Hello loves,
Like many of us these days I can feel the constant deep magnetism of perpetual distraction. Each time I have a spare second I find myself reaching for my phone, my tablet or my laptop. Mostly it's to work, sometimes it's to doom scroll, sometimes it's for entertainment but WAY more often than I should I am using technology to numb myself. I have been changing a lot recently. I am the happiest I have ever been and getting even more peaceful and content as my life unfolds. Even though the change is welcome I can't pretend that it's also not a little scary. I've never felt like this before and I am having to learn an entirely new emotional skill set.
Stories are powerful. Moreso, the stories you tell yourself about who you are. When someone asks you who you are we often list what we are, what we do, what we create but take all of that away from you and what's left? Who are you when your life falls to pieces? Who are you when your life thrives in delight? Great joy and great pain are also great windows into the truth of who you are. This can be frightening especially in a society that economically thrives off of you lying to yourself. Those self help meme's are not fibbing when they tell us that self care is a radical act. I won't demonise technologyitself though, it's a perfect tool but, like all tools it has it's appropriate place in our lives. It's easy to look outward and blame the expression of the fear but it's the fear itself that needs to be addressed and, like technology, placed back into it's appropriate space within our lives.
Growing is challenging, even when you're growing in the right direction. I think the answer is for me to keep returning to the story of who I am. Who I am is someone who reaches for kindness, who tries to paint their lives with empathy and compassion. The who of who I am is a spirit on the planet in a human shape focussed on loving as many human beings as possible. I've been through another one of those great steps forward recently and I keep relearning the same thing. For years I thought that growing meant becoming more full, becoming stronger and more powerful. I keep being reminded that the more I grow the more I let go of all of those ideas and become a grateful warden of the life that I get to participate in. The light of who we all are is bright and at times yes overwhelming but it's ultimitely worth investing in.
Spend some time pondering what you are using lately to numb or to distract yourself from the light of who you are. Remember how magic you are again.
Big love,
Ryan James x