#12 Searching …
A Short Story
“What happened?” Lots of people have been asking me recently. “Why aren’t you posting as much?”
The answer: I get overcome with unnecessarily existential overthinking, throw away whatever I was planning on sharing because it’s “missing the point” (what the point is, I’m never sure). I lie in bed, cursing myself for my inability to stop thinking about it all and for being lazy. Then, inevitably, I pour a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, put on an episode of HBO’s Girls and call it a day.
This week, I decided to poke a little fun at folks like me because, ya know, it’s not all that serious.
Enjoy.
Searching …
For millennia Man has searched for meaning. For decades I have, too.
My resume is overrun with meaningful such pursuits. I’ve climbed colossal mountains on every major continent. I’ve walked many miles, days without seeing another soul. I’ve lived in remote villages, bathing in a bucket, eating from the palm of the earth, hours from societal or electrical current. I’ve lived in the most densely populated neighborhood in the most densely populated city in the world, all my possessions collected in a chicken-coop-turned-bunk-bed, 24 of us to a room, cooking rice, negotiating transactions, birthing children, inches apart. I’ve waited tables for political refugees on asylum, bounced at a biker bar, carried golf clubs for billionaires, and scooped sacred shit from ancient Greek latrines. I’ve run with the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and trekked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I’ve bathed in the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ganges, the Mekong and the Mississippi. I’ve read Plato & Socrates, Confucius & Carnegie; Dante, Dickens, Machiavelli and Marx. I’ve smoked, snorted, swallowed, shot up, and sneezed out every form of altered-consciousness that prehistoric wisdom and modern science have to offer. I’ve been ascetic, fasting for weeks at a time. I’ve gotten food poisoning in six different languages. I’ve sat on a mat for days, months at a time, meditating, praying, pondering, questioning, querying in search of meaning, reason, God, answers—something. Still, I found none.
Until 3:17am this morning, on r/enlightenment.
Doing what any rational person does, restless, mulling mortality, purpose, ethics in the wee small hours of the morning, I typed “consequences better to always tell truth or sometimes lie” into Safari. Unhappy with initial results, I refined my search, appending “philosophy/religion/science” to the query, scrolled past the academic journals and online encyclopedias I’ve read innumerable times before, past the usual clickbait Buzzfeed, Oprah and Christian Science Monitor articles, and found the Answers.com page that linked to the sub-Reddit, r/enlightenment, where there was this old George Harrison song, “The Inner Light” (Capitol/Apple Records, 1969).
Funny, how often we search far and wide, answers persistently eluding, outstretching our desperate grasp, only to find them, unsuspectingly, in the most obvious of places—Answers.com, for example.
After listening to “The Inner Light”, I finally understand. I get it.
I feel a high I’ve never known. Answers, meaning, truth unlocked. Everything—it’s all clicking. Brain, body, spirit collectively firing on all cylinders.
I get it. I feel like Neo after unlocking the code to The Matrix. I have achieved unlimited power-ups in this video game called Life. And I want to share it with you, World. I want to shout it from the top of your proverbial mountaintops (including the few I have yet to climb).
The song’s message is quite simple: the answer is within. There is no peak you can ascend, no culture to immerse, no spiritual conquest to surmount. All things on Earth, as Harrison says, all things in heaven, in fact, can be found without going outside, without even looking out of your window.
I’m no Beatles snob—I’m more of a Stones guy, personally—but I do know the Fab Four had all types of funky, trippy, fantastical, pixie-dust-type songs. I never knew they delved into sci-fi, though. "The Inner Light”, as you know if you’ve listened, is obviously about the new iPhone 13. And that’s remarkable because—I did some more searching—Harrison actually died in 2001, a month after the first iPod came out. Even if he had tried the first-gen iPod before passing, what was it compared to today’s masterpiece? The first iPod couldn’t even open a web browser and had—what? 5-gigs of storage? A rock compared to iPhone 13’s impressive 512-GB storage (plus iCloud to boot), not to mention the 6.1” Super Retina XDR display and lightning-fast A15 chip for conjuring up all your desires and needs in fractions of a second—in superior high definition. But here Harrison is, in 1969, on the B-side of “Lady Madonna”, clearly singing about the newest phenomenon in the iPhone legacy. Impressive, Bradbury-level sci-fi.
I know what you’re thinking: iPhone 13? He could easily be talking about an older model or a Macbook or PC—heck, even an Android. You’re probably right. I mean, that line about not having to look out of your “window” to know “heaven”? Probably a Microsoft Windows reference, right? And, I must confess, Windows was pretty great—that is, until the iPhone came along. Nowadays, it’s rare you find anyone on Windows and for good reason: it’s a paltry system compared to MacOS 12.0 Monterrey or iOS 15.5. We can chock this whole “windows” debacle up to poetic license, because there’s no way anyone—even someone as prescient as Harrison—could have foreseen the actual heaven that is iCloud. But I digress…
Now, with the heavenly convenience of iCloud and the limitless dexterity of the App Store on the revolutionary iPhone 13, I get Everything with a few taps or swipes of my finger. All my favorite Beatles (or Stones) songs on Apple Music; my photos and documents synched to all my devices, present and future; to-the-second breaking news; investigative, expository journalism (via Apple News); live footage from a protest outside the Supreme Court; messages from my boss about that presentation he wanted me to prepare; thousands of gender-reveal fails; podcasts, glorious podcasts; the XL bottle of Pepto Bismol and toilet-bowl cleaner I need to order off Amazon after experimenting with the “culture” of 2-week-old yogurt; my tax filings; the Latch camera feed of my front door, which is currently showing two feral cats either play-wrestling or…; seven incoming calls from my boss I decline; a tweet about rising gas prices, another about rising temperatures/ocean levels; a new episode of that new Star Wars series; surrealistic photos my ex took on her recent trip to see The Northern Lights with her new fiancée, that jerk, Jim, who is (my iPhone 13 found out) some lowly mid-level marketing manager at Yelp, with a Bachelor’s from Indiana but originally from Michigan; an app for reading 700-page books in 15 minutes; a promo code from an influencer for 15% off new shoes for my Peloton; a message from my boss: “wtf? i see ur online. pick up NOW!”; that girl I met at a party 6 years ago just got a new pupper and ahhhh she’s so gah-dang cute! It’s all there. I get it. All of it. Everything but the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, which is only playing in theaters at the moment, but should be out shortly on Apple TV+. Everything (else) a few swipes or taps away. All of it, “Under My Thumb”, as The Stones song I listen to on my Apple AirPods goes.
Yes, with the modern-day Swiss Army Knife / Renaissance Man that is iPhone 13, I can rest easy.
Now I know I don’t need to book a ski trip to the Alps or a canoe trip down the Amazon or climb Mount Kilimanjaro for a third time. I don’t need to make the pilgrimage to Agra, or go to Sunday mass, or for a run in the park, or to my bi-weekly acupuncture/cupping appointment, or to the local bookstore to finally pick up Eat, Pray, Love, or respond to my boss, or eat any more 2-week-old yogurt sitting in the fridge. I’ll just YouTube, Task Rabbit, or Postmate whatever spiritual craving that arises, instead.
And so can you, on the all-new iPhone 13.
Now you, too, can rest easy, lying in your bed, under the covers, blackout curtains drawn, avoiding the persistent summer sun and the toilet for the sixth time today, and basque in the mellow glow of The Inner Light.
Yes, we can all rest easy, knowing that all of it lies within—the new iPhone 13, that is.
This article is part of a Paid Partnership in collaboration with Apple (Records and Computers)
