Noodles and Networking: Finding Voice in a Distracted Age

Lake at Seneca Park- Pita Cruz                                                                              11/19/2013

That dreaded time has come again. It’s 7 am and its time to get up.  My phone starts to buzz around my head. Shower. Change. Breakfast. Class. No time to think.

First period I have high hopes. We begin with a writing assignment truly unique. We are looking for voice. You know, that thing in the back of your head that nobody talks about and you’re not sure if it’s there. Do I have a voice? What does it sound like? Is it manly? Funny? Or is it what I fear the most? Boring. Dry. Dull. Flat.

Our teacher asks us to write. Not to think not to interfere with the words not to judge them but to just let them fall out as they come to my mind. Three minutes pass by. BING BING a timer goes off and we are instructed to stop. We start. Three more minutes. Again the timer chimes BING BING. How in the world am I supposed to find my voice with all this noise?!!

            Robison Jeffers, a famous poet, once wrote about the importance of silence.

Drink deep, drink deep of quietness

            And on the margins of the sea

Remember not thine old distress

            Nor all the miseries to be.

There are voices all around me. With more and more opinions being added to the Internet daily and pressure to sound professional it can be a challenging to find my own beliefs in the sea of data that is the web. Needed is the ability to pick out one noise at a time, to drink deep of the quietness. The way the web presents information makes this near impossible.

 It’s like a bowl full of noodles. Every new page, every new link, thrusts me forward but to where who knows. Staring at a plate of spaghetti there seems to be almost no connection between each of the individual noodles. More is not always more if it’s just for quantity sake. It’s easy to get lost in the all the noodles.

I find within myself a dichotomy of epic proportion: the more I want to understand the faster I search. The faster I search the more I come to understand that I do not know. I lose my personal voice.

So what’s the solution? The next time your about to plunge face first into the crazy noodled network don’t forget your fork. The fork, just in case you didn’t know, has four points on the end and is used to take noodles from the plate to your mouth. In a like manner using these four tips will help chomp on all the noodles of information and to put them into your mouth, in your own words.

To find voice in a noisy world use the fork: question everything that you read on the internet. Take the time to think about what the author is saying. Do you believe what is being said? Is there alternative possibilities that could make a difference that are nor mentioned. Focus on one work at a time. Close all the extra tabs; make it personal, between you and the author. If this means reading things in print instead of online that's fine. Think of many different possibilities. Find places that you can go that allow you to develop your thoughts. A walk outside, a ride in the country, sometimes getting away from everything can give you the intuition you seek. Ask yourself, not your teacher, not the people around you, what you really think about the words on the page. If I was going to write a really cool book about this subject, what would I say? How could I use this information to change the world. Finding voice in a distracted age can be as simple as using a fork.