The Creative Wave

There’s a problem with celebrity. With the lauding of individuals, especially creative individuals. We tend to lift that one person high on a pedestal and forget that everything they do is a product of a group effort.

I get surprised when I find that some ‘individual’ I’m following on Instagram turns out to have a creative team behind them. Or at least another person to chat things through with or to hold their phone for them. But why am I surprised? High class creative outputs need teams. It is impossible for one person to do it alone.

Dolly Parton was a wonderful woman. One of the things that made her wonderful was her humility, her understanding that she needed others and her desire to help others. Her Imagination Library is just awesome and in my feed, at least, she is remembered as much for that philanthropy as for her excellent singing.

In her ​TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert​ reminded us of the ancient idea of ‘having’ a genius, rather than ‘being’ a genius. That we get less overwhelmed ourselves if we think of the creative genius landing on us, using us, maybe, rather than us having to produce the creativity from somewhere within ourselves. As a Christian, I believe that my creativity comes from tapping into the creativity of God. He is the ultimate genius. The ultimate creator. I create because I am made in his image.

I’ve been thinking about this because I came across this quote from Mary Heilmann, a painter:

“When you get a clever idea, it is a consequence of being connected. To language, to other people. And so that magical, spiritual aspect of the concept is the product of a group effort.”

When we feel like we are working alone, producing the work from a well within ourselves, it can get pretty overwhelming and stressful. We put ourselves under pressure to get it right. We blame ourselves when we get it ‘wrong’. It’s exhausting.

When we understand that everything comes from being connected, we can feel more free. We can feel more free to ask for help. We can feel more free to fill up our creativity with the works of other people – reading, listening to music, feasting our eyes on visual art. We feel more free to give what we have to others. And we know that building our relationships with others is vital.

Yes, I need time alone to process, to rest and to see what is germinating in my own creativity. But I must never forget that all of it is a group effort.

Whatever you’re creating right now, I encourage you to take a moment to think of all the connections and input that has led to this creation. I’m not making it all from scratch, I’m just surfing the wave. It fills my heart with gratitude and I want to pass it on.

Good and memorable

Thank you to those of you who responded to last week’s post with your something good and your memorable cuppa. It was lovely to read about family experiences and about community building at cafés. One particularly memorable cuppa story was from a rooftop in Saudi Arabia “fresh dates and delicious spiced Arabian coffee”. Though I think I personally would prefer to read about it than to live it.

I feel like, having asked you all to share with me, I need to share a ‘something good’ and a ‘memorable coffee’ with you too. I’ve been thinking about this all week. I have found that it’s much easier for me to ask the questions than to give my own answers!

I write in a journal every day. First thing every morning, I write around three pages in a lined A5-ish Moleskin journal, using a blue Bic ballpoint pen. Sometimes I process emotions or sort through difficult issues, but mostly I write about what happened the day before. Just a quick description of what I did and how I felt about it.

I think that one reason I continue to write my journal daily is that I don’t trust my memories. I don’t trust myself to remember the important things in my life. If I didn’t write a journal, I think I’d be anxious about whether I’d remember an important happening or not. But writing it down takes that anxiety from me. It’s there, in the book, on the shelf. If I need it, I can find it.

So in preparation for this post, I have taken a few journals off the shelf and briefly thumbed through them.

This is what I’ve found.

Something good:

There are many many good things in my journals. Mostly very small good things, like a good night’s sleep or a warm sunny day or a walk on the beach.

I love my life. It has its ups and downs. I have struggled with a few health things over the years. I’ve had the normal arguments and disappointments. But overall, I really love my life. I am living according to my values. There is great joy in the every day things. I enjoy my work. I love my family. I have an excellent husband.

I’m grateful for all of this. It is a very good thing.

Memorable cuppa:

I didn’t find this in my brief reading of my journals but Moz (the excellent husband) reminded me of it when I asked him for his memorable cuppa so I’ll share it with you today.

For our 20th wedding anniversary, Moz and I visited Vanuatu. We spent some time in a resort and some time at the Youth With A Mission base. The leader of the base, our friend Roger, took us to the airport to catch our very early flight home. We were all sleepy so I decided to get the three of us a cuppa.

