Sadly, Gary Austin, the founder of the famed improv troupe The Groundlings, passed away this week. As a longtime admirer of his work, I read with great interest the thoughtful obituary in The New York Times.
There was one thing the obit quoted him as saying which really jumped out at me:
““My aim is to be totally present in the moment, and when I’m totally present in the moment I can do no wrong,” he said in 2015. “That’s a feeling I like to have, and I have it sometimes.”
That’s a very Buddhist way of looking at the world. Alas, I suspect it is very far from the way most people in “modern society” live their lives.
It strikes me now that every time you walk into a meeting with a SmartPhone in your pocket, and you keep your phone’s ringer or vibration mode switched on, you are doing the opposite of what he said. Some part of you is going to be absent from that meeting, even if your phone never rings.
I am an admirer of the related anthropological research of Applin and Fischer into PolySocial Reality. I wonder whether we should also be studying PolySocial Unreality.
Ha ha! We do! These are the misses that happen when connections are too asynchronous! I have addressed this in my dissertation, and some of it is also here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6679308/?arnumber=6679308
Yes, I suspected as much, thanks! I can always rely on you to be consistently present in the moment. 🙂