The British writer Gwendolen Howard lived like a hermit in a house in the countryside where the birds flew in and out freely. People barely allowed them, in front of the house there was a sign with: no visitors. Nesting Birds. Must Keep Cottage Quiet. No callers.
In 1952 Howard published her famous bird studies Birds As Individuals. One of the most important insights: just like people, birds have completely personalities. If you want to understand their behavior, you don’t have enough instinct as an explanation; You also have to look at their individual intelligence, hotness and even a sense of humor.
During her life, Howard got to know for no less than forty different great tits, I read in The birdhouse (2019) Van Eva Meijer, a fact -based novel. “They understood the gestures I made and we made eye contact.”
I also see a lot of great tits in the window of my writing booth; But until recently, such an intimate relationship with birds seemed like an unattainable ideal.
I was already happy that I knew the difference between carbon and blue tit. Yet I recently met my very first individual great tit – she is called spot and almost eats out of my hand.
That is largely due to my new phone. It is a so -called senior telephone. A poppy red folding device, with very large keys for people whose fingers shake. A telephone that you can’t do anything with, except calling and texting. With the alarm button I can sound the alarm when I lie on the floor. But a game like Snake Is not on it, let alone an AI app to recognize birds. The ringtone is deaf and hard of hearing, so stark that you are shocked. But anyone rarely just calls. The clapping telephone makes life boring. Exactly what I sometimes look for. Must Keep Cottage Quiet.
A while ago I confessed NRC My indiscriminate love for the smartphone: that crystal clear window in the world, my all -knowing companion, my everything. I wrote it as a counterpart against all moral panic about the smartphone, but perhaps I pushed the other way too hard, then there is a danger that you are going up.
The clapping telephone makes life boring. Exactly what I sometimes look for
I don’t want to dismiss my smartphonel love, but apart from that digital window there is also a real window that I love: that of my writing booth, where the great tits chatter. That box is remote, in a nature reserve in the bend of the river. The nearest store is a fifteen minute walk. An important minority in the parliament of my brain believes it is important to keep this place holy: to be able to think here without an audience, walking without a pedometer, watching without a greedy Instagram-tin.
Anyway, I also like to be offline. There are two souls in my chest, but unlike Goethe’s Faust, I don’t necessarily see that as a problem. As a logistics puzzle.
Keep peace
It seems to me to be an impossible requirement to keep a person of one piece: consistent, recognizable, ever on fire. The danger lies in that urge for unity.
One of the most painful sounds of this year I found the crowded cheers at the member congress of the PvdA-GroenLinks merger party. A Member of Parliament had submitted a motion in which she called on stopping supporting Israel’s air defense. She was angry that the world was silently watching and rightly; But so angry that she was going to hang out, and probably lost herself. Her hard motion was the utmost consequence that innocent civilians would no longer get protection. A minority of the congress was therefore against. This group was ridiculed, the party that stands up for minorities could not deal with the minority in its own ranks. That is why this shouting sounded sharp. As the stark sounded then another party, NSC, said yes to a law sentence to help those who are hungry.
Civilization is learning to live with your contradictions. I notice how difficult that is, keep peace in that internal parliament on the phone. It seems like a simple wish: I usually want to be online, but sometimes not at all. How do I organize that?
I can cycle to work without a phone, but then I am also unreachable when the school calls about a sick child. So far I used the Freedom and AppBlock apps with which I could close the internet at certain times and locations. It was disappointing that you then pay not to be able to have something you pay for, but soit. Worse was: the software can be circumvented. For example, I discovered that the internet on my phone was closed, but that the hotspot just did it on my laptop. I thought I tamed the monster, but sometimes it still struck it.
Another possible horse remedy: Buy a simplistic drug dealer telephone in the store around the corner with a separate SIM card – but then I had a second song, a double life, very awkward. So I recently wondered: could I not get two SIM cards with one and the same song?
And yes, that was possible. Although it was well hidden on my provider’s website, and I had to talk to customer service for fifteen minutes, but a day later two identical SIM cards arrived by post. Free. I put one card in my smartphone, the other in my new red fool. Since then I simply change souls.
