I often wonder what it must have been like to live without the TV, internet, cell phones, and social media. Their world was limited to their own families, friends, neighborhoods, and towns. Reading news of events happening in far off places in the world must have felt like some kind of alternate reality and not their own backyard.
The bottom line for me today is that I don’t think we were meant to process this much information EVERY DAY. Maybe we will adapt and our coping mechanisms will become much stronger but I don’t think our bodies have caught up. I don’t think our minds and our biological responses to stress have risen to the demands that we place them under. There is just so much emotion. I open up my news feed to see not only terrorist attacks on foreign soil, but a small boy that drown in a swimming pool in my neighborhood, the raw details of a friend who is battling a rare terminal lung disease, and an update about a friend’s brother who died of an overdose leaving behind a wife and seven children. Combine this with its antidote, the staged images or small moments, frozen in time, of what we assume is the “real life” of others. We are all too familiar with the damage that can be done when we start to compare the supposed lives of others, carefully displayed, to our own authentic reality.
We are all too busy. We need a break. But not the kind of break you get from an expensive, exotic vacation like the one that showed up on your Instagram feed. The kind of break you can only get from waking up in the morning to take a walk outside, sitting down to a nice homemade meal with your family at you own dinner table, reading with your kids, or have a laissez-faire conversation with your spouse; one that isn’t about finances or stress or responsibilities.
I need boundaries. I don’t want to burry my head in the sand, but perhaps I need to be a bit more judicious about when I force myself to process so much heartache, and so much joy, and sadness, and excitement, and everything in-between. Certainly not right when I wake up or right before I go to bed, and especially not when I am in the throes of my own personal tragedy, waiting for test results at a doctor’s office, or fighting with a loved one. I need to be mindful of the state of my own spirit. It is abusive to expect myself to manage the trials of everyone else in the world while trying to manage the ones within my own walls. We must reach out and help where we can but why mindlessly subject ourselves to the personal narrative of every tragedy that surrounds us when there is often nothing that can be done? We need to choose to turn it off and look at what is right in front of us, figure out what mark we can make on the day with the people we share our lives with. Then, if and when we find ourselves staring in the face of our own personal tragedy we will not have regrets because we truly lived and chose to be present while we could.
I see you France, I see you Syria, I see you friend who is battling cancer, I see you neighbor who has lost their son. You are in my prayers and in my heart. I will help and lift where I can; but, I will not let my despair for you and the acute vulnerability of the thought “what if” keep me from living today.
