Facebook asks the question "What's on your mind?" and to that the entire world gleefully jumps up and says "I've been dying to tell you!", which is one of the reasons I'm hardly ever on Facebook, even though I post on Facebook.
You see, I would like a little privacy. Seems a contradiction, no? For by posting on Facebook I'm hardly a private person.
What I am implying, though, is that I don't want to have my mind invaded by hundreds of millions of viewpoints on every subject imaginable. I don't want my head filled with images and words. Quickly gets to the point where ya can't think, ya know?
But, times being what they are, it's all going that way anyway so I occasionally jump in with my two cents worth, and maybe on a slow news day will actually glance at Facebook and other social media some just to see what's going on.
Never is the social media lake still, with nary a ripple. Always there are many very important events/causes presented in such a way that they grab attention, provoke, titillate, shock, expose, magnetize, hypnotize, etc, etc.
Non-attachment in such an environment is virtually impossible so I choose to now and again turn away from the blare and glare of the new TV and (OMG) just be.
Is that even allowed anymore?
Food For The Soul
Natalia Figueredo- Unsplash.com
There is a me still left, I think I can feel it. It hasn't been absorbed into the gestalt of Facebook, lost in a swirling mass of images, buried under tons of fresh content, here for a moment and then gone (I just checked- yeah, I'm still here. My physicality has been verified by sight and touch).
Whew. Thought I was a goner, a data point, byte, metric, hit, click.
Then, pulling back even further, I checked in and found to my relief that yes, I can still think for myself- I think! But I have to be careful that I don't overly indulge on the 'Feeds' or else I'll have an 'Internet Moment' like "What was I writing about here? I forgot!" (which I just did!). The length of my attention span can at times be milliseconds.
Fortunately just then a text message chime startled me- I had the volume on too high- and I reached for my phone, muted it, closed the lid on my tablet, and shut down my desktop computer. "Ahh....." I sighed, as the calm, familiar, and peaceful surroundings of my open-windowed living room enveloped me. "Blissful silence, distraction free space! Absolutely nothing happening!".
Yeah, I'll get back to the Feed when it feels right but at the moment nothing feeds me better than being Old School offline, listening to the birds and the wind.