Among the most popular diet ideas are those that involve “cleansing” of some type. While there are many ways to do this, most involve the need to stop eating what you currently eat.
I’ve always wondered if we could – and should – apply that to our lives on the internet. I know it internally, but couldn’t articulate it. Thankfully, David Brooks did. Here is part of what he said:
The two most recent times I saw my friend Makoto Fujimura, he put a Kintsugi bowl in my hands. These ceramic bowls were 300 to 400 years old. But what made them special was that somewhere along the way they had broken into shards and were glued back together with a 15th-century technique using Japanese lacquer and gold.
I don’t know about you, but I feel a great hunger right now for timeless pieces like these. The internet has accelerated our experience of time, and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.
There is a rapid, dirty river of information coursing through us all day. If you’re in the news business, or a consumer of the news business, your reaction to events has to be instant or it is outdated. If you’re on social media, there are these swarming mobs who rise out of nowhere, leave people broken and do not stick around to perform the patient Kintsugi act of gluing them back together.
Probably like you, I’ve felt a great need to take a break from this pace every once in a while and step into a slower dimension of time. Mako’s paintings are very good for these moments.
What would it mean to live generationally once in a while, in a world that now finds the daily newspaper too slow?
