Musings Blog: No Time to Pick Blackberries, Cultivating Deep Focus and Technology’s Claim on your Life.
Recently, I finished writing my second book, Good Boy, Bad Boy. In it, I explore my struggle with feeling “good enough” and provide a blueprint for how I’ve worked to find peace within myself. Despite being a very personal account that will help the reader explore and understand their own feelings around self-worth, the book is also a quasi-manual for good parenting.
Like a racehorse bursting out of the gate, the first draft of this book burst out of me in less than a month. It was a typical cold, dark January here in the Pacific Northwest when I began writing it. My third child was due in just over a month, and I was consumed by both an irrational fear that I would no longer have the time to write after she was born, as well as a desperate feeling that I needed to create a legacy work for all my children. Really though, I suspect it was pre-emptive maneuver to rationalize where and why I flubbed up as a father! Each morning, I’d wake up around 5:00am to write, and initially, all the words and ideas came surprisingly easily.
That was three years and seventeen drafts ago.
Good Boy, Bad Boy Book Cover. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble
Once I’d completed the writing of Good Boy, Bad Boy, the not-so-fun administrative tasks required to finalize the book were duly sent by my publisher. A question at the end of the document they’d sent took me aback. “Was any part of this book created with Artificial Intelligence?” That question had not been asked on the finalization questionnaire for the publication of my first book, Getting Naked, in 2021.
Exhaling while staring at the blinking cursor on my screen, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of discomfort that the times, they are certainly a changin’!
The question prompted me to recall a question I wrestle with too often on this blog: How severe are the effects or side-effects that technology claims upon my life?
While contemplating this question, it dawned on me that, this past year, my family and I hadn’t picked the blackberries just outside the back door here on Hardy Feather Farm.
In years prior, come August, those blackberries had grown big and juicy and were begging to be picked. This year, even though they were again large and luscious, we hadn’t had the time to pick ’em.
We were simply too busy…
About four years ago, my girls and I pulled up stakes from the big city to move to a hobby farm in the lower mainland of British Columbia. One of our reasons to dislodg ourselves from city life was that we wanted to get away from the buzzing technocratic, techno-reliant metropolis where my wife and I spent most of our adult lives. It was making us feel rigid and anxious and we no longer wanted our daughters to grow up like that.
We also dreamt of an idyllic DIY existence closer to nature.
Since the move four years ago, I’ve acquired a few living-off-land skills (I know how to sharpen a chainsaw now). That said, I’m no husbandman! Previously, as an urban-jungle dweller, most requisite back-to-the-landers’ skills had been far from my grasp (although I certainly knew how to pick blackberries...).
But, here on the fertile land in the mountain valley, I was too busy with my work in the digital-sphere to actually be here.
Which brings me back to whether I’d used A.I. to write my book.
“Pour your finite time and energy into something infinitely more absorbing than trying to keep life under control, which is actually living it.” — Oliver Burkeman
Of course, I hadn’t. For better or worse, the intelligence used to write the book was my own. I’d toiled in the creative trenches to write and rewrite each draft of the book. What if I’d just used A.I. to write it and record the voiceover for the audio book instead of reading it aloud for tens of hours? Would I then have had more time to pick berries and add husbandry skills to my DIY quiver? Or was using A.I. a red-herring that wouldn’t actually lead me “back to the land”? Like the writing of this book, did I simply just need to be more patient in completing tasks while learning new skills. Was the real secrete not increasing the speed of doing work but instead honing my ability to remove digital distractions and maintain attention on deep, uninterrupted work.
Eighteen years ago, I purchased my first Blackberry phone. Gosh, did I love it when the phone rang and I could chit-chat from just about anywhere. These days, I hate when the phone rings and whatever sentence or thought I was straining to string together comes undone. These days, it seems that trying to find time to write and deeply contemplate or learn something has gone by the wayside. At every turn, there is an attention trap ready to snare my focus. Even if I do manage to sneak away to steal some solitude for deep work, my mind is on tenterhooks, knowing all those emails and frustrated “why-can’t-I-reach-you” messages are waiting for me.
As such, it feels like technology, and the ubiquitous connection it allows, is like a dark god constantly hunting for my soul.
In an act of rebellion, about a year ago I purchased a dumbphone. I never used it used it once. Then, I endeavored to turn my smartphone into a dumbphone by stripping almost all the apps from it. That lasted all of about a week. Since then, like going one step backward and two forward, I have re-added just about every app I’d deleted and added a few new ones to satisfy the ever-changing communicative ways of my colleagues and partners.
Technology suffuses the space around me. No matter if I’m picking blackberries, digging in the dirt, or trying to learn how to build a fence, a part of me is always sucked back into the digital ether.
Despite being enveloped by the resplendence of nature on our farm, I’m always oscillating between different chat groups on different apps, for different businesses and contracts that, admittedly, allow me to be on the farm in the first place.
While I may no longer ride social media’s infinite-scrolling merry-go-round, I still tarry for too long in the digital universe. I realize I’m afraid, terrified, to take more time away from tech; the opportunities tech affords will wither then die on the vine… much like all those berries did this year.
It takes a fortitude I have not yet cultivated to abandon the traditional rules of progress and the modern rules of digital engagement. To trust that your opus of work and the people you work with will mold to your way of life (so long as you do good work) and with patience you will also continually learn new skills and while finding presence in the precious moment of the individual task at hand.
You don’t need a meme to find meaning and purpose and relevancy in present-day life. You don’t need an efficient A.I. to write your book or to find time to learn something new… or to simply pick berries.