feet on the earth
I’ve always disparaged video gamers. (Sorry.)
I’ve said more than once that I have a theological objection to the pastime, which is usually just a way to pretend that my crotchety disinterest is sophisticated. But I’ve also truly believed that, to a certain extent, our brains are trained to expect disproportionate rewards, we are made less and less aware of our human limitations, and we are susceptible to living in worlds of our own making instead of the one we have been gifted by God.And then this weekend, I realized that I write on the internet. I write articles and blogs and I spend what I suspect is an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter. And I’m sure my brain is being trained to expect rewards I don’t always earn, that I’m less and less aware of my human limitations, that I am susceptible to living in a world of my own making instead of the one I have been gifted by God.
I can roll my eyes and proclaim that video games dole out artificial rewards while gleefully racking up retweets.
So I didn’t expect what happened when so many of my favorite internet friends got together in one geographic location. As a new attendee of the highly-anticipated Festival of Faith and Writing, I experienced for the first time how disjointed we all were, like sci-fi characters struggling to fully materialize on this strange new planet called the real world.And then God wrote a metaphor into my story. I forgot to eat or drink almost anything on the first day, struggling to acclimate my online world to the physical body that wasn’t necessary until now. I ended the day with a massive headache—a pulsing reminder of my fragility, beaten down not by a frustrating argument or article but by simple hunger and thirst. There was every temptation to think my body the enemy—its limitations were getting in the way of my limitless mind and spirit. But the pounding in my head didn’t feel purely physical, in fact its existence seemed to question the very mind/body division I often accidentally believe in.And then the headache drove me from a gathering of dear internet friends back to a house full of people I knew more by their three-dimensional faces than their profile pictures, and I hated that I knew it was the right place to be. It was like a real-life plot device, I remember thinking, using the language of all the fiction writers around me. I was supposed to end up in one place instead of another, the headache motivating my change in plans. Apparently, I was meant to be in front of a fire with a bunch of fellow students, discussing that day’s sessions with our varying degrees of familiarity, instead of sitting at a long table of writer friends who all spoke the same language.God is a good author, so my headache was more than a frustrating reason to stay “home,” it was a tangible example of the limitations I’m deceived into believing the internet can free me from.My realization this week didn’t actually make me feel any differently about the internet or my work on it. Instead, it felt like God had ordained some “rumble strips,” those bumps or indents built onto the side of highways to keep drivers from veering too far off the road. It takes a little pain to see where the borders are.
It felt less like a reminder of the pitfalls of living too long in internet-land and more like a reminder of the goodness and givenness of our bodies. The point isn’t that driving off the road is dangerous, but that the road is a pretty good place to be.
I really don’t believe that we’re all that much kinder to each other when we’re physically talking than when we’re communicating online. Those arguments are far too small. It’s not actually all that difficult to remember that (most) of the people we interact with online are real, living, breathing, human beings. There’s something less pragmatically important about embodiment.I kept reaching out to touch people this week—to comfort them or get their attention or because they told a really funny story. It’s like I had all this pent-up love that could only be delivered physically, and I had limited time to give it. There were a lot of hugs, yes, but even once we were sitting down with a tiny paper cup of coffee I would respond to heartbreak and humor alike with some small gesture of touch. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until later.
I made a lot of jokes this week about being one of a very small number of extroverts who wouldn’t be drained by this weekend, but would experience sudden withdrawal after leaving 2,000 of our closest friends. But even extroverts have bodies, and bodies get tired, regardless of personality.
So today, the day after the festival, I have another headache. A headache born of all kinds of causes—physical and otherwise. I could blame it on the anxiety of meeting internet friends and the fear of crushing people’s expectations when it turns out I come with skin and bones and can’t backspace my words as they come out. But it was also because I slept on a couch for four nights and ate food at weird hours and didn’t drink enough water.
The organ I'm tricked into believing defines me is the same one taken down by such small, physical things.
We're small, even when we create things that can make us believe we're invincible. We're small and slow and breakable and I'm learning to celebrate that.As much as I like to think I can “power through” anything, my body was 36,000 feet above the planet it was born on for a few hours yesterday. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s something sort of comforting about aches that tell me that we can invent airplanes but it doesn’t change the fact that we were created for living with our feet on the earth.