Dear Jessica Brennan,
I’m an introvert who pretends to be an extrovert so I’m pretty much afraid of everything and can find a lot of noisy places in my head.
I have to work on being quiet because I can find lots of noise to distract me. One thing I worry about is, what if my blog can energize people to a point, leaving them with things to think about, maybe even leave them with hope for the future, but then eventually we all come full-circle and just sink back into the overworked lives and expectations that have brought us to where many of us are now?
And this is a now, that can be difficult to reconcile, especially for someone with a noisy head.
Good people walking around in droves, totally drained by stories of politics, Hollywood, war and mass shootings. People trying to tolerate perfect-life or whiny Facebook pages and pre-scheduled Twitter feeds as they are held in the grip of an electronic addiction. It isn’t that we aren’t empathetic to every single issue, quite to the contrary actually, we are too sensitive to survive it all. It all comes so fast and furiously. One person’s flat tire picture, posted next to a story about a celebrity sexual assault charge. Two kittens snuggling in a toque, next to a violent offender who has just been paroled.
I feel like what used to be the odd period of low energy has now become a broken running tap, that leaves people exhausted when they wake up in the morning – sleep deprived, self-medicated, defensive, emotionally shut-down, anxious and deflated by treading on the endless hamster wheel of trying to find any real truth that can fix a beautiful, broken planet.
The solution for me is to meld the crazy of this time, with my own unique and perfect kind of crazy. I believe, that the way to look in the face of a world that’s largely feeding on insanity, is quietly. Be quiet.
Sometimes a soul needs to get smaller and more meaningful rather than larger and more powerful because the truly perfect parts of this world that we can build on together, are tiny. They are quiet, and can’t be found in the news cycle. When life gets tiny and meaningful and quiet, the soul expands.
These tiny quiet places will bring serenity to those who seek it and healing to those who need it, starting with ourselves, because from what I can tell, we all need it.
Shhh.
Love Mum xo
