technology

Technology. I’m torn. Some days, I think it is the most helpful thing; others, I want rid of it entirely.

I aspire to the simple life. These days, I wonder if that’s even possible. A while back, I got rid of my smart phone & tried my best to pare down to some form of simplicity. I did a lot of knitting those months (I really do just love to knit, though).

One day, I had this odd realization that technology may actually be in our favor. Working in marketing in the tech industry often has me convinced that it’s all just business and economy. However, with all of the talk of “cloud” and “connected devices,” I’ve started embracing it all. When I come home, all of my devices really are connected. I can access my photos or documents from anywhere (or at least I would if I knew how to do it right; I’m still working on it). It’s actually magical: I can find simplicity in having this easy, unified life.

Shelves & shelves of books (or in my case magazines) can live on a single device. While I adore the comfort of books & have yet to fully adopt the Kindle, I appreciate the archiving of Poets & Writers and The Atlantic; I can search my notes & highlights & back-issues. Magic.

I can store & organize all of my writing in a single ½” thick device rather than wasted trees. I can look up anything from anywhere using internet on my phone.

Am I the only person who is still amazed by this? We have so easily adopted into the tech culture that we tend to forget how insane it really is.

Yet I still resist: for fear of losing what I probably never had having grown up in a world where the internet always existed in some form. I prefer to ask someone a question rather than “Google” it. I prefer to, of course, read a book in-hand rather than press a button to get to the next page. I prefer to find my way by getting lost rather than listening to a mechanical voice tell me the “convenient” way. And I am torn between typing up writing & writing by hand.

Think about the technology in your life. Is it a nuisance or a God-send? Does it simplify your life or make it more complicated?

I’m constantly seeking balance; to embrace where it actually helps & to push away where it shuts off human contact and interferes with life experience. Here’s to typing away & posting words from my fingertips to the internet.

counting blessings: a walk

Sometimes the adult life catches me by surprise: the simplest things. Today is Friday, & I have no plans. As I walked Pickle around the block, on the way home from the dog park—our usual route—I realized what a free evening really means.

We reached the corner a block away from the apartment. To my right, the sound whispered dusk’s light up the street, calling me there. To my left, home beckoned me in. The rest of the weekend promised free time. What should I do? Where should I go?

Freedom suddenly struck me as a real thing; I could do anything, anytime: no questions asked. I could just keep walking; I could go in & read a whole book. I could just stay in bed. For now, my only purpose is to be.

I do not need to ask permission. I am not a slave to time. There are no restrictions. Do you feel it? How liberating! We are blessed to walk the streets & lie in bed & just be.

solitude

A few years ago, I thought I wanted to be with someone, but his answer was no. I know that’s common, but his reason stuck with me, one word: solitude. It took a few minutes to find that word, but when he did, he knew that was it. Solitude. As a generally extroverted person, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone want to be alone?

It’s taken me until recently to understand.

We were on a hike, some friends & me, and as usual, I lagged behind. About six miles in (the tail end of a loop trail), I realized that I didn’t mind hanging back. I soaked in the shade of the Redwoods and breathed in the green. I could see no one ahead of me on the trail, no one behind. With the quiet of the woods around me, I kept going at my pace. To me, hikes aren’t the time for timing to beat a personal best.

After being consumed by the regular chaos of city living, I realized that one moment was what I longed for: to be truly alone. (I admit, it was weird at first to hike without my dog, but honestly, do you know what it feels like to be truly alone?)

Sometimes it’s easy to feel alone when surrounded by people. In the city, you can walk up the street & not talk to anyone (rarely, albeit) and feel like you are the only person alive—the rest of the passersby are part of the surroundings. Have you felt that?

I just wasted about twenty minutes trying to find a single word, but it’s a word that means the realization that every person around you is simultaneously leading their own life with their own emotions, feelings, needs, beliefs. The notion crossed my mind occasionally over the years, but my first memory of it was at a gas station in Utah. It was my biggest solo trip. The man at the pump across from me had deep lines in his face, though he could not have been more than fifty. It suddenly occurred to me that this man had lived 40+ years before this one moment of our lives crossing. Have you ever thought this about your co-workers? Your boss? I think about it at work the most: all of these acquaintances, but we are all human, at our core.

It’s funny to think that we are different. We live off our experiences and become so indulged in our own lives that it’s easy to forget that everyone else’s lives are just as complex. They go to bed at night. They get hungry. They feel sad. Sometimes remembering this is the only way living on the other side of the country from my family makes sense. Life does not stop in Pennsylvania just because I am out here. That’s why it’s always different when I go back; that’s why people call with news: life is still moving, even when I am not there to witness it.

Sometimes the complexity feels like too much. Sometimes I wish it would slow down (how many times have I wished it would go faster?). Sometimes I wish I could go back. But the pace is constant, along with change and intricacy.

