I read this week that the video game Pokeman Go had 45 million players in its first 12 days, and that among a host of problems related to the scavenger hunt nature of the game in the real world, was that 110,000 distracted driving-related incidents had been reported in the first 10 days. I am left wondering so very many things. Things like what would it be like to garner 45 million people’s time and energies to devote to….?  Fill in the blank. Things like, are we so out of our minds with the siren’s call of the technologies that we would jeopardize innocent lives on the road? Things like, why do we have plenty of time for this, but often so little for what really matters most?

If there was one question that I could ask All of Eternity, it would be; “Why is it so hard to remember who we are and what it most important?” Why does it seem easier to forget than to remember? Why does it seem so “natural” to get distracted and to lose track of really important things like self-care, self-love, the health of the planet and the importance of each other? And why is that even when we want to do things differently, it can be so hard to change?

Almost 30 years ago I had the worst birthday of my life. It was my 25th. What made it so awful was that I became utterly unnerved and unhinged that a quarter of a century had gone by and that I had been asleep at the wheel. I hadn’t done anything worth mentioning. I hadn’t a clue about how precious and short-lived Life really is. After this difficult revelation, I made some changes. Some things stayed the same. Maybe even most things stayed the same. It was hard for me to line up in my own mind why it was that I saw the need to change, and that I wanted to change, but still found it so difficult to do so. It was just so easy to get distracted. It was just so easy to forget. For a,long time I beat myself up about not doing better, believing it to be some failing on my part that I could not just get to where it was I most wanted to be.

I see things differently now. Sure, there is lots and lots of research about how and why people change, and why they don’t. My sense, though, is that there is more at play than we usually recognize around what creates change. Something that is beyond the obvious of A+B=C. Something that is beyond a human hypothesis. Something that is beyond will and intention. Maybe it is built into us for some reason beyond our knowing to struggle like this. Maybe it is so the Universe gets to create through us. Maybe it is about choice at some level far deeper than most of us go. Maybe it is to learn forgiveness, or to ask for help. Maybe it has to do with some evolutionary shift that will occur in its own time no matter what we do. And maybe there is no reason at all.

Through all of this unknown around how it is that we remember to pay attention to our precious lives and how to keep shifting towards the expression of our truest nature, I know one thing for sure: The technologies are exploiting our weaknesses in ways too numerous to mention. By this I mean, all of the daily ways we use our devices to miss our lives, our health and one another. All of the ways that we do not know how to say no despite what it is doing to us. All of the ways that we can squander away our time here, living as if what we do does not matter, or does not amount to any more than chasing down digital creatures in the real world. If on our own we struggle with being here and with what is most precious, how will we fare with something that magnifies our tendencies to forget?