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An Avalanche of Nothing

By Joan Doyle

Once upon a time I loved having e-mail. I badgered my sister in Ireland to get a computer so we could be in touch on a daily basis, in the days prior to Skype or texting. “Please” I begged, “We can e-mail every morning and night instead of only talk once a week by expensive phone call. We will feel closer, like we used to be.”

Today, I hate e-mails. No one reads them fully anymore. If the subject line doesn’t give the message in short-hand the e-mail is likely to drop down in the list un-read and quickly it is forgotten. Right? I suppose I am guilty of this too on my busiest days and for many of us that’s everyday. As a freelance artist, counselor, writer and library page, weekends can be work days too. Unlike in a time, long past for many, when a single nine to five job designated time to work and time to play. Now everything gets blurred into one continuous networking, texting, e-mailing interaction with friends, family, clients and potential clients, websites and blogs, chat rooms and virtual shopping carts.

Internet addiction is now becoming accepted as a very real problem. Avoiding the real world, impairing short term memory and decision making abilities, (so I read on the internet!) addicts feel a need to be in communication even when there is no message to convey. Relationships instead of deepening become more shallow as people accumulate an impossible number of friends on Facebook. Bite size pieces of information from many sources suffice while lengthy meaningful communication with a few is forsaken.

Personally I am burned out. I have expressed a wish to my husband recently to go on a silent retreat. I have had a strong desire to disconnect and to re-connect to something real. I have been missing my family in Ireland a lot. The love I feel is very real and unchanging but the sharing of meals, milestones, lengthy phone calls and most of all time, has diminished. I have been struggling with the acceptance of that and its inevitability after eighteen years abroad. I am the one who moved so far away, so I take responsibility and acknowledge that everyone, including me is overwhelmed these days.

This morning as I walked my dog Otis I could feel my irritation about this situation fuelled with thoughts like, I am always the one to pick up the phone and to travel the six thousand miles to see my family. No one had come to see me in the last five years and as for phone calls there is nothing but dead air. I’d hear no news of home if I didn’t pick up the phone myself. Would anyone even notice if I stopped calling or visiting? Feeling very sorry for myself, I wondered was I wrong to wish someone would call me for a change. Was it too much to ask?

As I had this thought, I recalled at least two friends who had shared with me that they felt the same way; that they were always the one to call either friends or family. Maybe everybody feels this way. Maybe all of us are making calls to people from whom we wish to hear, and at the same time getting calls from people who we don’t regard as essential to us, so we discount those calls. That idea made me smile as I thought of all the disgruntled people not seeing the good they have but wanting what they don’t; a very human condition.

Just then a California bluebird flew out of the tree I was passing and landed to the right of my path. My smile broadened to a laugh! It always delights me to see a bluebird, for one thing, it is rare and for another they always remind me–“the bluebird of happiness is in your own backyard.” I needed the reminder this morning and I am glad for how Spirit uses nature’s messengers. I was reminded I am responsible for my own happiness and I choose once again to simply count my blessings; an age old wisdom that never looses its effectiveness.

In truth I get great pleasure out of calling those I love and I choose to stay focused on that. When I feel lonely I can remedy that by reaching out to someone else. When I take the focus off of “poor me” I quickly realize there is so much need in the world and I have something to give. The love and connection I wish to feel is in the giving and I feel it when I care for another human being, or an animal or plant, or my home or myself. I don’t have to be rigidly focused on my family; I am surrounded by people whose day I can brighten as I brighten my own by connecting with them. It is up to me to bring balance to my life and remember what is truly important and meaningful. The internet is a tool and I am in control of how I use it.

As Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher, so wisely put it “Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” The world of a thousand things, as delightful as it is, can be a distraction, an illusion, an avalanche of nothing, depending on your way of thinking.