Wither thou goest, there also shall I wither. .. Shakespeare? Milton? Blake? Never mind — I have a little riddle for your entertainment:

Where Are You Walking When You’re Looking at Your Phone?

Your body is walking down Broadway, but you may be somewhere completely different.

Your feet are in Manhattan. Your eyes are on a six-inch screen. Your attention is in a text conversation with somebody in California. Or watching a football match in Europe. Or reading about something that happened yesterday. Or worrying about something happening tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the biological machine is doing a remarkably good job of walking without you.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

You avoid people. Step off the curb. Wait for the light. Navigate around a trash can. Follow the crowd. Maybe even get on the right subway—all while the part of you that you normally call “me” is occupied somewhere else.

So who’s walking?

That right there is a beautiful little waking-state experiment.

Next time you catch yourself walking while looking at your phone, suddenly put the phone away. Don’t do anything special. Just notice:

Where am I?

What has been walking for the last three blocks?

And perhaps the number one question of all:

How much of my life can it do without me?

Because walking is only the beginning.

Have you ever arrived somewhere in a car and realized you remember almost nothing about the drive?

Apparently somebody stopped at the red lights.

Somebody stayed in the lane.

Somebody made the turns.

Somebody parked the car.

Nice work.

Who was it?

Never mind the times you suddenly woke up to find yourself driving on the freeway at 90 miles per hour? You were startled awake by the flashing red light behind you. And the siren.

And what about breakfast?

How many breakfasts have you eaten while reading something, watching something, talking about something or thinking about something—and afterward couldn’t tell anyone what the third bite tasted like?

Somebody ate it.

Somebody chewed it.

Somebody swallowed it.

The machinery seems perfectly capable of getting on with things.

It can walk. It can eat. It can drive familiar routes. It can shower, dress, make coffee, open doors, answer routine questions, complain about the weather and possibly conduct an entire conversation.

This suggests another experiment.

Put your phone down occasionally and catch the machine in the act.

Don’t try to become enlightened.

Don’t assume a special posture.

Don’t breathe through your left nostril while visualizing a blue triangle.

Just suddenly become interested in what is happening.

I’m walking.

I’m here.

That’s a tree.

That’s another person.

Those are my feet doing that.

For perhaps two seconds, something very peculiar may happen.

You may actually be where you’re walking, but don’t worry, it’ll only last a second or two.

Then a thought comes along. You remember something. The phone buzzes. You start planning dinner. And you’re gone again. The body continues down the sidewalk.

Which raises the possibility that the phone isn’t actually the problem.

The phone merely makes the situation wonderfully obvious.

People were disappearing into thoughts, memories, fantasies, arguments, worries and daydreams long before anybody invented the smartphone.

The little screen simply gives us someplace convenient to disappear into.

So perhaps the real experiment isn’t:

Can I stop looking at my phone?

It’s:

Can I occasionally show up where I actually am?

Because your body has been waiting for you to notice it. And it knows the way home even if you don’t.

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Commentary on my article, by my friend & proofreader, Chatbot Bob:

Your opening gag—“Wither thou goest, there also shall I wither”—is wonderfully awful. 😄 It sounds vaguely biblical/Shakespearean enough to sail past the reader for half a second before wither registers.

Incidentally, the phrase you’re mangling is biblical rather than Shakespeare, Milton or Blake: Ruth 1:16, traditionally “whither thou goest, I will go.” Which makes the joke even better.

😄 The joke requires the reader to have that familiar biblical cadence already rattling around somewhere in the machinery.

“Whither thou goest, I will go” is solemn, devotional, almost ceremonial—and then you quietly swap in wither, turning it into something like wherever you go, I shall deteriorate right alongside you.

And then “Shakespeare? Milton? Blake? Never mind—” adds another layer: the narrator obviously can’t be bothered to remember where this supposedly lofty quotation came from, because there’s a riddle to get on with.

Actually, that fits the article rather nicely. The reader’s automatic machinery recognizes the quotation before the conscious reader has quite caught up with the joke.

Which is, come to think of it, exactly what the article is about. 😄

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Here’s the Bardo bus now!

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See You At The Top!!!

gorby