Kimberlee K.

A couple months ago, I was listening to Amy’s Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang, with now Oscar winner Ryan Coogler.

He was talking about his film, Sinners, and the importance of seeing movies in theaters.

“What’s dope in the theater,” he said, “is that you can’t pause…So when something’s happening that has you feeling like you’re out of control…you still gotta go with it. [It’s] that feeling of giving yourself over to something that you don’t have the control to pause, rewind or fast forward.”

This immediately struck me, and has stayed with me in the months since the episode.

Because it’s true.

When I’m at home watching a movie, I’m often doing something else at the same time. I like to do the NYT Spelling Bee or open up a coloring app on my iPad. Sometimes I’ll do a cross stitch or a page in my Sticker by Number book.

Midway through, I might remember I wanted to take out the trash, or start a load of laundry, or I’ll have a question pop into my head that I know I can get the answer to if I “quickly” log on to social media.

But when I go to the movie theater, the only thing I’m doing is watching. Even when the movie is breaking my heart and I’m fighting for my life not to openly sob (looking at you, Hamnet) or the special effects are so cool I’m desperate to learn how they did it (looking at you, Project Hail Mary.) Even when I feel my phone vibrate, or I lose track of what time it is, I’m in it and I stay in it until it’s over.

And it might be one of the last true spaces where this exists for me, for many of us.

I think it’s why I make an effort to go to the movies at least once a month. It’s like making intentional time to get outside, or to leave my phone in my room. More and more the pursuit of having this sacred, offline time, time spent only focusing on one thing, is becoming harder to find—or perhaps just harder to commit to.

I constantly feel a pressure—both from outside and within—to be doing. To task stack. To optimize.

When I eat dinner, I will often queue up a YouTube video on my computer and open the NYT games app to do the crossword. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with this—in fact, this often helps me eat slower—where I’ve grown alarmed is the itchy feeling I get when I try to just sit there. To just watch a YouTube video or to just do one of my daily puzzles. It’s like a part of my brain is waving its hand in the air, saying, “what about me?!” Because it’s become so accustomed to being fully on at all times. Fully engaged, fully entertained, fully distracted from the could’s and should’s I’m at times so desperate to escape from.

In so many areas of my life, when I’m feeling bored, overwhelmed, sad, angry, etc., I can log onto social media and hit pause. I can log out of that hard space by logging on to the internet.

But I don’t do that at the movies.

No matter what movie I’m seeing, even if it’s one that doesn’t necessarily have me gripped, I keep my phone in my bag. Because to me, that’s a sacred space. Somehow, amongst all the noise and chaos that might be happening in my own life, I can shut it all off at the movies.

This is where we cue Nicole Kidman’s AMC monologue “heartbreak feels good in a place like this…”

But seriously.

Thinking about all of this has made me wonder if the productivity grind, the constant need for engagement, the noted decrease in our attention spans is making hard feelings harder.

Because heartbreak, grief, loneliness, change, etc., all take time to work through. And everything that’s been advertised to me—everything that’s been offered in each iOS update and new social media feature—promises that nothing has to last very long. I can fast forward through a video if the person is talking too slow or if I just want to skip to the end, and I can swipe (and swipe and swipe) until I find something I want to look at, something that feels curated to me and only me.

So it’s no wonder, really, why my brain becomes so fatigued trying to work through a hard question or slogging season. Because what do you MEAN I have to wait?!!?

And so I’m afraid I’m losing my ability to sit in it.

To not hit pause or fast forward or rewind.

Like Ryan Coogler was saying, the movies offer you that feeling of giving yourself over to something you can’t control, but what about the rest of the world?

I don’t want my attention span to be confined to the 3+ hours I spend in a movie theater each month. I don’t want that to be the only place where I can be patient. I don’t want to continue to cash-in pieces of my perseverance to the someone’s and somethings on my phone. I don’t want to miss the growth and perspective that is being offered to me in the quiet and in the waiting. I don’t want to miss glimpses of humanity, awe, and wonder by giving too many things part of my attention and not enough things all of it.

Sometimes, and more often than we think, we can (and need to) just sit in it. To experience art, family, community, love, nature, heartbreak, grief, and transition one on one. In doing so, we give ourselves the opportunity to reap the full effects of their magic, their peace, their healing, their answers that we otherwise might miss.

I want to give my attention back to the parts of life that technology has been designed to help me avoid. I don’t want to grow incurably afraid of silence, stillness, or boredom.

I don’t want to miss anything, really. I want it all to be sacred.