Breaking the 3-minute mindset (or, life needs more than 140 characters)

Cross-posted from MadeMark.net I was making a video clip this morning of the plot and planters where we’ll be growing vegetables and flowers this year. It runs 3:43. I’m more and more aware these days of my desire to slow down. Life goes by so quickly even without us shoving it forward. Cutting it into byte-sized, 140 character micro-chapters only makes it more likely that we’ll miss most of it, as if we’re gazing at a tapestry and the only thing we see is the occasional thread. Everything I read about pleasing and attracting an online audience says shorter, shorter, shorter. Many people now have the attention spans of squirrels, picking up a nut, sniffing it, dropping it and looking for another. To paraphrase an old saying, life is what happens while we’re busy tweeting other plans. You can see this demonstrated acutely in any office elevator. People no longer have the patience or ability to speak to one another, to say good morning, to just take a very short ride in an elevator without grabbing the BlackBerry and seeing who needs them right this very instant. It’s a conditioning, and we’ve done it to ourselves. We’ve chopped our existences up into ever smaller bits until now life is not only short, it speeds by in data packets and laughing baby YouTube sensations and the quick, quick, quick grab for the ever-shrinking attention span. I’m going in the other direction. If I see or conduct an interview with someone who has something to teach me, or even interest me, I’m happy to give them 10 minutes. More if that’s what’s required. And I’m not going to try to keep any video I make short enough to provide a beginning, middle and end in just enough time to keep someone watching. Planting a garden is not done in under three minutes. Reading or writing a poem is not accomplished in 140 characters. To savor, whether it’s food or drink or another human being or the day we find ourselves in, requires allowing every flavor to seep in, in its own time. Come along to the gardens of each other’s imaginations and let it take as long as it needs. The rest of the world can spiral faster and faster to a day when nothing means anything and everything gets ten seconds because that’s all it’s worth.]]>