If William Wordsworth Had an iPhone

“The world is too much with us.”

William Wordsworth wrote those words almost 220 years ago. He lived in England's Lake District during the Industrial Revolution, so yeah, he had a little bit to complain about. His beautiful home was being ravaged as factories found new ways to produce goods. Trees fell, and smokestacks belching noise and smoke rose up like greedy monsters. Products that had once been made by hand in quiet rural villages were suddenly being churned out in mills. Noise. Pollution. Greed.

The first line of that poem popped into my head the other day while I was pondering the current state of the world.

Each of us carries a small device in our hands every day that literally puts the world at our fingertips—well, our thumbtips at least. The things that horrified Wordsworth have become such an ordinary part of our history that most of us never gave them a second thought. Half the men in my family worked in a paper mill. Those factories were as normal to us as the pristine countryside had been to him.

Now we have the digital age. Real-time events from anywhere in the world. Artificial intelligence that can calculate and create in milliseconds what it takes our human brains hours, days, months, or even entire lifetimes to process.

Then I had a funny thought.

What would ol' William think if he could see the world today?

If a railroad expansion and a bobbin factory sent his head spinning, what would he think if I suddenly popped up beside him holding my cell phone?

"Hey, Billy, look at this. I can pull up everything you've ever written right here on this little thing in my hand in about three seconds. I can even show you a copy of your portrait. We could call a friend on the other side of the earth and talk to them this very minute. Heck, we could video chat with them! You could see their face on this little screen, and they could see yours."

"And look! There's even this thing called DoorDash. We can order your favorite meal. Somebody will cook it, another person will hop in their buggy, and they'll bring it right here to you!"

(Assuming, of course, DoorDash operates in the Lake District... but you get my point.)

The first thing I did this morning before I even got out of bed was grab my phone and check my email. I looked for new orders in my Etsy and eBay shops. I popped over to Facebook to see what my neighbor had for breakfast and watched a baby goat bouncing around like a rabbit.

The world is too much with us indeed.

I have a feeling Mr. Wordsworth would've promptly had me carted off and charged with witchcraft, and honestly... who could blame him?

But seriously, the world is too much with us.

The good and the bad. The beautiful and the shocking. Sadly, it's usually the horrific and shocking that rises to the top of our news feeds. I was a journalism major, and one of the first things you learn is the old newsroom saying: "If it bleeds, it leads."

There are a lot of leads in the world today.

I'm not going to wander off into a discussion about the state of journalism or the effects of social media on society. You already know all of that.

What I will say is this:

Beauty still exists.

There is still beauty to be found—we've just gotten so accustomed to looking for it "out there." We search for it inside that little glowing device in our hands.

But when we stop for just a moment... when we slow down a little, take a deep breath, and actually look around... we discover that beauty has been patiently waiting for us all along.

The way the morning sunlight gently warms the kitchen floor.

A perfect rosebud blooming beside the front door.

The sound of birds arguing over breakfast while the coffee brews.

Yes, the world is too much with us.

But we can choose, if only for a moment, to look up.

Look around.

We might be surprised by what we find right there in our own backyard.