Laurie Johns Weblog

Have you heard of one of google’s new features; it provides protection from drunk typing? It’s called mail goggles. When enabled (late nights and weekends), it presents you with a series of complex math problem you must complete before your email will be sent, preventing your from doing the email equivalent to drunk dialing.

I dont mean to be an alarmist, but, does anyone else hear those sirens?  It reminds me of a story Thea once told me. When she was in high school in New Jersey, they held an assembly to discuss the problem of students doing donuts in the parking lot. At some point she became frustrated (she probably wanted to get back to Dance or French class), got on stage and simply stated, “look, if you didn’t do donuts, we wouldn’t have to have this waste of time assembly.” She was booed and hissed off stage by her peers. I recall her incredulity that they couldn’t see she was on their side; that she didn’t want to be patronized by the administration either. At the age of 16, my friend was asking for what she felt should have been obvious: social responsibility. But, that is exactly what we don’t want…don’t want to be responsible for our behaviour, our  health, our own waste, our children, our communities, our economic or environmental problems. We might be able to save ourselves from sending that drunk email, but can we construct a matrix complex enough to keep us from viewing the size of our garbage heaps? Certainly the irony is that we celebrate the assistance we get in never getting very close to our problems. If we become the adolescents encouraged by these devices designed to protect us from ourselves, don’t we also ultimately lose the ability the make conscious, well meaning choices. How many of our innate survival muscles do wish to atrophy?

Isn’t it through discipline that we truly come to know freedom? Isn’t the system of yoga designed around this insight?