Friday, Jun 12

Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.

All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull.

Dear Reader,

You’ve come to expect a collection of Feel-Good stories from Daily Dot each Friday. But today’s newsletter, though focused on feeling good, is a bit of a departure. 

Dot was recently struck by this sentiment from Suleika Jaouad’s newsletter: “I’ll pause to admire a flower in bloom and, almost immediately, feel the urge to photograph it, to use an app to identify it, to name it — to convert the experience into something usable. Something I can return to later, as if later were more reliable than now.”

Dot knows exactly what she means. Is that your experience, too, Reader? Far too often, I’ll hear birdsong and reflexively reach for the Merlin app on my phone, as if identifying the bird matters more than simply listening to its mysterious (to me) song. I can’t stroll the beach where my father lives without taking a photo of the vast lake, even though my camera roll already holds hundreds of almost identical shots. But, of course, they’re not identical. Today, the breeze is slightly different, the water a teensy bit more turquoise, the gulls quieter. Does my camera capture that? Not really. And by shifting my attention from what I’m feeling or seeing, I end up missing something. By capturing it, I mute it. By simply witnessing, I open up the possibility that it will say something. That I will be present enough to hear it.

Storm over Lake Huron

Jaouad wrote, “I can’t shake the feeling that part of what we’re losing isn’t just the things themselves — the reefs, the species, the slow erosions we only notice in retrospect — but a way of seeing that might help us respond differently to losses already underway.”

I think she’s right. The quality of our attention has been eroded by this knee-jerk sense that, unless we record something, it doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t matter. But to just be with something, to witness it without naming it, or capturing it, changes our experience of it. We’re a part of it, not just a witness.

So today's small act of resistance is this: Put the phone down. Not to be more present in some self-improvement way, but to practice the older, slower way of seeing Jaouad is mourning — the kind where you’re not the recorder of the moment, but part of it. The unnamed flower, the anonymous bird, the hilarious thing your pet just did: It happened. You were there. That’s the whole thing.

Presently,

Dot

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