FINDING PEACE AND TRANQUILITY
admin February 9th, 2012
Recently I read an article on the trends we can expect to see in the future. I found it quite amazing. At a time when we are updating homes and building new homes to include surround sound, home theatres, all kinds of internet and media connections to bring state of the art technology into our homes, the experts are telling us that there is a new trend emerging. Apparently all of our sensory circuits are getting overloaded from the constant bombardment of emails, Facebook, twitter, cell phones, etc. Can you relate?
Author Pico Iyer returned from a meeting in Singapore with Malcolm Gladwell the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” He was astonished to hear that the next trend is going to be, are you ready, STILLNESS, meaning, unplugging from all the noise around us.
“Has it really come to this?” Pico says. “In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.”
People are paying over $2,000 a night at Big Sur to relax at a resort which has no communication devises. They are called “black hole resorts”. Generations before us knew that they needed to find peace and tranquility to calm their minds and bodies and for general good health. They had monasteries, retreats, meditation rooms, prayer rooms, chapels (even in their homes), quiet gardens, to name a few. The current trend to meditation and yoga, I believe, is an effort to attain some peace and quiet for our busy and noisy lives.
So perhaps, in the next few years, the new trend we will see in our homes will be a quiet room or tranquility gardens where we can unplug from all the noise around us. Ahhhh…the sound of quiet.