The long haul of the long hall

Being alone. Probably no one likes to be alone all the time, but I think more and more, we should all be spending a little more time alone. Maybe a lot more time. Alone with our thoughts. Alone with ourselves.

Wednesday morning, early, I was walking the north and west borders of Frank Whyte Park. It had rained the night before, the first real rain in a while, and things had changed. A roadside cardboard box I’d noticed on the edge of the road on Inkster near McPhillips on Tuesday had softened and bowed. Many trees had dropped curls and dots of spent blossoms on to the sidewalk. Twisting worms traversed wet stretches of pavement. At the corner of Fife and Inkster, two tall honeysuckles had broken from bud into flower overnight, a new scent fighting with the lilac that is so prevalent this week.

The dust had been smacked down and stuck to the pavement, and all the green colours suddenly suddenly seemed fuller and brighter.

A corner-turning day; spring to summer with the help of rain.

Pavement still wet, tires hissing, but the rain had stopped and my rain jacket was rolled up in my knapsack. Cool breeze on my arms.

The sidewalk and the street heading south by Frank Whyte curves in an un-grid-like swoop, and I was following the inside edge of the concrete, wondering, as I have before, who decided to create the gentle bend to the left of the road.

Walking towards me was a woman with whom I’d crossed paths several times before. She was, as always, on the phone in a loud, two-way conversation, and I could hear both sides, though not well enough to understand the words.

It was 7 a.m. on a morning that was almost the very definition of being refreshed with possibility.

I wondered about that, about why it was that, on a morning so very much made for reflection, you’d choose to be on a call. A call like the call you’re on every day. Do we need that much connection? Do we now all over-connect? Is that why the riders on my bus are always all head-down, immersed in supplication to their smartphone gods?

Why go to a performance and take video to share, instead of experiencing it for the wonder it actually is?

I don’t mean this as a judgement — I mean it as an observation. I think we are being broken by technology — entertained to death, stimulated to addiction, unable to simply enjoy the sound of wind in poplars — and I’m being broken in exactly the same way. Our ability to marvel, to generate our own wonder, to experience is, I think, in real danger.

We’re powered now more by distraction than by abstraction. I thought about this when I heard a U.S. college student explaining that he didn’t understand how anyone would be able to finish a college essay without the use of AI.

Watch a two-year-old, unrestricted by embarrassment over their actions, struggling to get their hands on a smartphone, and you’ll recognize this beast is tapped right into us. Its ability to press our buttons means we find it impossible to keep from swiping our way across its screen and pressing its buttons.

Sometimes people find me in the long hallway at the Free Press, walking and looking for words. It’s not really that there are any words hiding out there — they are, I know, hiding in me.

So I walk the hall in a loop, knowing if I make my feet quiet enough, the words will make themselves known. Things will take shape. I mean, I have an office, but it has windows, my computer, nearby co-workers, the cursed phone — all of which are a welcome escape from having to actually focus on words.

The long hall has none of those.

It has eight equally-spaced fluorescent light fixtures, no art whatsoever and a loop is, for me, 165 bland steps. Nothing to grab my attention — just an empty space my mind will fill with the start of something of my own.

I need the deprivation to focus. And I’ve never had trouble focusing before.

We’re damaging ourselves, and eventually we’ll realize that. What that damage will mean to us as humans in a society is something else again. I don’t want us to lose our ability to conjure novel concepts with our imaginations.

Imagination is the start of love, the fuel of fear and the source of human wonder.

I don’t want to see a time when we outsource dreaming to heartless tech platforms with their calculated and crassly constructed feelings, just because it’s simpler that way.

Honest work is not a bad thing — but work is hard. Creation is hard.

But it’s valuable.

AI is a superior copycat of what used to be our own thoughts and feelings.

But it will never know just what it feels like when it’s warm out and, just above Huron, a light cool rain starts to fall, landing fine and gentle on the insides of your forearms.

Russell Wangersky is Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca