Lately a new trend has emerged named raw-dogging among people who travel long-distance flights.  According to this news report, raw dogging is not some smutty sexual act, but one where travellers eschew all distractions, including sleep, movie-watching, and use of electronic devices.  (Some go one step further and forego blankets, toilet breaks, and even food.)  Instead, they stare at the seat in front of them and watch the GPS plane on their in-flight TV screen.  This rebel act allows raw-doggers the opportunity to take in their surroundings, meditate, and enjoy their journey; some say it even teaches them self-control through patient restraint.  After all, they think, is lack of stimulation all that bad?  Some people find the concept horrifying; it seems to be as strange to them as the moniker ‘raw-dogging’ to name the phenomenon.  But is it that terrible?  Is it such a time-wasting thing to let one’s mind not wander to a device but to give it an actual rest and just fixate on one thing?

When I was a boy growing up in Sydney I enjoyed my own version of ‘raw-dogging’.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I used to catch the train to school back in the days where no-one oggled at mobile electronic devices 24-7.  I used to look out the window and watch the train tracks inter-linking while another train, barreling in the opposite direction, would suddenly whoosh past with a solid slam of air.  When that would happened, I would count the number of carriages that the oncoming train had (did it have 4, 6, or 8 of them?) and smell the fumes of those steel beasts.  At other times I would stare into the distance to see the houses and streets where people lived next to the train lines.  I could do it for hours and not get bored.

Other people did it as well, back then; now almost no one does it.  People have headphones attached to their heads and after spending all day in an office looking at a computer, they spend their remaining hours of leisure looking at more screen, blocking their eyes and ears to reality.  And heaven help you if you should interrupt their well-spent time doing this; do that and you may get a filthy look.

Incidentally, I recently read about Alexander Selkirk (whose commemorative statue is pictured in this picture), was a Scotchman who lived in the 18th century and was believed to have been the inspiration of the character Robinson Crusoe in the book so-named by Daniel Defoe. Marooned on the island of Más a Tierra off the cost of Chile, Selkirk was lived there by himself for 4 years before being rescued by sea captain Woodes Rogers in February 1709.  Upon rescuing Selkirk, Rogers thought him so capable that he quickly appointed him to be a captain of one of his vessels.
Interestingly, Rogers said of Selkirk that “[o]ne may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably, as this man was”. Selkirk’s isolation had tempered him, brought him closer to God, and gave him survival strategies that gave him great capacities.  Upon resuming his life in the UK after his rescue, Selkirk struggled to adapt and could no longer enjoy the creature comforts of home.  He eventually died aged 45 while on a buccaneering expedition.  Yet his experience off the Chilean coast taught him to live without needless distraction.  Those of us raw-doggers in the world are trying to just do the same thing to find out what life is really about and to re-discover what it means to have a soul.  And we can do it without being on a plane by fasting, enjoying time with God, and switching off devices. 

God bless, Nahum.