Walking The Dog – Rufus Thomas (1963)
Are you a dog person or a cat person?
This is one of the prompts on the dating app Hinge, one of my favorites of their many prompts designed to start conversations among complete strangers who are attracted to each other. I find myself gravitating towards cat people, because I generally like cats more. They take care of themselves, don’t need the same care as dogs if you go away/travel, and do their business in their own personal sandbox. Cat owners likewise tend to be introspective, perhaps (though not always) quieter, and more independent. If a dog is a companion, a cat is more of an animal that happens to live in your house. Almost, in some sense, an accessory.
But I like dogs too. My brother’s dog in particular, is one of my favorites. His name is Rhaego and he is a fancy little golden doodle, with a wavy, dirty blonde coat of hair. He’s a designer dog, but there are times when I find him to be a bit more primal than you might expect from a hyphenated-breed dog. After all, he is descended from wolves.
I don’t always enjoy walking him, especially early in the morning, or during extreme weather, but there are certain walks that I greatly enjoy. I remember one of the first times I watched him – I was down the shore for several days at my parents’ house. I can’t remember what I was doing there, but it was early spring, and the weather was cloudy and chilly. Not cold enough to warrant a winter jacket anymore, but definitely not yet t-shirt weather.
That weekend, I walked him many times. I was bored, didn’t bring my laptop, and had little else to do since I was at the house alone and nothing was open. The town was getting ready to wake up from its deep winter hibernation that every shore town goes into during the “off-season”, when the tourists disappear for 5-7 months and the only folks in town are the locals. My family’s shore town of Sea Isle drops from a summer population of roughly 50,000 to a winter population of about 2,000 during the off-season, to give you an idea of the desolation.
At that time, Rhaego was still unfamiliar with Sea Isle. In new and foreign environments, he is wont to stop frequently, sniffing every bush and telephone pole in his path. He pauses often, lingering sometimes for more than a minute before he’s ready to move on. I prefer not to rush him when I don’t have to. He forces me to slow down, hearing the sounds around me, feeling the rush of the wind and thinking about my footsteps – one falling in front of the other. I sometimes try to put myself in his brain and imagine what the human world must seem like to a creature like him.
I’ve been thinking a lot about being “present”. I put that term in quotes because I feel like it’s been co-opted by Silicon Valley types who love to go on half-baked retreats and have to use meditation apps like mindspace to get them away from their technologically focused lifestyles (in what has to be one of the ultimate forms of postmodern irony). But it’s a good enough word for our purposes here.
Recently, I was talking with a friend who did a lengthy 10-day buddhist retreat (not a half-baked one) in which participants were not allowed to look at their phones, talk to anybody other than their meditation guide, or touch anybody. They were only allowed two meals a day and mostly spent the days meditating in various fashions. Recently, as we sat together in the eucalyptus room of Northeast Philly’s Russian sauna (go if you haven’t), bathed in fragrant steam and eerie yellow light, my first question about the retreat was “how hard was it not having your phone for that long?” She found this to be an odd question because she said the lack of a phone was hardly the most difficult part – instead she struggled with being unable to talk and feeling lonely because she was spending New Year’s away from her family, who she typically spends it with.
I found this to be interesting, and felt almost stupid for asking the question. For me, my phone has become such a distraction and such a part of daily life that I had trouble even imagining being away from it for so long. But I liked that it was not a problem for her – in some sense, it made me proud to know her.
Earlier that day, I nearly ran a red light in an attempt to reroute google maps after missing my exit for the sauna. I was distracted and felt like a mess as I tried to figure out how to get there, trying to do too many things at once. As we talked more about the retreat later in the day, I evaluated some of my own habits regarding my phone and my general ability to concentrate and focus on one thing at a time.
In another conversation with a different friend this past weekend, I confessed that I haven’t enjoyed traveling much lately, outside of my recent solo trip. Oftentimes, traveling with friends makes me anxious to the point where I’m not even excited about where I am. I feel rushed, or hungover, or always-ready-to-go-to-the-next-place.