I think that’s why we all need moments to be alone. This is my season of understanding solitude.

Solitude can often be confused with prolonged singleness. I’ve mistaken it myself, wondered why I am single, why that person chose to be single. There is a difference. There is a tiny knowing somewhere that solitude is a choice, that even when the opportunity to not be single presents itself, the direction to take is apparent: solitude.

That is where I am. While there are moments of doubting that, there are more reassurances that this is where I am supposed to be. I am grateful to live alone (with the company of my pets).

As I flip through pages of Rilke on solitude in Letters to a Younger Poet, I realize this topic is just beginning. I’ll leave you with these excerpts from Rilke:

“There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy…But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours- that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.”

and

“And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground. People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult. All living things do this, everything in nature grows & defends itself according to its kind and is a distinct creature from out of its own resources, strives to be so at any cost and in the face of all resistance. We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it. To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength, concerted on their solitary, fearful, upward beating hearts, they have to learn to love.”

write on: words on notes

If you couldn’t tell by my sudden on-burst of multiple blogs & poems, I’m a bit behind on writing. So much that it pains me, and I am finally losing sleep over it: sleep time spent writing. It’s necessary.

The notes keep piling up. It starts with a Post-It or a few lines on my phone. It doesn’t seem like much until they’re everywhere. I reached a breaking point when an offering envelope from my sister’s church fell out of my pocket; it was empty save for a few lines written across the back. Or again when I reached into my bag for a pen and pulled out three crinkled Post-Its with dirt coating their sticky backs and the smeared writing barely legible.

The tension builds every day because I know that the words are there, but they are not being captured. Every once in a while, I find peace in the unwritten: let them go; they were not meant to stay. Most of the time, this is not the case. I’m still fretting over the loss of recordings I made on a hike. I always had the intent of listening to them to write down the poems and lines, but when I got a new computer at work, the recordings broke. The words are gone. I have to save the smudged Post-Its before it’s too late.

I am always trying to keep up, even if that just means moving the notes to my official “notebook” instead of loose words floating around my possessions, waiting to be lost. Just when I think I’ve covered them all, or at least found them a temporary home before expanding on their ideas, I find more: a sun-stained page on the windowsill, a few notes jotted in the corner of the church bulletin. The thoughts don’t stop, so even while I am behind in recording them, new ideas or realizations are rushing in, begging to be written down.

I think of Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: "So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse - in which there are actual note pads, let alone index cards- I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it." Reading that may have been the start of my obsession with notes. But then there is the encouragement: "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table, close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

So here’s to the forgotten words: to those lost in my mind, on the street, in cyberspace. And here’s to “keeping up”: to writing through what’s there, to recognizing that, even with words gone, there is no shortage of material. Here’s to the muses: to continuing to write despite exhaustion, emptiness, and busyness, to finding motivation when the words hide or shrink or prolonged seasons without writing try to convince me the writing life is over.

Write on, friends, note by note. 

end of day

“The sun rises, & the sun goes down, & it hastens to the place where it rises.” – Ecclesiastes 1:5

When I get into bed each night, the lists try to gobble me up—all of the things I didn’t do; all of the new things to do tomorrow. Like counting sheep, I track on my fingers what I didn’t write down, what I must remember, what has to get done. When I wake up, I do the same. Lists have become my prayers, and they empty me.

When I really do pray, it feels empty—my heart & mind consumed by the jumble of shit yet to happen; it weighs on me & steals my thoughts. I usually stop praying mid-sentence & with, “That’s all I have” or “I just can’t talk anymore”.

Why am I wordless when it comes to God, yet the words do not stop within me?

It’s not just God—I’ve been void of words in general. It has taken a struggling force to get myself to write these days. I feel the pull, yet I cannot get the words out. They are in my head, but they refuse to touch the page.

I wonder if people had so much on their minds when they called it a night in biblical times. I also think of the Amish: rising & lying down with the sun. Are they all so anxious to get to bed and disappear for a while? Does the unending to-do list weigh on them like the hope of one day getting it all done?

I like to imagine that days came to a peaceful close for them: what’s done is done.

Even as a child, my nighttime mind was restless. I’ve probably spent more time tossing & turning over thoughts than I have actually sleeping in my bed—the words, the work, the uncertainty are the single pea under my mattress. All of the “but I didn’t do”s and the “I never got around to”s make my whole self restless.

Yet we are called to work until we return to dust. What are the fruits of my labor?

“Even in the night, his heart does not rest.” – Ecclesiastes 2:23

Literally & figuratively, the heart does not rest, even at night. We are filled. With what? Data, words, questions, doubts, love, empathy, emotion, plans. All of the worry and wonder feels more real once time is up at end of day.

Yet the sun hastens to return, and the lists and concerns will be waiting, & as best said by the Weepies: the world spins madly on.