Checking the Urge

You wake up in  a can-do mood. You go to your computer, to-do list at the ready. The first item is to write an email to, say, your accountant. You log on, and your inbox is overflowing with new messages. Some look important, so you open those first. Annoyingly, a couple of them generate new items for your to-do list. Then, because you are a neat and tidy person, you get rid of all the messages from China advertising vegetable powders, and all the “receipts” for extravagant purchases that you didn’t make. And because you are a caring person, you open the emails from your friends and click on the links they contain so that you can respond appropriately. And then of course you check The New York Times. Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and the accountant still hasn’t heard from you.

Does this ever happen to you? It’s the story of my life. But it wasn’t the story of my life before I first set eyes on a TV, at age fourteen. Sure, as an adult, I had books, and radio, and TV to distract me, but they didn’t seriously interfere with my powers of concentration. My late-onset ADHD didn’t declare itself until the arrival of the internet.

Back in the dawn of the email era, a friend declared that she would only check her inbox at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every day. I chortled to myself. What could be so bad about a way of keeping in touch that was so much more convenient than the post office or the telephone? Now I know. I, who get only a moderate number of emails, and almost zero texts and Instagram messages, nevertheless spend my days wandering dimly inside The Cloud. My default mode, when I have a few minutes before a meeting or while I wait for the kettle to boil, is to check The Times. I do this obsessively, in the forlorn hope that, any minute now, there will be a headline that will signal the country’s return to sanity.

And as I check and recheck in vain, ignoring my accountant and depriving Truffle of his walk, I can go for hours without generating a single thought of my own. Michael Pollan, in a recent NY Times interview, talks about  the need to practice “consciousness hygiene,” to protect our minds because “We spend so much time thinking the thoughts of other people, and enduring the rants or the obsessions of other people.” We must safeguard our interiority, and keep it from being polluted by the emanations of other consciousnesses. “There’s so much stuff we don’t want to be thinking about that we’re thinking about. ”

I am not a born contemplative, and the thought of letting go of all those alien consciousnesses in favor of observing my own makes me nervous. I recognize my perpetual need to anesthetize myself, to use the internet, or TV, or even “good” books to avoid being in my own company. Michael Pollan recommends meditation—that, to me, deeply uncomfortable state—as a way to practice consciousness hygiene, to build a fence around one’s inner self. And he believes in the virtues of boredom, those vacant times when we are seemingly unproductive, but that, as artists have always known, are in fact creativity’s silent workshop.

I should adopt my friend’s 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. email regimen. And I must check the urge to check The Times every five minutes, since despite my years of assiduous clicking the country has not regained its sanity. I will try instead to spend a minute here and there gazing out the window, hands folded, screens closed, noticing stuff—how gray the woods still are, how bare the ground, how scarce the signs of spring, just a tiny violet here and there. But how raucous and imperious the bird orchestras sound, as if by their noise alone they could force the sap to rise, and the first green to appear.