Phones
It is time now for us to regard phones as items carried. The word once referred to a vocal appliance wired to the wall, but the word has had its different meaning for nearly two decades now, referring of course to our personal digital devices. It is time for us to understand these phones as objects: not new things, but mundane things—physical items inherent to the physical world our spirits are passing through.
Objects. Like rocks, loaves of bread, spiral notebooks, jars of paint. Objects—whereas we are souls.
One affects the other. If your soul made a journey, your body would also travel the distance. And if your body was laden with rocks on this journey (imagine you carried a pack of stones), then your soul would also be impaired. The journey would be harder and slower for body and soul alike because of the burden.
Similarly, if your soul was given a moment—time for gathering in and time in which to breathe—then your body with all its trappings and all it carries would be there, too. Yet in your purse or pocket is a phone, so the soul is potentially impaired in this other way as well, very different from the rock. That is, the moment prone to being broken—either by the pull to abandon it for a message coming in, or by the urge to discard it by casting it out, relinquishing the soulfulness of the moment by preserving it or communicating it for observers far away.
Objects. Like rocks. Just physical things.
But also unlike rocks in the measure of their effects....
A rock carried is physically heavy, but soulfully it can be light. A phone is almost precisely the opposite.
[More about body, soul, and spirit]