This is another stab at a topic I know I've already written about. Thanks for bearing with me!
One of the things that I keep having to remind myself is that there has never been a generation of humans exposed on a daily basis to so much information. It is not only that there are so many more humans on the planet with every passing day, each with their own interests, skills and activities. Each person is making an impact ("news" on some level or another), and we are receiving this wide-ranging news almost non-stop over the course of the day, in dozens of forms, and visually taking in ever more input.
I was proud to be a "generalist" early in my lifetime, a Jill of all trades, master of none. And I still believe in the American liberal arts education, which encourages exposure to many different academic disciplines. I believe in the kind of mind that can look at the big picture, analyze it, and find creative solutions in ways that perhaps a person of a very specialized education cannot. Yet, this very generalization almost caused me not to be accepted into my British master's program -- evidently, in those days, an American undergraduate transcript was looked on as suspiciously unfocused. Mine was a patchwork of music theory, music history, composition, conducting, and piano and organ -- but also English Literature, Chaucer, Scottish Literary Tradition, European history, theology, earth sciences and art. Kind of a snapshot of me, really. Then, when I worked as a letters correspondent at Time Magazine, part of our job was to read the New York Times every morning, so that we would be conversant about up-to-the-minute world and national news before responding to reader challenges to Time's own reporting. (This was before 24 hour cable news, Twitter, Facebook, or even e-mail. Letters were still literally delivered by U.S. mail.) The journalistic "eye" and curiosity rubbed off and has stayed with me. I can "do" generalist really well.
The down side of this for those of us who might have forgotten our own focus, or might be searching for it from scratch, is that the generalist ethos -- magnified by today's constant news stream -- means that your thoughts are constantly bouncing around from topic to topic to topic. I give myself a hard time that I'm not more interested in, say, climate change and fashion and politics and new trends in physics. I get sucked into feeling responsible for keeping up with all of it. Then you add to it a tendency to worry about what other people are thinking, and all this external input can be utterly paralyzing.
I tried to "do" the Times today, and yet after reading a few articles about Great Britain and a few recipes for Thanksgiving, I couldn't go any further. It's the same with my Facebook news feed: I am grateful for links to the music and art that I am passionate about, and just to see my friends' names and faces. But I just cannot do much more than scroll through about 80% of it. I bless the fact that such-and-such is their passion, but have to remind myself constantly that I am not required to add it to my own repertoire. It's too much. This human brain has just about reached its capacity.
Our world will only become more and more complex and fascinating. It's a conundrum. How can we continue to be informed, educated thinkers and teachers if we have reached the saturation point? I really don't want to become a hermit. In fact, this coming decade is likely to be the most productive and exciting of my life, if I can focus exclusively on those topics that I truly care about. The world population may grow by another few billion before the end of my life, and who knows how information will be disseminated by then? This is life energy continuing to grow and change, and it will not stop. "It's all good." But I suspect that the only way I will truly make my mark is to gently release the tendency to gather and analyze so much new external information, and focus more on creatively expressing what's already within me.
