Patricia Pearson is a Toronto-based writer and winner of two National Magazine Awards, a National Author's Award, and the Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime of 1997.

The other day I was on the streetcar at rush hour, trying to practise mindfulness techniques in order to keep my claustrophobia at bay.

I don't know if you're familiar with mindfulness guru Jon Kabbat-Zinn's famed adage "Wherever you go, there you are," but the basic idea is to calm yourself by staying attuned to the moment.

Feeeeel your breath go in and out. Innn and ouuut. Taaaste the seeds of the banana in your mouth. Saaaaavour each bite. Smeeeeell the aroma of coffee from the cup you are carrying. Listen to the world. Can you hear the breeze? The birds? Your breathing?

No, but as it turned out I could hear the woman beside me bellow into her Nokia: "OH MY GOD, MARCUS TOOK A HUGE DUMP IN HIS DIAPER TODAY! I mean," she insisted, to her husband or her mother or the voices in her own psychotic head, "it was gi-normous. It was like, I dunno, full-body smearing. Like, all over his back."

I gamely carried on with my stress reduction exercise while she elaborated with further details. Lisssten to the sounds of the world. Feeeel your breath. Piiiiic-ture infant skin covered in fecal matter.

Then I went home and asked my husband to buy me a cellphone jammer for Christmas.

'There are thousands of mobile owners who manage to refrain from the behavioural equivalent of farting in the library.'

'The law is an ass'

I don't care if they're illegal in Canada. The law is an ass. I am getting way too much information from my fellow citizens — none of whom appear to even notice that I exist, much less that I have functioning ears.

(Ironic, that we are jarred into paying attention to shouted half-conversations as much by their sonic unfamiliarity from our evolutionary perspective as by our desire to feel included and attuned. For both reasons we find ourselves lured toward indifferent boors.)

Hurrah for these jamming devices, which can knock out wireless service within a nine-metre diameter of the pocket in which you — the weird dissident peeping up on behalf of public decorum — have slyly and gingerly placed one.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, Americans are beginning to import the jammers from Europe in mounting numbers, despite their illegality, because they work so much more effectively than daring to say "please." As in: "Turn off your cellphones, please," or "please switch off your mobile devices," or "kindly lower the pitch of your voice before I rip that BlackBerry from your hand and sell it on eBay."

One of the Americans who'd purchased a jammer told the Times he was a therapist who could not get his patients to stop taking calls in the middle of group sessions. I'd like to say "shocking," but hardly.

There is something fundamentally upside down about people's perception of public space when they're on cellphones. It is difficult, sometimes, to even penetrate their consciousness.

Counter-culture

I was once standing on the curb of a busy downtown street waiting for the light to change, along with a gaggle of other pedestrians. A teenaged girl engrossed in conversation on her phone obliviously stepped into the traffic and when a startled driver braked hard and honked at her, she glanced over her shoulder and snapped: "Do you mind, I'm on the phone."

This actually had the effect of making the rest of us, who were otherwise paying little attention to one another, collectively burst out laughing. Unexpectedly, it became a shared moment in the here and now, a sense of being mutually present that is precisely the objective of the mindfulness movement.

Most entrepreneurs in the wireless world appear to be unaware that there is a counter-culture — an embattled resistance — in their midst.

Of cellphone jammers, a spokesperson for Verizon Wireless protested to the Times that: "It's counterintuitive that when the demand is clear and strong from wireless consumers for improved cell coverage, that these kinds of devices are finding a market."

Well, no, actually, it's not.

There is nothing counterintuitive about wanting "improved cell coverage," and yet at the same time wishing to engage the world with a modicum of graciousness.

There are thousands of mobile owners who manage to refrain from the behavioural equivalent of farting in the library. Having sufficient confidence that your listener can hear you, so that you don't have to bark into the air like a demented spaniel, has nothing to do with answering your phone in the first instance, in the midst of group therapy. You can choose to have good manners or not.

Fight over public space

The current impasse actually reminds me of the push-back against smokers in the late 1980s, when nonsmokers finally broke their collective silence and decided that it was not okay to fire up a Player's Light in the elevator.

It was a fight over the uses and abuses of public space that inevitably turned into a brawl, and then a rout. One side apparently needed total victory, even though a partial victory — a roll-back toward good manners — was all that was needed.

So, it will be interesting to see what happens with cellphones. For the time being, the only solution — short of the jammer — is to wear an iPod. That way, the cellphone user can be blind and you get to be deaf.

This won't do a great deal for mindfulness, but I'd rather be hyper-attuned to beautiful music than to reports on the bowel movements of one small Torontonian named Marcus.

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