Sometimes,
it feels as if I’ve been sucked into a vortex – like there is a tornado
whirling around me and I want to step outside of its energy field but I can’t
seem to do it. That’s a lie, of
course. I CAN do it, but instead I’ve
allowed the energy to suck me in. The
energy field is habit, bad habits. I’ve been at war with my electronic devices
as I’ve fallen into the black hole we call the internet. I am seriously contemplating starting a
support group – IJA: Internet Junkies Anonymous.
The other day, I read (skimmed) an article about how just having a smart phone close by interferes with your brain’s ability to concentrate. I get it. Nothing can hijacked me faster than having internet access. At traffic lights, while awaiting the green light, I check my Facebook feed. I check my email. I had to turn off notifications so my phone doesn’t ding at me all day long. When I’m included in a group text, I invariably have to “mute” the conversation otherwise I’m sucked into the chatter.
The
world is at my fingertips when I am online and there is so much good stuff out
there. I LOVE being educated. I LOVE learning new things and so much of it
is fascinating. I was reading the other
day about how the Dutch, who are very accustomed to dealing with rising sea
levels, are building reservoirs rather than walls. They “give
back to the rivers some of what we had taken.” Run into it. Don’t resist what is, work with
it.
I will
never manage to read all that I want to read, learn all the things I want to
learn, or write all that I yearn to write. And as much as I romanticize unplugging,
the truth is that much of what I need to do each day requires being
online. I have prayers to publish, A
Course in Miracles lessons to do, bills to pay, houses to sell and don’t
get me started on all the books I need to download from the library!
I need
to take a cue from the Dutch – run into it.
But how do I do that without being sucked in? I find myself constantly tempted by the
allure of social media, email, and just plain doing my job (which requires
looking up information a good part of the time). Unplugging is not an option and it’s erroneous
to believe that disconnecting from the internet will solve my problems. My problem is not the internet. My problem is believing the answer to my
problems is “out there.” It’s a self-discipline problem. It’s a habit (neuros that fire together, fire
together) problem. It’s the reason most alcoholics
can’t take one drink without tumbling all the way down the hill. It’s why drug addicts shouldn’t dabble in
occasional lines of coke. When I find myself being sucked into the vortex, it’s
not helpful to think that I can control myself.
That’s a lie of the ego.
I’m in
my sixties. I am in the second half of
my life and every day that I waste is a day I won’t get back.
Everything
is in divine right order. I remind
myself of this daily as I bump into situations that my mind tells me “should”
be different. In reality, resisting “what
is” is the root impetus for escape, and urge to escape is the unwillingness to
be present to life on life’s terms. That
doesn’t mean I continue behaving in ways that arouse guilt or shame, but it
does mean I forgive myself for the past.
I can’t invent a time machine and go back and reclaim the wasted days,
but I can be gentle with myself for disappointing myself.
It seems
like I should have learned this by now, but apparently, I am still learning
it.
This
morning, as I lay in bed reading myself back to sleep, I read Thich Naht Hanh’s
Cultivating
the Mind of Love and realized that the core of my focus was askew. I
was thinking that I needed to fix myself, forgetting that the “self” is comprised
on many “nonself” elements. As John Muir
said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to everything else in the Universe.” I preach no separation, but act
as if I’m disconnected from whatever I find happening when my assessment of
it is less than pleasing.
What I found in those wee morning hours was wholeness. Hanh’s says, “The idea that man can do whatever he wants at the expense of non-man elements is an ignorant and dangerous notion.” We take care of the earth and each other and ourselves because we are all connected and what happens to anyone echoes out to affect everyone. He says, “We have to vow to practice for everyone, not just for ourselves. We practice for the tress, the animals, the rocks, and the water. We practice for living being with form and living being without form, for living beings with perceptions and living being without perceptions. We vow to bring all these being to the shore of liberation. And yet, when we have brought all of them to the shore of liberation, we realize that no being at all has been brought to the shore of liberation. This is the spirit of Mahayana Buddhism.”
In our ACIM group last Tuesday we read, “The children of God are entitled to the perfect comfort that comes from perfect trust. Until they achieve this, they waste themselves and their true creative powers on useless attempts to make themselves more comfortable by inappropriate means. But the real means are already provided, and do not involve any effort at all on their part.”
“They must learn to look upon the world as a means of healing the separation.”
It is
the world that brings healing – not by avoiding that stuff I don’t like but by
seeing it as the way to heal. Run into
it. Maybe the answer isn’t to avoid
being sucked into the vortex but to see the vortex as practice. It’s like the ego – you can’t kill it or work
at eradicating it; you have to see it as the path. The call for love (fear, the ego’s cry) is
showing me all the places that need love.
As Hanh says, “When we realize that to take care of the self is to
take care of what is not self, we are free, and we don’t have to push away either.”
Wasted
day. Not wasted day. None of it matters. The only thing that matters is love. And that gets squeezed out the moment I
assign value judgments about the merit how I’ve spent my time (or how others
have spent their time), or money.
“Teach only
love, for that is what you are,” says the Course.
Someday
perhaps, I will stop forgetting who and what I am. In the meantime, I just keep practicing.
Namaste,
my friends, Namaste.
The post In the Vortex: Confessions of an Internet Junkie appeared first on Opening to the Possibility.