I thought that the international airport would have decent drinks, and the café had T2 canisters lined up on the back bench – a good sign.

But then I saw the barista open a T2 tin to expose the ‘Home Brand’ tea bags inside. And this is Vanuatu home brand. Not good. Moz did not enjoy his cup of tea.

The coffee similarly tasted of dirt and may not have contained any caffeine at all. It really was the worst coffee I have ever drunk in my life. Though the coffee at the café near the waterfront was halfway decent, so it may have just been that particular shop that served horrendous drinks.

Memorable for sure. Great company, horrible drinks!

So that is my good thing and my memorable cuppa. In my journal reading I found a few more questions too – what superpower would you like to have? If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?

But you know, it’s not the questions that are the important thing here. It’s the listening. If the answer to the question is like mine, “I don’t know. I don’t really think about things that way,” then that is something you can also listen to. Something new you’ve learned about the person you’re chatting with.

It’s the listening that’s the important thing.

Thank you for listening to me each week.

Conversation starters

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a ​loneliness epidemic​ going around. There’s been a lot of talk about it, and quite a few experiments and studies to see the effects of isolation and loneliness. I think it’s great the people are doing what they can to help with the problem.

I heard one podcaster telling me that we assume that we’ll hate conversations with strangers, say on public transport. But if we actually try to chat with someone, we’re happier and have a better time than if we’d stayed glued to our phones or kept our headphones in.

I reckon most of us don’t interact with others because we don’t know where to start.

When our little family visited my parents in the USA in around 2002, Moz and our friend Rodney (also Australian) visited Washington DC together while I stayed home with the kids.

The train back to Virginia was filled with people in business suits. The carriage was quiet as each person did their best to pretend that either they didn’t exist, or that no one else in the carriage was there.

Moz and Rod sat at a table, and a woman across from them pulled out her newspaper and began to work on the crossword. She held the paper carefully so that it didn’t transgress onto any part of the table that ‘belonged’ to the others.

Rodney was having none of that. He grabbed her paper and pulled it to the centre of the table, telling her that they could work on it together. At first she was horrified, but then she heard Rod’s Australian accent, put him in the category of ‘those crazy Australians’, and relaxed.

Their table had a great ride home together, working on the crossword as a team.

Most of us don’t have the courage to do what Rod did. Some of us might not have the Australian accent! And what was right for Rod might be wrong for our situation. But I have heard two conversation starters lately that I thought I’d add to your toolbox so that you, too, can help with the loneliness epidemic.

One: Tell me something good.

This apparently came from a bartender. He took the woman’s order and asked, ‘Tell me something good.’ Then, as he served others, the woman took the time to think of something good that she could tell him when he came back. She said it lifted her mood and also gave them something to chat about.

I am always happy to listen to people share their hard times and hurts. It’s important for all of us to feel heard and supported. But also, I’m going to remember to ask my friends to tell me something good and keep ‘something good’ in the front of my mind to tell others. It will give all of us a lift.

Two: What’s your most memorable cup of tea or coffee experience?

This is a great conversation starter. I want to use it because I’m sure I’ll hear some truly amazing stories. Note – it’s not the best or the worst experience, but the most memorable. What jumps to your mind?

I’m out of room for this week’s post, but next week, I’ll tell you something good, and I’ll tell you a memorable cuppa experience that I’ve had. Meanwhile, I’d love you to share the same with me!

If you use these through the week to start a conversation, please let me know how it goes. And please tell me other ways to begin a conversation that allow your chatting partner to share with you.

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Mondegreens and maturity

The other night, as we were having family dinner, my Dad made a dad joke about the ’round yon virgin’ and a few seconds later, Caleb had a lightbulb moment.

“Hang on, that’s what I thought it meant. That the virgin Mary was round because she was 40 weeks pregnant. But it means ‘around the virgin’ doesn’t it?”

We all assured him that yes it did. The carol says nothing at all about Mary’s body shape.

