The last speaker at TEDGlobal, Franciscan monk Brother Paulus Terwitte, described how at the previous night’s party he was having a conversation with another TED attendee that was suddenly interrupted when the other person’s cell phone rang, upon which he excused himself and left. Brother Paulus waited for a few minutes, “but he never came back.”
He was obviously not important enough, the monk concluded, and he went on musing that there’s always more to discover; we’re so afraid to miss something that is potentially more valuable to us that we entirely miss the value of what we already have. Which is why he replied to Alain de Botton’s quintessential, excruciating “question of the early 21st century” from the first conference day – “What do you do?” – with a disarming “Nothing.” He said he’d spend three hours of an organized, scheduled “doing nothing” every day at his monastery. “Don’t try to own the whole world by taking as much from it as you can,“ he advised.
Brother Paulus' talk tiptoed along a fine line between self-help course and sermon, and at times I felt a little embarrassed about the monk’s forced naiveté that was all the more exposed because he presented it without the comfort of cheap wit. But embarrassment is a good thing – when something is embarrassing, a nerve is struck and an emotional reaction triggered that is undeniably real. Anything embarrassing is powerful – and true. Like silence.
During his talk, I wasn’t so sure what to make of the monk’s digital lifestyle commentary (“Is it possible that humans can have 300 friends? Is it possible to contact 600 Twitterers?" – “We turned into hunters and gatherers again; we’re hunting and gathering information”) but now, a few days later, I realize that that his words have made a lasting impression.
TED is an adrenaline rush in a somewhat claustrophobic, hyper-social boot camp environment; a compressed tour de force through a whole range of human emotions: curiosity, creativity, inspiration, fear, shock, awe, euphoria, friendship, belonging, rejection, accomplishment, success and failure, over-stimulation, fatigue. “When exactly in the past few days,” Brother Terwitte asked, ”did you have 15 minutes to think about the ideas you’ve heard and the people you've met – alone?” And he paused for a brief moment of silence – the second one at the conference. On the first day of TEDGlobal, during a special recording of BBC’s radio program World Service, the moderator had asked the audience to begin the recording with “a minute of radio-silence,” and it was both fulfilling and painful to see and feel it.
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