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I
was driving from Washington to New York one afternoon on Interstate 95
when a car came zooming up behind me, really flying. I could see in the
rearview mirror that the driver was talking on her cell phone.

I was about to move to the centre lane to get out
of her way when she suddenly swerved into that lane herself to pass me
on the right – still chatting away. She continued moving dangerously
from one lane to another as she sped up the highway.

A few days later, I was talking to a guy who
commutes every day between New York and New Jersey. He props up his
laptop on the front seat so he can watch DVDs while he’s driving.

“I only do it in traffic,” he said. “It’s no big
deal.” Beyond the obvious safety issues, why does anyone want, or need,
to be talking constantly on the phone or watching movies (or texting)
while driving? I hate to sound so 20th century, but what’s wrong with
just listening to the radio? The blessed wonders of technology are
overwhelming us.

We don’t control them; they control us.

We’ve got cell phones and BlackBerrys and Kindles
and iPads, and we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and
Tweeting – I used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high
school kids who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village
idiot, that the correct term is Tweeting. Twittering, Tweeting –
whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder.

This is all part of what I think is one of the
weirder aspects of our culture: a heightened freneticism that seems to
demand that we be doing, at a minimum, two or three things every single
moment of every hour that we’re awake. Why is multitasking considered
an admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic
inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.

Why do we have to check our e-mail so many times a
day, or keep our ears constantly attached, as if with Krazy Glue, to
our cell phones?

When you watch the news on cable television, there
are often additional stories being scrolled across the bottom of the
screen, stock market results blinking on the right of the screen, and
promos for upcoming features on the left. These extras often block
significant parts of the main item we’re supposed to be watching.

A friend of mine told me about an engagement party
that she had attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and
plenty of champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cell phones on
the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire
event.

Enough already with this hyperactive behavior,
this techno-tyranny and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and
take a deep breath.

I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological
advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to
typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper
morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other
tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes.

Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and
spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems
of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that
surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and
that includes our own individual needs – those very special, mostly
nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives,
enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or
her, and that you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out
of touch with your song,

forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied.

As this character says, recalling a time when he
was out of touch with his own song, “Something wasn’t making my heart
smooth and easy.” I don’t think we can stay in touch with our song by
constantly Twittering or Tweeting, or thumbing out messages on our
BlackBerrys, or piling up virtual friends on Facebook.

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives.
We need to savor the trip. Leave the cell phone at home every once in
awhile. Try kissing more and Tweeting less. And stop talking so much. Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when
they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say
to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your
song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really
you.

© 2010 New York Times News Service