There’s
a whole genre of articles in which writers like me leave social media
and report on how their lives transformed. I swore I wouldn’t add to it.
I swore that if I went off Twitter or other social media, I would not
write about it. But here I am, writing about it. And I’m doing so
because it didn’t change my life in quite the way that I expected or
many of these essays promised it would.
I
enjoyed Twitter. I genuinely did. I enjoyed connecting with others and
hearing what people were talking about throughout the world. I miss it.
The problem is I loved it a little too much. I’d find myself checking it
when I should be working, running late to my daughters’ school events
because I tried to fit in a quick peek or staying up far too late
surfing vast oceans of information, tired and barely interested but
unable to resist the glowing undertow pulling me in.
I
am part of a small group of friends from across the country who meet
together monthly over Zoom and once a year or so in person. We talk
through our lives. We pray for one another. We have permission to give
one another unsolicited advice. In November, they all encouraged me to
drop my Twitter habit, at least for a little while. I jokingly called it
an intervention. It wasn’t far from it. My life was overfull, and this
was something I could cut out. I complied, albeit hesitantly and with a
bit of whining, because I trust my friends and their wisdom.
So
I blocked Twitter. A colleague tweets articles I write — including this
newsletter — from my account. Still, I can’t see Twitter even if I
tried (and I have tried). I went from being on it nearly every day to
being off it for two months now.
This
is the part of the “getting off social media changed my life” essay
where I say that I have discovered Zen-like quiet and peace, how I
started exercising, lost five pounds and found new focus and freedom
from anxiety. But that did not happen. Not yet, anyway.
Being
offline didn’t make my life a bastion of meditative bliss. I still have
three young loud kids, a job, a church, a spouse and a messy house. I’m
still busier than I’d like to be; cutting out social media did not lead
to as much extra time as I’d hoped or thought it would. I still
freebase distraction in ways that are compulsive and foolish. (My new
time waster of choice is Zillow and other real estate sites. I suspect
if I block that, I’ll find something else.)
But
there is one way that leaving Twitter has benefited my life and my
mind. The times when I checked Twitter were often the transition points
in my day: when I sat down to work or I finished a task, waiting at a
light or in line or to pick up my kids from school, going to the bathroom,
the few minutes before I fell asleep. Freeing up those small, seemingly
inconsequential moments has been transformative. These moments of quiet
and emptiness throughout the day are nothing I really considered
before. I don’t schedule them in my calendar, and I didn’t notice their
departure when I began going online. But leaving these small moments of
my day unfilled changed how I walk through time.
My
new motto born of this experience is: Guard the margins — those
seemingly unimportant parts of our day and time. Margins on a page can
seem like wasted space (wouldn’t it save trees if we wrote or printed
across the whole page?), but all that blank space helps us to read and
take in information. We need the blank spaces. We need moments when we
get no input, no news, no videos, no memes, no opinions. We need moments
when we space out, daydream, when our minds go blank.
In
the few minutes before dinner or on my way to my car after work,
instead of quickly checking on trending topics, I may wave to a neighbor
or get an idea about how to fix a paragraph I was working on or hear
birdsong. Waving to my neighbor will likely not change her or my life.
Fixing that paragraph won’t revolutionize my career. Noticing birdsong
will not help me better understand national politics or the violence in
Kazakhstan. But these seemingly trivial moments of connection, mental
space and beauty change me slowly over time. They weave a life worth
living, thread by thread.
These
moments aren’t always peaceful. In small, blank moments, I may feel
gratitude or delight, but just as often, I recall a hurtful conversation
or notice that I feel tired or lonely. But this, too, is part of the
gifts of these small moments. If we fill up those few minutes with
distraction, we numb ourselves in tiny doses and cut ourselves off from
our interior lives.
These seemingly insignificant breaks in the day help us emotionally and mentally; they give our prefrontal cortex
a needed break. And they’ve also meant something to me spiritually.
“The whole life of Jesus is wrapped in silence and mystery,” wrote
Cardinal Robert Sarah. “If man wants to imitate Christ, it is enough for
him to observe his silences.”
Silence, as I’ve written in thisnewsletter,
is an essential spiritual practice. But I often envision a life of
practicing silence as one with long stretches of quiet, swaths of
monastic discipline and solitude, reams of uninterrupted contemplation.
For me, that kind of life is completely out of reach and will remain so
for the foreseeable future. I can fall into all-or-nothing thinking, in
which if I can’t have the monastery, I end up using my lunch break to
binge-lurk in online political spats or watch cute animal videos.
But
leaving small moments empty, silent and, in some sense, useless is a
tiny taste of a life “wrapped in silence and mystery.” Guarding the
small silences in the corners of my day subtly rewires my brain,
teaching me to allow my time and my thoughts to lie fallow for a minute,
to be a little bored and a little blank.
My
friend Timothy is a studied musician. He is a violist. I asked him
about the function of small breaks in music — of rests. He said that
music, like a living creature, needs to breathe and these small breaks,
however seemingly brief and unimportant, are what allows a piece of
music to live and take flight. He told me that if you filled up every
rest in a piece of music, listening to it would be exhausting and would
eventually descend into an “undifferentiated mass” that we can’t really
take in, attend to or enjoy. Rests in music, even short ones, create
rhythm, variety and narrative. They help, he said, guide and change the
course of a song.
But he said you have
to learn to “play the rests.” It seems easy. It doesn’t require
technical skill, the way that it does to play a scale or an arpeggio.
But to make good music, you have to learn to honor the small breaks in
it.
In the same way, our days, which
are so full of work and thinking, of arguing and learning, of
disappointments and confusion, of striving and creating, must have
moments when nothing much is happening. I filled those moments with
loud, funny, angry and interesting voices online. But leaving these
small moments empty is what makes the difference between noise and
music.
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