The strange message left me squinting into the middle-distance in abject confusion. I had just emailed a friend to ask if she was still able to meet me that evening. ‘I’m meditating right now :),’ her reply said. And it was crowned with the addendum: ‘Sent from my iPhone.’
After a few disorientated seconds spent trying to process this bizarre sophism, I finally decided to be outraged. Why on earth had she taken her iPhone into a ‘meditation’ session? How was I supposed to know not to email her because she might be ‘meditating’ with a twitching mobile at the edge of her crossed knees? The more I thought about it the crosser I became. I drafted several retorts, one of which particularly pleased me: ‘Wow! Well done for meditating while also sending an email. Have you alerted the international Sivananda centre to inform them of this breakthrough in meditative techniques?’
I also thought about how great spiritual moments in history might be transformed by the addition of remote communications technology. ‘Can’t talk now, burning a bush. God…Sent from my BlackBerry.’
‘Just getting some tablets of stone in. C u at the sea-parting. Moses…Sent from my iPhone.’
‘In middle of nowhere. Not enuff loaves ’n fishes 2 go round!! This could get heavy. JC…Sent from my iPad.’
But I didn’t send a sarcastic reply, thank goodness. Because later on, when I met up with my friend and remarked on her rather unconventional approach to inner contemplation, she burst out laughing. ‘Darlink!’ she said in her glamorous Peruvian accent, as she enveloped me in a Chanel-scented embrace. ‘You’re a craaaazy woman! How could I be meditating if I was answering my phone? It was a joke. Don’t you get it?’
I had to confess that I did now, four hours later, get it. But why on earth had the possibility of her message being humorous not occurred to me before? After much tortured consideration I narrowed the options down to these: 1) Life has finally ground me down. I have become humourless, embittered and stupid in middle age. 2) I have come to expect people to do silly things with their phones.
I’m opting for the latter explanation. I’m convinced that a big part of me is already resigned to a time when friends will claim to be meditating while answering their iPhone. It’s just a natural extension of where we are heading, based on the evidence.
Take last Monday’s yoga class, for example. There I was lying in shavasana doing my full yogic breathing and enjoying a blissful few minutes when my head wasn’t churning like a washing machine on spin cycle, when a phone behind me started to vibrate in a handbag. OK, so it was my phone. But you get the picture. It happens every week now, the buzzing of the bags, prompting little scurries to the back of the room and much rummaging through Anya Hindmarches to make sure nothing epoch-shattering has occurred during cobra. Even while in pursuit of inner peace, you see, we are no more prepared to switch our phones off than we would be prepared to switch off our own life-support machines.
The other day I caught myself trying to answer my mobile as I steered my horse towards a fallen tree. I was risking breaking my neck so I could read a text from a friend saying, ‘Hey what you up to?’ I contemplated, but in the end decided against, trying to send a text message back saying, ‘About to jump a three foot…aaagh!…’
A therapist friend of mine claims she can prove that this bonkers behaviour is all down to something called the amygdala, a bundle of nerve cells in the brain that prompts emotional reaction. She says the amygdala has become warped by the impact of modern technology demanding instant responses and is now incapable of staying quiet for a second. We are all at the mercy of our amygdalas, which are constantly primed to react, react, react, 86,400 seconds a day.
She claims that every problem in modern society might be solved if we could put our amygdalas back to how they were before some idiot invented the palm pilot. This might involve giving everyone in the world, apart from a few tribes in the Amazon, a lobotomy, but if it stops us rummaging through our bags during yoga it’s worth a try.
As I sit crossed-legged on my mat listening to the buzzing of Balanciagas, I wonder what Buddha would have made of it. I suppose if the enlightened one were around now he wouldn’t be bothering with any of that one grain of rice business. He’d probably be trying to inspire the world by rationing himself to one iPhone call a day.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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