#1, JULHO
COUNTERING BINGE CULTURE WITH LONGEVITY ENDEAVOURS
Do you remember a pre-world wide web TV culture? The limited channels, the in-print scheduling, the advertising we reluctantly sat through? The feeling that could not be instantly assuaged at the tap of a button when an episode ended on a cliffhanger yet you had no choice but to wait until the following week to find out what happened next?
I didn’t think I’d ever be nostalgic for annoying adverts, but they did force you to wait. They tested your investment in characters; in storylines.
Patience is a quality-enhancing attribute that invites collateral grace and receptivity into one’s life, and having to wait is one of the building blocks that helps us to cultivate it. It’s much easier to skip through the boring bits today. Skip a track you don’t like (no holding your finger down on the fast forward button for what feels like an hour), skip the adverts (watch online), even skip the intro music to your favourite show (who has that extra fifteen seconds to spare?)
But what if the option to skip transmutes into an expectation to skip, one that leaves us intolerant, freaked out, or paralyzed when we cant? When something is not hitting our internal ‘stimulate’ button and thus we deem it irrelevant or unimportant?
It’s increasingly possible — and even encouraged — to make things happen really (really) fast. The unspoken mantra seems to be “the more the better.” Multi-tasking is admired. The ability to do it all is revered. But, for me, the excitements of life lose the power of their satisfaction when I attempt to welcome too many of them into my limited container of awareness; when I don’t have the courage to direct singular attention; when I’m impatient for prolific results instead of focussing on the effort it might take to reach them. And, in doing so, I risk skipping the part of the process that makes a dream worthwhile.
I don’t want to binge-live my own life. I don’t want to diminish my capacity to be surprised and delighted.
I want to retrain myself to wait for the twist.
To be okay with not knowing right away.
To let this week’s episode absorb before exposing myself to the next.
I want to invest my interest in longevity projects, both personal and professional, no matter the inevitable tedium, frustration, or moments lacking inspiration that implies, because the moment of actually bringing a dream to completion is a relatively short-lived experience, and one that is not nearly as exciting as its initial moment of insertion into my psyche. It is one that often leaves a residue of inexplicable deflation; an anticlimax of sorts. In a similar way that devouring a new series on the internet now leaves me feeling bereft instead of full when I’ve managed to cram a whole season’s drama into a single week.
Where can I go from there?
With TV, and with life, it’s occurring to me that sometimes I’m going to have to stick around. Through the annoying advert or conversation, through the cliffhangers, unresolved plots, and unanswered questions, and trust that this show knows what it’s doing.
It’ll give me joy and sorrow, and plenty of laughs as a side order with both. It will provide me with comfort and satiation (if I let it), so that I’m delivered at its final episode to a place of fullness — nostalgic for its passing, perhaps, but not empty. Not lacking. Because I’ve stayed present in real time to the development of the story. I now understand the nuances between characters, and appreciate the significance of certain unspoken gestures. I’ve absorbed the writers’ teachings that resonate in my own life, and allowed time to tailor my immediate responses before they become calcified opinions. My mind understands that investment doesn’t necessitate impatience. And my body, at bone level, understands how to live patiently; how to live, simply, with not knowing.
WRITING + PHOTOGRAPHY by NAT DOLLIN
Nat is working to cultivate a vivid life from the inside out.
Attentive to subtleties, reverent before horizons, and appreciative
of tequila, curiosity towards paradox drives her to ceaselessly
weave between extremes, insofar as the tapestry yields insight.