The Tsunami

Week 6

Seven weeks ago I built my foundation. I had even started a garden of mindfulness practices. Animals had begun visiting the land that I had begun cultivating, and I had started feeling purely peaceful. My cell phone would sit inside the house, used for only professional and urgently practical purposes, and I would sit outside; enjoying the air, the quiet, and my Life. I had, for once, really tasted the coffee I was drinking! All of my practice had already begun paying off!

Then, I heard the loudest knock at my door that I had ever heard in my life! Certain members of my inner circle needed to talk; and they needed to talk NOW!

“Where are you, David?”

“David, why aren’t you answering YOUR PHONE!!!”

I stood at the doorway of my soul entirely perplexed at the predicament I was in. Who were these people and what did they actually want with my life in such immediate fashion? Their bodies were all intact, they were healthy. No one had robbed them recently. None of them were even close to self-aware enough to recognize a true internal crises within. What was actually happening here? Why were they beckoning me back to my phone? Didn’t they know I was trying to work on my Self and my mental health?

Or, did it have nothing to do with them and their demands at all. Was it just my addiction?

All at once I raced to it. I raced to my device and sat staring at it for three hours a day for a week. A wave, taller than the Tower of Babel might have been, began forming out of thin air. The tsunami obliterated my progress and all of the mediocre fortifying structures designed to quell its path. I heard the waves, and the screaming, and the rush of water inside my Self. I felt my end, near.

After I had taken plenty of water into my lungs and parts of me had thoroughly drowned and numbed, I put the phone down. I had not only ingested debris-filled water from the storm; but propaganda, biased reporting, celebrity emptiness, violent ideas, likes, dislikes, followers, unfollowers, content, competition, consumerism, capitalism, messaging designed to break me, misogynist imagery, and all of the vapidity and brokenness of the age I found my Self living in and a part of.

I had taken all of the phone calls that were asked of me to take. For the vast majority of the calls (save two), I found my Self attacked, shamed, misunderstood, laughed at, misguided, and made more dumb by small-talk U.S.A. I had been throughly wounded. What was I thinking? Oh right, I wasn’t thinking. That was the problem; That IS the problem.

The wonderful thing about being demolished within without being dead is that one still has the opportunity to try again and try better. I will rebuild. Starting Now.

Has the emptiness of the internet ever broken you?

A.H.N.D.

Book I am reading now — Down Girl by Kate Manne and The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri