Feb. 19, 1854 - Print! it is a close-hugging lichen that forms on a favorable surface, which paper offers. The linen gets itself wrought into paper that the song of the shirt may be printed on it. Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a a telescopic world? -- Henry D. Thoreau

Journal of a Sabbatical

February 19, 1999

the human moment

The Connection segment on "the human moment at work" got me all worked up this morning. Psychiatrist Ned Hallowell says modern conveniences are isolating workers. We're efficient, but email, voicemail, and telecommuting and the absence of the human moment could wreak havoc on an organizational scale. Guess we know where he stands on the threat of a post-hominid future. Except nothing he said really subverted the post-hominid future.

A human moment as opposed to a short-eared owl moment? or a feline moment? or a white-tailed deer moment? I know he means as opposed to a "mediated" moment of communication via e-mail or voice mail or even the telephone. The thing he's missing is that the loss of human connection in the work place has more to do with the pace of work and the constant focus on the bottom line, downsizing, right sizing, people as "resources" than it does with communication by e-mail. The kind of human connection he seemed to be talking about on the radio was more like what you'd have in a friendship or a therapeutic relationship or a conversation with your partner than with the kinds of transactions you have at work.

We didn't use e-mail that much at Cosmodemonic, although we did overuse voice mail, but the whole atmosphere apart from which method of convenience messaging we used took no account of who we are as people. Every conversation was a transaction. Every person was a resource to be assigned to a task the same way you'd assign a machine or money or raw materials. How can two resources connect in a human moment?

Hallowell also harped a lot on wanting to see the person he was talking with (the other panelist was in another studio in another city) so he could get a sense of who he was as a person. There is a huge flaw in this assumption. Can you tell who I am as a person by my appearance? Do my ideas carry less weight if you can see that my body carries more weight? Does the amount of gray hair that I have affect what I'm saying? Sure body language and appearance are part of the communication package, but that's not an unqualified good thing. For every assist in the communication you get from seeing my smile or observing my body language, you also get a hindrance from your own internalized ideas of fat dykes with graying hair.

And what about clothing? Doesn't that affect the communication as well? Years ago the therapist who led a group I was in suddenly showed up for the group in jeans and a flannel shirt rather than his usual slacks, sport coat, shirt & tie. The entire group focused their agenda on how we had trouble taking him seriously in jeans and flannel shirt. His clothing completely overwhelmed all other communication that night.

It seems just way too easy to say e-mail gets in the way of communication and all these other things (gender, race, size, ethnicity, clothing, age...) don't.

I stayed in and listened to the entire hour at least partly because it was a cloudy day and they were predicting snow.

We've had heavy overcast skies all day but no precipitation. It's oddly twilight-like again. I wasn't going to look for birds because of the supposed snow. I went to Plum Island anyway. I had to stop for a white-tailed deer in the middle of the road in the middle of the afternoon. The deer stood there for about 3 minutes and finally moved on to join another deer grazing in the meadow.

The twilight like weather brought out another short-eared owl too. I was sitting at the dike at Hellcat watching some goldeneyes diving when I looked up and saw the short-eared owl flapping low over the marsh. Man, I havent' seen a short-eared owl since 1995 and now I've seen three this week! I did read in the paper that there has been an influx of short-eared owls into Massachusetts this winter. Guess there is.

I also saw a small flock of northern pintails at Joppa Flats as well as the one who hangs out with mallards at Stage Island. They're very elegant birds with their white swirl on the neck.

Picked up Summer at Little Lava again, reread the first 30 pages and kept on going. I toted it with me everywhere I went so I could read it in restaurants, coffee shops, parks ... I seem to need to be away from my home to read anything except my nightly dose of Thoreau.

Kendra woke me up this morning. This week I am being awakened by people whose names begin with K. That and short-eared owls are becoming a theme.