Extempore Entreaty on Doubt and Procrastination

An Unfolding - Part 6

To Sit and Think

I so rarely sit and think now
Unless I’ve been told to do
By school, or work, but my own Head
Almost never chooses to. 

The girl who sits across from me
In the coffee-shop downtown;
I think she may not own a phone
Or at least her discipline’s profound. 

I am a slave to my device
Could I ever do without?
It’s been an aching hour in here
Sitting only in my doubt

Give me the strength O Lord my God
To cast down the idol in my hands
Lift my eyes to the hills from the screen’s lonely light
To see you and feel life again

                    -N.C-J, 2024

Lent has begun. Having already started the process of dumbifying my phone (grey screen, deleting most apps) I am also committing to: not go on my phone until an hour after I wake up and not between getting home from work and 7:30, and not go on social media at all. I am looking at this not only to be a fast, but that it would be a gradual beginning of a life where I can be more present with community and God.

I don’t want to overstate it or use dramatic language, but I do not believe I am when I say I believe I’ve lost months and months (maybe years) of time to the vampiric touch of my smartphone. Of course it is not a one-way street, and there were other things in my life that caused me to retreat to the phone; to long and pine for its distractions from the world.¹ I was borderline depressed from time to time when going through the death of my mother, cancer amongst the young and old in my family, and working in the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver throughout Covid. But even prior to that, it seems clear to me now that I was numbing the molten feelings that are (I am finding out) to some extent naturally part of who I am. I’ve alluded to this in past posts, if you are interested, and indeed this whole business of starting a poetry newsletter is the airing-out of the rediscovery of my emotions. Riding for the first time with my eyes ahead instead of down; into the Frontier.

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Being in the habit of repressing emotions and strong feelings is a trait many men share. It’s such an effective technique that most of us are basically functional the majority of the time; perhaps there are some flare-ups here and there. For some of us it’s just yelling at the kids or wife before an apology, or breaking up with the girl so we don’t have to face our bad habits, or slamming the steering wheel in traffic as we lace the windows with venom at bad drivers. For others it leads to even more insidious coping mechanisms that themselves lead to shame and more repression. I had thankfully dealt with the most common male outlet for repressing big feelings: porn addiction. And since I was not brave enough or willing to spend the money to try substances, there was left one clear choice. Try a smartphone!² It’s like one of those ads for medications that promise the world as a healthy-looking couple skips down the street in the sun, while the list of potential side effects scrolls by being read to swiftly and softly to register: “…may include non-productivity, envy, shame, lust, greed, depression, sore neck, bankruptcy, loneliness, stagnancy, losing your relationship with God, causing a car accident, forgetting what the outside is, your children looking at you hoping you saw them jump and seeing you looking worried at that thing in your palm they don’t understand they go back to playing because dad doesn’t really watch all the time… see your mobile provider for details.”

So all that to say I am on a path to using my phone much, much less, as work, school and practicality allow. I won’t elaborate on technology here as there are many authors doing amazing work on the topic from both secular and religious perspectives.

The poem you read above was one of the first times in 10 years or so I went without a phone to a coffee shop and sat to write creatively. A poem came to me as I watched a woman come in, order, and proceed to sit and read or watch people, never taking out a phone.³ I wanted to be able to be in the moment like she was, but it was so hard to not have the comfort of the screen - or perhaps it was so distressing to sit and think. To let my thoughts breath for the first time in so long.

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I’ve been reading many other newsletters on substack, and really enjoy the poetry sub-community, which in itself has sub-communities. I am taken with one that enjoys talking about the ins and outs of technical metre, free verse, syllable, rhyme, theory, classics, and more. They get in debates and have contests and it’s all very fun - I would like to get to that point in my own writing as well. The poems I share here mostly don’t scratch at any technical skill beyond the basics, but they are very sincere. The last line of the poem above is a True & Heartfelt Prayer.

I’d love to hear what you think. See you next week.

How I want to receive communication from now on.

1. Irony not lost.

2. To a certain extent the smartphone in my example could be replaced with video games, youtube, watching let’s plays, streams, and so on. There’s some nuance to be had in how games can teach you things, streams can build community, and so on, but it’s all in the same general category. However, the smartphone is the worst and most isolating culprit.

3. The title of the blog post comes from a Wordsworth poem Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg, meaning something like ‘on the spot effusively emotional poem’. My poem also poured itself out rather quickly, not requiring many edits.