Granted, you’re probably tired of
reading my musings on barefoot just about everything, but if you’ve stuck with
me thus far let’s go ahead and finish the race, shall we? So far I’ve written 4 blogs in this series;
Barefoot Work, Barefoot Theology, Barefoot Church and Barefoot Gospel. This is going to be the last in the series,
who knew you could write 5 blogs in a row about a topic as seemingly simple as
bare feet? Well, if you haven’t noticed,
I tend to be long-winded when I write, so that’s probably no small contributor
to that fact.
Anyways, I’d like to tie in all
the previous four blogs and add yet still more thoughts in general to this idea
of bare feet. Just to make you aware,
there wasn’t really a rhyme or reason to which order I decided to do these blogs
in, I had brainstormed yesterday morning a very long list of ways that I’ve
embraced my inner Burmese; which was the original title of my series but I have
since decided to change that into several smaller chunks. How do all of the previous blogs tie into one
another? It’s fairly simple in my
opinion. It’s the basic understanding
that everything we do, whether it’s how we view God, how we practice church,
how we understand the gospel, to even how we tackle the subject of work,
everything is sacred and holy. That is
why it’s vital to approach these subjects with literal or figurative bare feet.
Having a barefoot life brings to
mind a couple of things. To me, the
first and foremost thing I think of when I consider living barefoot in a world
of shoes is the idea of freedom. To be
barefoot is to be free. Another basic
idea that can be gleaned from living a barefoot life is the idea of
simplicity. The notion that just as
shoes can be quite stifling no matter how comfortable they’re supposed to be,
nothing beats being barefoot. It
connotes simplicity to me. The options
for how we dress our feet are endless, but perhaps the best solution is to not
dress them at all. In the same way that
bare feet is the simplest and best solution to our feet’s cries; a simple life
is the best solution for the modern world that runs around at an incredible
pace.
Several decades ago I’ve heard it
said, people started foreshadowing and worrying about what people would do in
the future when they had so much free time on their hands due to the undeniable
notion that computers would take over all the main tasks of the modern day
worker. Today, we look back on those
ideas with perhaps a longing for what might have been or more likely with
disdain at the person’s naivety. In
spite of this example, we continue to believe that technological progress will
solve all our problems in the modern day era, anything from extreme physical
poverty to the cure for cancer. A
magazine that I thoroughly enjoy reading is entitled The Economist. I do have one critique in particular that I’d
like to share with you here. They are
pretty much the epitome and shining example of intelligent people who think
technology will save the day if we were just to embrace it more and put more
money into research and development.
Technology has produced some
incredible results over the past 200 years to be sure. We have collectively created more wealth and
spread that wealth around to more people than was ever thought imaginable up
until the Industrial Revolution. I do
not intend to argue with all the benefits that technology has afforded us as a
modern day society such as preventing the spread of deadly diseases or the
final decline in the AIDS pandemic. I
wish to argue more on the side effects and unintended consequences of
technology that very few people are even aware of or if they do at least
acknowledge these consequences they are even more likely to see them as a bad
thing that can’t be fixed by yet more technology.
You see, I made that terrible
mistake that has been the downfall of many a modern intelligent man who is
blessed enough to be literate. I read a
few books on the idea that there might be some downsides to technology and it
simply ruined me. Not only for my
professional career as an elementary educator but also in my personal life as I
started to reexamine my strongly held beliefs in the strengths-only side of
technology.
A few of these book titles are
worth mentioning in case you get a wild hare and decide to do further study
yourself on this subject. I made the
mistake of reading the majority of these books one right after the other, which
served to turn me into no less than a modern-day intellectual heretic. I’ve been heretical in Christian circles for
some time now, but to be a heretic in Christian circles as well as
professionally educated circles is to be frowned upon even more surely. Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly,
both written by Neil Postman, are wonderful books to get you started.
The Shallows deals more
with how technology and the internet in particular is helping to rewire our
brains along neural pathways in ways that aren’t always to be praised. This book was admittedly a little over my
head in regards to the physical make up of the brain due to my limited
knowledge in the area, but the author did a great job at making it at least
somewhat understandable for amateurs such as me. That one in particular ruined me as a
professional educator in America. In a
state that is implementing mandatory tablet devices for every student from
grade K – 12th grade by the school year 2014-2015, I clearly wasn’t
going to make it after reading that particular book. Not to mention my district in particular
considering we were the first school district in the nation to implement an
Activboard in every single classroom in our district.
Another book that I had run
across seemingly by accident at a Border’s book bargain bin before they went
under unfortunately, again due to technology ironically, was entitled Better
Off with the subtitle of Flipping the
Switch on Technology or something to that effect. It was written by a former MIT professor who
had spent a year or year and a half with his then new wife in a Mennonite or
Amish community which I think he purposefully neglected to say which one to
respect their privacy actually. Anyways,
the guy is clearly brilliant, I mean, not everyone can be a professor at MIT,
right? Anyhow, this book rocked my world
several years prior to the other books that I read one right after the
other. In it, he argues that perhaps the
Amish leading a simple life simultaneously results in their non-existent
divorce rate as well as their overall level of happiness and joy. Outside of a smallish percentage of bipolar
population within the whole, the Amish have a fairly close to zero rate of
depression overall. The Depression
Cure has some insight into that as well, if you want to go down another
completely and unrelated route to what I’m addressing here. It is a good book and I did at least want to
mention it while I was on the subject though.
No comments:
Post a Comment