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“We write to breathe, to know we’re alive, and to matter to the world we write for.” - Rikki Ratliff
Rikki’s a friend, a colleague and a fellow writer. She’s in the midst of the experience of a lifetime, pursuing the one thing in this life – writing – that most consistently makes her soul sing. But she’s doing it on the other side of the globe, far away from every obligation built into her every day here. She’s doing it, to give her writer’s heart the space it’s been craving to fill up with new vistas, people and experiences, to expand and overflow.
The overflow has splashed out on to paper with ink – as writers’ hearts do – and this morning, she sent me a sample of the spillage. Her words above, were among the droplets that filled my heart this morning, and set it to overflowing here.
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Since taking on full-time work for one client in April, while continuing to juggle the needs of other clients, family and friends, I’ve found myself feeling a wee bit stretched of late. And so, I’ve been considering purchasing one of those handy mobile computing devices; you know the kind, the pocket-sized wonders that seem to keep their owners on an invisible leash, yanking them to attention with the merest sound of a little “ping.” Wondering whether such a device would help to simplify – or only complicate my life, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about how I use technology today, and how it’s shaping the person I am.
I’m a person who loves to reflect. It’s not enough for me to live my life – I also need to think about how I’m living it, and to think such thoughts regularly, otherwise it feels somehow like the days just slip away.
So recently, without sufficient time and space to quiet my soul, I’ve been sensing some “slippage.”
This article got me thinking: for work related reasons I spend a great deal of time on the Internet over the course of an average day, and I’ve done so for years. Could my dependency on online media be changing the very structure of my brain?
I admit it: I find it increasingly difficult to settle myself to read a book these days. My best reading seems to happen in the summer time – when I can get away from technology for a while and return to the slower, calmer pace of a distraction-less life and actually settle myself enough to immerse my mind in chapter after chapter.
So how else might technology be impacting my life? When I heard about Quit Facebook Day, I knew this was a subject I needed to explore.
You can read about my conclusions here.
Meantime – what do you think? Should I resist the call of the iPhone?
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