Being Here

In 2011, Hannah Essack presented this to an audience of her peers, and it remains powerfully relevant today.

I stand here today ready to do battle. I am a modern warrior, fighting for a precious and rare commodity. There was a time when this commodity was plentiful and humans abused it. Today, it is harder and harder to come by.

Thousands of corporations around the world spend billions of dollars trying to capture a piece of it. Many fail. Those who succeed, can’t rest on their laurels thinking that they have it forever. It can disappear in a moment. My fight today, is the fight of these huge corporations. Time Warner, Universal NBC, eTV, DSTV. I’m fighting for your ATTENTION.

You hope I’m thinking about what I’m about to say and not holding my Blackberry in my pocket tweeting about this event while updating my Facebook status (About to speak in front of a large crowd) and ordering a pizza and coke for later.

That’s what I’m here to talk about today. The declining ability of our generation to commit our attention to something specific for a reasonable length of time without being distracted by half a dozen other things. That’s why I’ve titled my piece –

BEING HERE!

Do you agree that we’re always rushing about thinking about the next thing while doing three other things mainly with our thumbs. Take this hall for instance. Half of you are already zoned out, the other half are practicing their own speeches, and one quarter of you are trying to figure out which half you fit into while the other three fifths are looking terribly confused, and trying to figure out how 2 halves, a quarter and three fifths add up to one. The truth is that it doesn’t add up.

Somethings got to give when we’re juggling so many different communication strands and thoughts at the same time. Remember the cartoon with thought bubbles showing a character with a single thought bubble above their heads. That’s so 80s. A GENERATION Y teen like you and I would have 6 simultaneous thought bubbles up at the same time.

Poet William Henry Davies, in his hugely enjoyable poem, LEISURE, wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

The poet published this piece in 1911. 1911 – I could barely imagine that the lives of people were so cluttered then that Davies would need to be concerned about people not having time on their hands. Yet Davies was writing after the industrial revolution had changed almost every aspect of humans lives– sound familiar?

I guess the big questions is : SO What? What’s the big deal about giving your attention to a single activity, like standing and staring? Are our lives diminished in any way by the fact that a large number of us are Vitamin D deficient because we never go out in the sun?

200 000 years ago, the first Homo Sapien, Artipiphagus spent a lot of time outdoors. What good did it do her? Her attention was given over to two or three things and the primary theme was survival.

First, it was a constant search for her next meal.

Second, it was about avoiding becoming fast food while running away from a lioness.

I’m not sure that being constantly on alert gave her any appreciation for her environment either. Although, when she picked up a reed and started painting on cave walls, she showed a sense of herself in her environment and left us a legacy.

But a legacy wasn’t her intention. It was the outcome of her wonder as she looked at her surroundings.

Zoom forward to 2011. We’re always rushing around, unless we’re waiting in line. When we’re waiting in line, it’s for devices that detach us from our environment and fragment our attention further. I predict that in a generation nobody will know that APPLE is the word for a crisp fruit with sweet flesh.

Among all the distractions in real life, there is the super distraction of a VIRTUAL reality. It’s almost 10pm and you’re in New York City in the middle of Times Square the blinding lights, the huge Coca Cola moving image on the massive digital billboard. Suddenly there are bursting flashes of light everywhere, the paparazzi again, blinding, casually pulling down your Gucci shades you walk over the smoking manholes. They follow you around for a few more minutes until 3 burly men in black suits push them out of the way, thank the lord for body guards.

Finally....peace....you log off.

Where once people found their escape in this world, in the mountains and at the seaside, some people now escape into other worlds where they create an avatar, a digital alter ego. That old cat lady next door becomes a sultry and brooding wonder-woman-shaped model named Puffy Monroe. That accountant from PWC is a flashy rock star in leopard print tights living Charlie Sheen’s real life in his imaginary one.

And madam adjudicator, well lets just say give me an A and I won’t tell a soul about your second life.

This is where we are right now; or rather this is where we’re not.

Why do we do it? Perhaps some of us can’t live without the internet and our phones.

Real life must be experienced through devices and artificial worlds. Here people don’t smell, the world is controlled and shaped in your image, a place where we become like gods, designing our friends, our , our complete environment. Now it’s a world where you step out of your own complicated life to be something or someone else. It gives you a sense of power, maybe hope. Maybe a sense of control. You can choose to change everything about yourself that you don’t like unimpeded by genetics. You don’t have to follow societal rules. You are never self-conscious. No-one and nothing can harm you, there is no crime, and you never die. You are invincible.

My mom and dad still talk fondly about something that appears to be heading for extinction. BOREDOM. Well that’s what I call it. My father describes how he goes to work in the morning. At the traffic light he sends a text to his PA to confirm three meetings for the week. While driving he makes a phone call or five. In a traffic snarl up he joins a teleconference. There is no quiet time or stillness. Every moment is occupied with an activity or thinking through the activities of the day or the week. Then last week, he chose to shut everything off. He drove his usual route but this time he opened the window, coughed and wheezed from the fumes of the diesel truck in front of him and then just looked around examining the trees, the flowers, the houses, the people. He claims that it was his best day at work in many months. It appears that humans look but no longer see. Their eyes are open but their minds are otherwise engaged.

The theory of evolution suggests that a living organism adapts to its environment through millennia greatly influenced by behavior. So if I have to guess what future humans are going to look like, I would say thumbs are going to get slimmer with a protrusion in the middle to hit the right number on a touch screen.

Body frames smaller and slimmer. Lips thinner and mouths smaller as we talk less (texting being our primary mode of communication), noses flatten out and become holes in the middle of our faces (what do we need them for except breathing– eyes will get wider and more pronounced since we are constantly looking at small screens, we’ll get shorter (height is irrelevant) and our heads larger to accommodate a brain that’s processing more information than ever before in the history of mankind- in fact – let me simplify this – have any of you seen ET?

Living here and now is not about shunning the super connectedness that we have gained through the internet and mobile phones, which allow people’s voices to beheard like never before. Living here and Now is about acknowledging that we are evolved from the earth, that we owe our existence to her and that we are sustained by her and we will be worm food again, sometimes when we least expect it. It’s about symbiosis, not being a parasite. It’s about creating relationships over accumulating things. By living in the moment we stop taking our relationships for granted and start appreciating our peers and parents for who they are rather than what we’d like them to be. It’s not about what you should have done yesterday, or what you could do tomorrow but about what you must do today, the present, this minute, this second. It’s time to start responding to each moment the way children do, as an opportunity to be amazed.

With so much information at our fingertips, we assume that ignorance is dead. Theproblem is that we have a glut and we’re not coping with e mail, RSS feeds, tweets, status updates. We scratch the surface, scan quickly and move on. That loss of innocence is the biggest threat to human kind.

The romantic poets were perhaps best at appreciating the wonder that their senses exposed them to. They’re all dead poets now but perhaps they lived a fuller life as a result of their direct experience of their world and the people in their communities.

For them destiny and legacy were irrelevant. Today was everything. I’d like to remind you of a lesson from the daffodil fertilizers, which is what they have all become. Lean in. Listen, can you you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day, each and every day, to make your lives extraordinary.