All that death and resurrection.

Good Friday

I decided to embrace that religious tradition of abandoning something for the Lenten season of fasting. Before you get excited, upset or proud of me in any fashion, I abandoned Instagram (essentially) and Dating Apps. Two things that haven't done much for me over the last few months than stir all my insecurity into a weighted blanket that mostly just weighs me down.

Out for a walk, and this tree looked like it was riddled with faces

It's a familiar rant for me, and an academic subject of inquiry as I've gone through school thus far (a paper on social media and self-perception, a research proposal on boredom and creativity) with the usual complaints.

SOCIAL MEDIA is killing our attention, exploiting our data and stealing our souls. I remain unimpressed. I remain skeptical. But I also realize that the traditional suggestion, Thoreau-like, of abandoning all technology and becoming one with the birds and the trees, is not an entirely helpful suggestion either. Mostly because the forest and the wildlife perhaps, could use being left quite alone as far as my presence is concerned.

That and the reality is that we live in a world that is hyper-interconnected. We live in a world where the tools of connectivity and self-expression are unhelpfully bound up with a lot of capitalistic exchange, and mostly (mostly) just so much noise noise noise. That, perhaps, is the thing that I dislike the most.

Most of us use these tools because they provide us with a certain degree of nourishment. Connection and updates from farthes flung friends and families, a space to creatively highlight our lives and their passing. It's fun. I do it. I like to find beautiful things to photograph (in my own sillie way) and write (often wordy) descriptions of what it all might mean.

I also, at least for myself, don't know what it means to be somehow fully mindful or present in my life. I don't know if we can exist free of the world's clutter entirely. And perhaps, I might suggest, we're experiencing it all much more oppressively because we are also trying to resist it or lash out at it.

I'm sure if I were meditating more, I'd have some meaningful metaphor. Something like becoming still and letting the river flow past you instead of pretending you are flowing through the river.

Let the damned thing roar, I do suppose.

"Went for a walk in the woods/the birds were singing, you said 'It's nature's ringtone"'

Sometimes the problem with lenten-style fasting is this idea that if you somehow remove something, say something that has been distracting or disturbing your peace, pulling you away from a more sacred sense of center, is that you often create a kind of vacuum in its absence.

Like a big ole boulder pulled out of the river's flow, it will initially suck dirt and muck into its place.

So too, I deactivate my Instagram and I find I'm scrolling on Fakebook (the sillier and more vapid of its cousins)... or now Google builds into my phone a kind of headline scroll on my main page that just recently switched from a helpful 10-15 headline before it stops to that dreaded monster.. the INFINITE SCROLL! (aren't we all searching, still, for the infinite?).

Scrolling is the fidget toy of the digital era.

I wanted to begin posting here more, and on there less. Yet I'm certain only a handful of "my people" will read me here, though also, perhaps, some of you strangers (make yourself at home!).

It doesn't come with the connect-ed-ness that social media suggests.

If only there was some other, better way. But there only somewhat is, and mostly isn't.

So on Sunday I'll be back baby, like Jesus himself, roll away the stone and we'll be bustin' out. He with resurrection and tidings of uncomfortable joy, me with more pictures of trees.

In some ways, the greater need, beneath the distracted fidget, is the need for rest. I was talking recently with friends about the challenge of finishing my undergrad and its full-day allotment of to-dos. I wake up on the first day when I can quite acceptably do nothing, and I feel this drive to jump hurriedly into accomplishment. I've programmed productivity into myself... though it isn't so much productivity as in a nourishing drive to build or to accomplish or to self discover, instead it is this unease, this guilt that at my stage in "adulting" there must be something I should be doing that would be more/most productive with my time. Like some other voice inside of me is preemptively disappointed in how little I will do with the day.

Notes for my therapist, I'm sure. (I can hear you saying already, what would she say about that kind of thinking??)

Until such time. There is that suggestion that instead of taking away something that you are too indulgent in, or that you should refrain from, instead perhaps add something that would be particularly meaningful. Commit not to abandoning social media (a thing that is clumsy and not entirely tenable) but instead commit to writing a letter to an old friend each week. Attempt to name the needs you're trying and failing to meet in the grip of "media" and come up with a way to specifically meet that need in a way that does more good than harm.

It's all a bit idealistic, I know. So I'll start slow. I'll start here.

Hello ole friend, how are you these days?