This summer our CATLab cohort got a theme word: presence. Unassuming enough. Be present in the workplace while you’re there. Simple.
Then we picked up Felicia Wu Song’s Restless Devices (she’s a Westmont professor, for the record), and the word started getting heavier. Song’s central question isn’t whether our devices are useful. It’s what kind of people we are becoming with them in hand. That question stuck with me longer than I expected.
Here is where I landed.
Like most people, I call my mom whenever I remember, text a friend or two throughout the day, hop on FaceTime here and there for a catch-up. I’m bringing people from my past into my present. Bridging the gap that distance creates. Reasonable, warm even.
But Aristotle had a thought about this.
In De Anima, he argues that to know something, the mind must take the form of it. Not metaphorically. Literally. To know your coffee mug, your mind must hold the form of the mug, become a kind of mental impression of it. You can only know what you are actually attending to. You cannot take the form of two things at once.
Which means that when I am texting a friend back home while sitting in a room full of people I have not yet met, I am not present in the room. My body is there. My mind has taken the form of something else. I am attending to a relationship that exists somewhere else, while the present moment goes unmet. The kid daydreaming about PlayStation in the back of class is not in class.
This is where it becomes a trust issue for me.
There is a framework in scripture that takes the seasons of relationships seriously. People come into your life for a time and then they go. That movement is not failure. Ecclesiastes 3 is not a lament. It is a description of order. A time for every activity under the heavens, including the activity of letting go.
But we have built technology that allows us to sidestep that. We can sustain relationships across any distance now, which is sometimes a gift. But I wonder if we are also using it to avoid the discomfort of an honest ending, or the risk of a new beginning. Clinging to the familiar, the already-known, the role we already know how to play.
Think about the difference between The Rock and Christian Bale. The Rock shows up as The Rock in everything. Christian Bale becomes someone new for each film. The technology that keeps me anchored to my existing relationships keeps me being the version of myself those relationships already know. It casts me before I have a chance to audition for something else.
New scenery is only useful if you actually enter it.
I am not making a case for cutting people off. I call my mom. I text my friends. This is not a manifesto against the phone. It is something closer to a question I cannot quite shake: what am I missing in the room I am actually in, because I am somewhere else in my mind?
And beneath that, a harder one: is staying connected, in every case, an act of love? Or is some of it an act of control? A failure to trust that the people meant to be in your life will find their way back, and the ones who were only meant to be there for a season already gave you what they had to give?
I don’t have an answer. But presence, it turns out, is not simple.