Hello again, friends.
I don’t know how you’re doing, but for me 2017 seems to be more of 2016, if just ‘SS, DD’. Bills, challenges, parenting, political madness. It’s different in details but seemingly the same level of stress though perhaps the background levels have increased a bit. I’m not going to tell you not to worry–in the words of Christopher Titus, ‘worrying about the rent is HOW the rent gets paid!’
But you can’t let it get to you.
You still have to do the things you know you’re supposed to do. Pay those bills, work for someone (the Corporate ‘person’ or that damned Boss) who seems bent on crushing your soul, manage your schedule, take care of your loved ones, take care of your self both physically and spiritually. 2017 is a number on a calendar, not a thing. Time passes either slowly or quickly depending on how much fun you’re having. We tally off the dragging few minutes of an unpleasant task and the years off the Wheel of Time differently, though. One seems to last forever, while the other sneaks away from us until we look back upon some liminal event in our lives and it appears that years have slid away when we hadn’t noticed.
I interact with (to me) a surprising number of people on various social media. Some of them I haven’t seen in 25+ years. Some I see every day. I don’t consider myself a very social or popular person, and I seem to have a limit on the number of social interactions I can effectively engage upon in a given day. It’s not you–I’m by nature an introvert. This is the way I’m put together, although I have learned coping skills and I actually do prize social interaction for it’s own sake. A beer and a quiet place to read a novel are often as good to me as a party. I know there are people that if they had the opportunity would FB or IM Chat all day long until they fell into a coma, and I know people who would be fine just dealing with family–or no one at all–unless under duress. I fall somewhere in the middle of the ‘normal’ (in the statistical sense) distribution, though towards the right side of the Bell curve in favor of solitude.
Time, for me at least, tends to pass oddly when I’m dealing with people. Time spent chatting or socializing with friends seems like it passes quickly, until I look at the clock and see that my lunch break has purely vanished or that I’ve spent an hour running down old FB posts while waiting on a process to finish. Part of me worries about ‘lost time’, but time spent with friends really isn’t, is it?
Just be careful. Social media is a ‘good thing’ in the world; it connects people who would have otherwise never been in touch with one another. It conquers distance and to a certain extent time. I’ve reconnected, at least in fashion, with a lot of people who were my best friends during our shared military service. However, don’t let the Internet Revolution annihilate the simple pleasure of hanging out with people living in your house, your neighborhood, or your town. Or just having some time to be you, and examine your own thoughts. Listen to the wind. Converse with the rain. Remember who YOU are.
Keep striving, friends.
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