. . . from the weather report.
Specifically, Dark Sky, It gives highly local, near term, weather forecasts. If I'm going to be outdoors for the next few hours, This is all I need.
I've had a lifetime struggle with too much information. When I moved into the first place of my own after college I didn't bring in a television. Haven't had one since. When I was in high school, our local TV station made a grab for eyeballs branded, The Storm Center. I called it, The Panic Center, as it made each routine intensification of New England weather into an existential threat of spinning isobars. I just need to know what to wear when I go out the door.
CNN started June 1 1980, and with it, 24 hour news delivered with great urgency.
My pitch? "Millions of moles live on every continent except Antarctica and South America. What secrets are they keeping underground? Can they turn those hills into mountains, and, if so, what are the dangers to you?"
And was it only 15 years ago this September that Facebook first allowed anyone to join; thereby making it possible for any of us to broadcast our own 24-hour news channel.
I've never joined. I think there may be someone else who hasn't.
I'm not anti-tech nor innovation. I wrote my first line of code in 1969. Was the first on my block with a PC. I'm a digital native.
My problem is with my mind's limited processing space. I'm trying to save it for what's meaningful and useful. Faced with all these data flows. I'm praying the information-age iteration of Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer.
God, give me Grace to disengage from people, places, and things that cannot be changed,
grant me Courage to block, delete, ignore, and deflect all information from those sources,
and deliver the Cognitive Bandwidth for those very few things I can do.
May I offer two examples? One is protective; the other is proactive.
My model for powerful self defense comes from Thomas Friedman.
Friedman was reporting from Beirut in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War. Portions of his accounting of that time, in his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, record his experience of inadequacy in the face of so much turmoil and suffering. One story in particular, has stayed with me. Friedman was writing a story for a deadline. Someone started firing a machine gun in front of the building. A fellow reporter urgently tried to get Friedman's attention to the event. Friedman declined the invitation.
"I just looked up from my typewriter at this fellow and said, "Was he shooting at you? No. Was he shooting at me? No. So leave me alone, would you?"
My model for action comes from e e cummings one winter afternoon (at the magical hour when is becomes if) a bespangled clown standing on eighth street handed me a flower.
. . .
Most people have been heard screaming for international measures that render hell rational —i thank heaven somebody’s crazy enough to give me a daisy
And the sun just came out.