitated Zoom grids like an episode of The Hollywood Squares in hell. Our bodies disappeared.
Since the first COVID vaccines arrived in late 2020 we’ve been in an ongoing renegotiation between our bodies and our environments: do we go back to the office, back to the classroom, back to restaurants, back to movie theaters, or do we stay home and have the world come to us? Of course, we do both, but why do we choose what we choose each time we choose it?
And once you choose the analog, the embodied, what new vistas will you discover?
This week is Spring Break in Oregon, so La Profesora and I drove down to Los Angeles for a quick family visit, bringing Ace and Jodie, our two corgis. We own one gas car and one EV. We took the Tesla. Even though it’s a digital car—basically a giant smartphone on wheels—the analog limitations of the car’s battery and the dogs’ bladders changed how we made the 1,000-mile drive south.
The Tesla Supercharger station in Redding, California, is in the parking lot of the magnificent Turtle Bay Exploration Park, which we saw at night and came back to the next morning to wander in daylight and walk across the Sundial Bridge. We never would have experienced this driving our gas car.
We did not know there was a town called Lathrop, California, until we needed to charge the car there, too. We walked the dogs while the Tesla battery filled and happened on Rasoi, an Indian restaurant serving delicious food in an unremarkable strip mall.
Charging takes longer than filling a tank, Tesla owners are a friendly bunch, and corgis are furry celebrities wherever they waddle, so we had many cheerful Supercharger conversations that would never have happened at a gas station, including a shrewd consultation with Fred, a Berkeley hippie veteran of driving over the snowy Siskiyou Pass in his Tesla, who told us we had nothing to worry about with our all-wheel drive.
I couldn’t figure out how to end this piece, so I closed my laptop, wandered outside, and am typing these words in my folks’ sun-dappled backyard. It’s 71 degrees Fahrenheit (much warmer than Portland). Birds chatter. A jet lumbers across the sky. Ace sits vigilant at my feet. Jodie waits for a squirrel to chase. I grew up here but see it afresh because of the new route of my journey back.
I can’t calculate this freshness, but I can describe it. That distinction between numbers and words is what I’m all about—the unquantifiable.
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