i wonder…
A while ago, I remember seeing a video of one of my heroes, Mr Rogers, doing an interview. It was just a short clip of the entire interview, but it left a lasting impression on me. To paraphrase, he was mentioning his concern that our society had lost its sense of wonder. That we were bombarded with so much information, there was no room for silence.
This video came to mind as I was photographing our public library for a project I was (and actually still am) working on. The library is the perfect place to go and wonder. Yes, it’s a building loaded with information. But the information contained on its shelves is more of a slow release information hit, as opposed to the straight to the veins version we get from those tiny computers we carry around with us everywhere we go.
How many times have you said, “I wonder…” and then promptly went to your phone to look up the answer? We’ve all done it, thousands of times. There’s no need to wonder anymore when we can have the answer in just a couple taps of a colorful glass screen. (A colorful glass screen expertly designed to suck us in and keep us there, but that’s another topic for another day.)
But, our brains aren’t designed to handle all of this. And for lots of us, it causes us overload. So, I’m starting to let my brain wonder. I don’t need the answers to everything. And my phone battery is lasting a lot longer than it has in a while.
“Oh my, this is a noisy world.”