I think technology has a big role to play in this. I hardly ever sit alone with my thoughts anymore, something I used to be quite good at. With an all-in-one device always in my pocket, it’s hard to concentrate on the boring everyday that sits in front of us, when there’s a world of images and updates and news and friends that awaits if only we tap a few buttons. It promises to take away your feelings of loneliness or disconnectedness or whatever else you may feel.
In the fall, starting in September, I went through a strange period – I broke up with my long term girlfriend and closed on a house on the same day. The first several weeks I spent in my new house felt surreal and isolating – I still hadn’t moved all of my things in yet, so I was largely without furniture, books, internet, or even most of my clothes. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to turn the hot water heater on, so I would take cold showers, and there was no food in the fridge. I cried a lot, I barely ate, and I repainted my bedroom and the living room. I shaved my head, started running more and lost 15 pounds.
And through it all, the one constant was my phone. It was the one thing that lent a sense of normalcy to my life and was there when I needed it. It was my lifeline to my friends, many of whom live in different places and who I don’t get to see in person very often. It was also my lifeline into creating the new idea of myself that I wanted to put out. I spent hours on instagram watching reels of comedians, poring over home design inspiration ideas (#altbau, anyone?) and going through stories to see what the rest of the world was up to at any given moment.
But as I’ve figured out my life since and gotten over the breakup, my phone has become a pesky thing in my pocket that I’m unable to rid myself of. I now check it constantly, having gotten used to the feeling of its being a portal into a happier state. I now find myself distracted from daily life and vaguely anxious.
Social media is a particularly effective distraction from daily life because it commodifies images and communication in a way that makes them insignificant, or as Martin Heidegger would say in The Question Concerning Technology, turns them into a mere standing reserve.
In my attempts to feel less anxious, more engaged with what’s in front of me and more aware of my own existence and humanity, I’ve been trying to spend less time on the phone and computer and more time concentrating on things in the world, rather than on screens. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy (Heidegger in particular), and nothing makes you question existence and what it means to be a human more than reading philosophy. Heidegger felt that what makes humans humans (or, in Heideggerian terminology, Dasein’s ownmost essentia) is possibilities. Humans, unlike matter, equipment, or art (the other modes of being according to Heidegger), are full of potential possibilities because of their ability to reflect on their certain death and make decisions about what kind of life they’d like to lead in the face of that. What Heidegger calls everydayness is essential to human possibility – everydayness is more or less, just the way that we look at and relate to the world and equipment and how we propel ourselves to ends.
Heidegger can be confusing, but I’ve been enjoying the challenge of solving the puzzle that is his philosophy. And it’s made me reflect on technology and the way I use it in my own life – when I use it for mere entertainment, it is a distraction from everydayness and ceases to be useful as equipment, or a means to an end. It becomes the end itself and begins to replace the physical world in a dangerous way, because it distracts you from what makes you human – certain death and the possibilities of what life can be.
I’ve never been particularly good at meditating, but when I spent a few days at a buddhist temple in South Korea in 2017, I learned a meditation technique that I really enjoyed – walking meditation. The goal of a walking meditation is to turn a 1 minute walk into a 15 minute walk. That is, walk very, very, very slowly. Slowing down the way you do an ordinary practice like walking forces you to consider what is really going on in a walk, helps you focus on the act of walking and, I find, always helps to clear the mind. I like walking meditations because I can concentrate on the sounds around me and work to turn off my brain and simply focus on existence.
Walking Rhaego sometimes reminds me of a walking meditation. The best walks are the ones where I don’t even bring my phone. I don’t keep track of the time and I let him walk me as he stops, sometimes to literally smell the roses. It’s a far cry from the distractions of modern technology and the anxious feeling that something better than what’s in front of me is a click away in my pocket. I find that sometimes when I’m walking with him, I’m actually aware of things like ambient noise. When I walked him recently, I heard the sound of a plane overhead – something which I often hear, but don’t often listen to. Back in high school, that used to be one of my favorite noises to hear on an otherwise silent hike through the Pine Barrens. In the vast silence of the forest, a mere plane flying overhead served as a welcome reminder – I am here, I am alive, I am human.