Caleb is in his late 20s and he had never thought this through. He’d just sung the carol and got on with the presents and the food.

Fair enough.

I have to say fair enough because it wasn’t until the next morning that I had the thought, “What was around the virgin?”

When we sing this carol, we sing the first couple of lines, take a breath, and start a new sentence, “Round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild.” But that’s not a whole sentence, my editor brain says. Unless the infant was around the virgin…

That’s an awful picture. Stop. Go back.

Maybe it’s the first couple of lines that make the sentence work.

“All is calm, all is quiet ’round yon virgin mother” (Yeah, there’s not comma between virgin and mother. The word “virgin” is an adjective. A describing word that describes the mother.)

The whole picture shifted into focus. The carol is not saying that the whole world was quiet (which was what I had always thought), just that there was quiet around Mary and her new baby. I hope there was. I’m pretty sure baby Jesus cried when he was hungry or tired. But I hope that, on that first night, just for a little while, it was calm and quiet, and Mary and her baby could “sleep in heavenly peace”. At least, until the shepherds showed up.

It just shows that we can carry weird ideas for years and years without even knowing it.

You probably had this carol all sorted out and are laughing at my slowness. I hope you are laughing! It’s such a silly idea.

But I wonder what other ideas you and I have carried over since childhood?

Some of these are just fun, but some of our childhood ideas can be more harmful. Some teaching we’ve received has brought shame or division. Some family ways of doing things have been unhelpful or even destructive.

We may not even know these ideas are there. They can shape our behaviour without us understanding why we behave the way we do.

What do we do about this?

We educate ourselves by reading and thinking and talking with others. We do our best to be open to new ideas and critically evaluate them. And I also trust God that he will help me to see where I need to change. That he will bring these things up for me when I’m able to work on them and learn new ways of being.

I hope, when these ideas come to light in my life, I will be able to accept the corrections with the same grace as Caleb accepted his. That I will be able to begin the work to build the new neural pathways and take the time to change.

And I hope the same for you.

What weird and wonderful things have you misheard or misunderstood?

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So thankful!

As my time talking with Scottie (on ​Ultra106.5​, our local Christian radio station) comes to a close, I want to say a proper thank you. (If you don’t know Scottie, please keep reading. There is a message for you at the end.)

I’m not sure how long ago it was – probably five or six years – that Scottie invited me on air. I had gone into the station a couple of times to spruik my novels, and we’d chatted quite nicely. I’d also interviewed him on my podcast and that had gone well too. Scottie was looking for content to fill the breakfast hours so he suggested that I come in regularly to chat with him.

I didn’t know whether to do it. This was a few years into my journey of working from home and building my business. I had found that it was difficult to figure out how much time various business activities would take. Many activities had looked very possible at the beginning and ended up being energy draining or time draining or both. ​The podcast​, for example, took about seven hours each episode to produce, way more time than I had thought. Would this activity be another of those?

I also felt quite insecure. What did I have to say that was worth broadcasting over the whole of southern Tasmania? I wasn’t sure that I had anything to give. I wasn’t an ordained minister or a trained counsellor or anything.

I talked with Moz and I talked with Dad. But the thing I remember most is talking with Mum. She strongly encouraged me to give it a go. So I did. I could always stop if I needed to. It was worth a try.

Since then, either weekly or fortnightly, I have driven into town on a Wednesday morning to prerecord my chat with Scottie. The chat would then be played on air as I drove home, and I would arrive in the house to scare Moz as he listened to me on the radio.

Scottie and I have discussed various things. At one point we read through ​Boots That Fit​, one chapter per week. Lately, we have chatted about whatever I’ve written in my blog. The chats have helped me keep writing my newsletter, and Scottie has often given me a new and helpful perspective on things.

Now, when I give talks at schools, or preach at churches, or offer my courses, people recognise me from the radio. Scottie’s encouragement of me has been so helpful in building my ministry. I would not be where I am without his belief in me and the way he put that into action.

I am very very grateful! Thank you Scottie, and may the Lord bless you so much as you step out into the next part of your journey.