No wonder pill
There are romantic expectations about the disconnected life. I notice how overstrain they are on the Instagram advertisements for three-day staying on your own in a hammock on a muddy Dutch island where you have to paddle yourself, without telephone, alcohol or delicacies, only the promise that you will come closer to yourself, for only 800 euros (excluding mosquito spray).
Nature is not a wonder pill at all. And being offline can lead to the essence, but that essence can also consist of boredom, loneliness, meaningless repetitive behavior like an animal in a cage.
The first time I cycled to work with my clapping telephone, I started to open and close that thing. Must said: the device claps wonderfully open, like a jumping balm. And it claps with something in between pouf and fell in, whole satisfying. But after a while you are really folded out.
Then I sought my writing booth for incentives. Went weightlifting with books. Read the double -thick summer issue of De Groene Amsterdammer from last year, including the small advertisements (‘stilling connection and peace, Abdijhoeve Bethlehem invites you …’ Aaarrrrgh!). Rediscovered my binoculars, the magnifier. Las random books that I already read, always searching for sensory stimulation in the sentences, like a wanderer who picks up cigarette stumps. Blowed feverish by Proust, Sea wind in the countrysideTranslation Kiki Coumans, noted words such as ‘Wemeling’ and ‘Bleek gold waterfalls’.
When I had thoroughly combed the box, I just went outside, picked some blackberries and stuffed in my mouth until my face left with the bitter juice; Made a much longer walk than normal, hoping to meet people, in the meantime thinking about the balance of my pedometer at my home IPHONE: my respectable day average of 13,000 was in free fall – just now that I walked so much.
In a world that wants you or one or one zero, you can change as often as you want
But so far some comments, the Red Madklapper I also consider a successful experiment. The thing does what it should be: I can now simply increase one head and leave the other at home.
In seniors mode I read more, I walk more, I look more and I take fewer photos (there is a camera on my folding phone but it has the pixel density of an embroidery). A lot of noise is spared me. Problems arise and resolve again without my intervention. A fuss swirl up and lies down again without having it really. I let everything happen behind my back.
I miss the world news – but I hear the spirit of the times all the better cloth cloth From the army helicopters who are increasingly flying over here. I do read the rags of the world from the enthusiastic faces of the very young marine recurrences that are carrying tree trunks in the nature reserve on the right as a general for lifting affected comrades.
I turn into a senior wise ninety, who has seen everything, but wants to see much more, because he has finally discovered that you should not look for life elsewhere; Life is this here, which is now taking place right in front of you. This is all, you have to do it with this.
Don’t have to choose
Right in front of me I have a window on the world, great tits flutter in front of the open window. Until recently I could never keep them apart, for that the souls covered with down shot back and forth too quickly. It is as if you are playing search-the differences with ten, fifteen almost identical bouncers. I saw a swarm, no me.
No: it was my own thoughts that shot too much back and forth to focus on it for a long time. But if I don’t have a dancing screen, I have to.
Stain is a great tit for beginners. Flets and fluffy and uninhibited, she sat down in front of me. A female, I think, without the thick black breast strip, the ‘tie’ that male needs. With a clear spot on the white left cheek for recognition. At first she was always shocked by her own courage. Now she trickles over the writing table.
I will not come to the forty individuals. For that, at the end of the day, I crave my other soul. But I can now live as the American writer Henry David Thoreau. He went to live in a hut in a forest, to front only the essential facts of life. But one and a half kilometers from the first neighbors. He sometimes did shopping in the city. He understood: you have to organize your life in such a way that you don’t have to choose. My red folding phone makes that possible: sometimes city person, sometimes Bosmonnik. The device deserves an ode as well as my smartphone. Together they form my ideal device, my allest telephone, which gives me the world and stilling.
Towards the end of the afternoon I feel like the smartphone, as you get in the end of the summer. When I get home, I screw that other soul back. Then, just like in the past, piles of postcards are waiting for me. I am very happy with the wonderful waterfall of meaningful notifications, I look for the names of the flowers, let myself be dragged into groups. Post photos. Tel likes. Until I feel like changing souls again.
Taming your phone is a continuous dressage. In the meantime, my clapping telephone teaches me this: in a world that wants you to be a one or a zero, you can change as often as you want. You sometimes have to disconnect yourself from the swarm. You must continue to see yourself as an individual.