The Stillness of Thinking and Writing

When was the last time you simply stopped doing all things, sat, and thought?

I find that I am always on my phone, computer or even tablet when I’m cooking, watching television, writing, working…you name it. I am always multitasking, but for what reason?

I came to realize that really the only time I am focusing is at the movie theater and the five seconds before I fall asleep and the television has just been turned off.

The other morning I caught the end of a segment on television about Ernest Hemingway and how he used to constantly edit his work to utter perfection (the narrator stated that most writers today would have never thrown away what Hemingway did). Note I have never followed anything on Hemingway or read his work, yet it still made me think. Did he win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his perfection? And did that perfection come from a time when there were not five hundred other outlets distracting a writer? When a writer sits down to write, most use a computer, for Hemingway it was pen and paper or a typewriter, not a social media filled distraction hole. It was a library of books and an adventure outside, not a Google search engine and Wikipedia pages.

Has the quality of writing shifted because of this? Has society changed our expectations? Would our writing and reading shift if we switched our current ways back to historic ways?