Stillness speaks loudly to me. I don’t mean a stillness of the body, because it is often during times when I am in motion that my mind settles, free of distractions. This “settling” wipes away the fog of modern-day life.

It was during one of these “motion moments” that memories of college entered. The impact of two classes more than 45 years ago remains fresh and, during this morning walk I was on, opened my eyes and mind more than they did originally.

One class was about “Sense and Perception”, oddly enough offered through the Psychology Department. The other was a basic Philosophy 101 type of course. During the former, we learned about the light spectrum, how our eyes work and the process of sight. In the latter, we learned that everything we see is an interpretation of the very thing we see. Because it is an interpretation, we can doubt the object we see exists. Extending the philosophy, we learned the Latin phrase, often attributed to Rene Descartes, “cogito, ergo sum”, meaning, “I think, therefore I am.” Roughly explained, we can doubt the existence of everything, but the mere fact that we doubt something proves we exist.

As I rounded the first half lap on the walking track, I looked around. My surroundings were quiet and serene, as the sun was just beginning to rise above the trees. I heard birds chirping, felt the slight breeze on my face and all was good in the universe. My mind was free.

I thought back to those two college courses. I decided that if what I was seeing and experiencing wasn’t the true reality of my surroundings, I was fine with that. Descartes was sent to his place in the bullpen.

Which brought me back to the light spectrum and its place in the larger electromagnetic spectrum. A heavy topic for such a pleasant moment, for sure, but one that took root.

The electromagnetic spectrum is arranged by wavelengths from longest to shortest. My professor illustrated this spectrum as telling us to imagine it being the width of the classroom. On the left side of the spectrum would be radio waves, followed by microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays reaching to the right side of the classroom. He continued by telling us to look at a small, one inch section of a line in the middle between radio and gamma rays. This tiny section is called the visible light spectrum. In other words, its where all the things we see reflect back color to our eyes. It’s the only part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see, but we know all those other waves are there around us.

At the end of lap one, “what-ifs” kicked in.

What if we could see all those other wavelengths? What would it look like? Would getting an x-ray appear more of an assault on the body instead of the invisible wonder it is? Would the same hold true of a woman getting an ultrasound of their baby?

I thought about microwaves and radio waves in particular, leaving all the others and the images they conjured behind.

Radio, especially FM radio, was big back in my adolescent years. It’s how we expanded our tastes in music as we drove around on Friday and Saturday nights with friends. And, sometimes, it played in the background in our car while parked on a back road. The waves were all around us.

But the what-if that grabbed my soul was, “What if we could see microwaves?” I wasn’t thinking of the household appliance, but the signals upon which cell phone signals are carried.

In the distance, I saw a cell phone tower. I wondered what it would look like if a black cord, like a web shot from Spider-Man, stretched from the tower where a microwave was being transmitted to a device being held by a person I saw across a parking lot. I imagined the line moving as the person walked. I thought about more lines stretching down to vehicles on the highway transmitting information such as GPS, a child’s iPad, the driver’s cell phone, those plug-ins that monitor your driving habits and any other devices in the vehicle. And what about nearby buildings with security systems, heating and air controls and phone systems?

The more I imagined, the more crowded and darker the landscape became as the black lines multiplied, covering the beauty I had been experiencing one short lap earlier.

I thought about what information might be passing back and forth along those black connections and the old adage “You become what you consume.” What was being consumed as the small screens captivated the minds of the people watching? Are we being nourished? Are we being poisoned? Are we deliberately being shaped?

I felt bad for those who have gone down the proverbial rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and political division. For those who willingly, it seems, forfeit their own initiative toward critical thinking in the hunt for the elusive yet powerfully addictive “Like”. How dark those web strings must be.

Just up the hill on lap two, I noticed my own black line connecting my phone to that same cell phone tower onto which all the others were bound. After all, I had to have the app on my phone to count my number of steps so that when I reach the daily goal, a shower of confetti fills the small screen on this seemingly unobtrusive device in my pant pocket.

At that moment, a line from Schitt’s Creek came to me. Paraphrasing, it goes a bit like this – “Be careful, Brent, lest you suffer vertigo from the dizzying heights of your moral high ground.”

As I approached the end of my final lap, I decided to look around and symbolically turn off the black lines attached to everything and everyone around me – not as a means to hide from reality, but as a measure to focus on myself. Make the black line thinner. Change the content and constant flow back and forth along it because a great deal of what we consume through these black feeding tubes isn’t nourishment, and a diet full of hate and outrage begets hate and outrage.

I’m not saying ignore what you see and hear. I’m saying to give it proper perspective and importance. Do the research if you decide to consume. Seek the truth and facts.

See the beauty, not the lines.