Perhaps totally unintended, the greatest benefit of owning a smartphone for me is the camera app. True it’s great when coming home to find out what to pick up at the supermarket or to know who might be waiting for the traffic light to change in San Francisco or that the cutest cat in the world has just befriended a reindeer in a high school classmate’s backyard. As for being able to watch videos of whatever rock star from the ‘60’s has just died and read the rants of those supporting those still seeking presidential nomination, sure, they’re important too. But it is the camera that most enriches my life. It is the camera that puts me in touch with my non-virtual world with whole new levels of intimacy and appreciation. The camera’s ready availability attunes me more than ever to the ever-changing beauty and excitement and drama and comedy that I pass through while my mind does all it can to distract me from those things.
Whoops! I just made this a Buddhist or maybe a mindfulness thing, didn’t I?
- Be in the present when my mind wants to spend the afternoon in the past or the future.
- Observe!
- Participate!
- Leave analysis for less enlightened or more reality-avoidant.
And there’s another—I’ll say it—spiritual aspect to this: the phone-cam as link to humility:
- Look at all this that I’ve had nothing major to do with either creating or maintaining!
- Understand it all as the gift of a universe possessed of grace and in constant motion!
- Learn over and over again that beauty and excitement come spontaneously and live well outside the realm of value judgements!
My Mom loved to say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” My little phone-cam with its constant urging to see and its ability to instantly communicate to the world what I see whispers “Behold!”
The Oculus
Morning sunlight
#2 train
Crossing guard
Norman
W 76 & Columbus
A Friend
Freeman Street #2 station
The Met Breuer
Subway Smith Street
Doing dishes
Subway: D train 167th
Central Park
Welcome! 