I want to give two messages this week:

1) If you want to say thanks to Scottie for his long years of service to ​Ultra106.5 ​and the Hobart community, please email me at ruth@ruthamos.com.au and I’ll pass it on. You have until Wednesday morning! Don’t delay! (Or you can write to him yourself, later, if this email got to you too late.)

2) If you don’t know Scottie at all and think this has nothing to do with you, this is my message for you:

Sometimes we wait for special occasions to say thank you to people. We wait to let them know how much we appreciate them and what they’ve done. Please don’t wait! When you think of someone you want to thank or encourage, do it straight away.

Drop them a message, give them a ring, write them a card. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it. You can always do it again on the special occasion.

It doesn’t have to be a long screed. It doesn’t have to be particularly well said. It just needs to be said.

Say the nice thing. We all need encouragement.

Finally, thank you all for reading my blog. It is so encouraging for me to actually have readers! You all bless me more than you know.

Long session of learning

Often in this newsletter I give advice. It is always advice that I have tried myself and found helpful. I think it’s usually helpful to you or at least thought provoking. That’s what I aim for.

Lately I’ve been feeling that I might be misleading you a bit. Unintentionally, of course. But still, I might be giving you the wrong idea. You might think that I have a certain way of living that I just don’t have.

You see, I often put my “rules” into practice for a while, and then something changes and I stop doing that thing.

One week, I blithely told you all that I was doing my housework for ten minutes every morning, going through a rolling list of cleaning tasks, and feeling secure that at some point, all the jobs will get done. I still think that’s a good idea, but I don’t do that anymore. Now, it varies. Often, I will write or edit for half an hour, then get up and do some housework or gardening for five minutes or so, then back to the desk for another writing stint. And that only works on a day when I’m at home and working at my desk. My housework time is sporadic, to say the least.

Another day, I told you that I am only eating when I’m eating. That is, I make a meal, sit at the table, and eat, looking out the window, not at my phone or a book. While I still think that’s a brilliant idea, I don’t do it anymore. I always entertain myself somehow when I eat.

I like rules. I’m a rules person. Many of us are not but some of us, like myself, want a structure to work with in our daily lives. But life changes regularly, and when it does, the structure must change too.

Our workloads change. Our circumstances change. Our energy levels change. We can’t just say, “This is the way it should be” and then get mad with ourselves when we can’t keep up.

So today, I am confessing that I don’t live my life according to the “rules” that I have set out for myself. I fail regularly and I drop some ideas when I find that I can’t put them into action over the long term. And I don’t usually report that to you.

I am learning to be kind to myself when I fail to meet the standards I set. I am learning that some “rules” are for a season, but not for all time. I am … learning.

I think that is what life is. A long session of learning. I’m hoping that, like the old hymn says, I’m being “Changed from glory into glory”.

Today, I hope that my confession frees you from any slight inkling that you might have that you need to put any of my “rules” into practice. I hope that you, also, are able to bend with the winds of life and change your practices as is needful. And that you also are encouraged that you are changing from glory into glory as you learn and grow through all the seasons of life.

May we all continue to learn to be kind to ourselves.

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Comparison or Admiration?

Last week, I talked about a Carl Pullein using examples of a high-level government official from the early 20th century, Sir Allan Lascelles, as an example of how we should structure our time. I want to muse a little more on that this week.

I said last week that Pullien had ignored the fact that Sir Allan probably had housekeepers, maybe a slew of servants, or at the very least, a stay-at-home wife, to do a lot of the housework and cooking and all the other little things that make a life go smoothly. He could concentrate on his job and arrange his life the way that suited him. I don’t know anyone who has a background workforce enabling them in this life and it worried me that he used this example.

The other example Pullien used was Lord Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter is the creation of the brilliant Dorothy L Sayers. He is a joy to read about. I have collected as many of Sayers’ novels as I can lay my hands on (her nonfiction is also brilliant). However, I would not recommend Lord Peter as an exemplar of how to organise your day. For a start, he has a super-human butler, an unlimited supply of funds and no 9–5 job or obligations. And more than that, he is not real! He is a fictional character. He never lived except in Sayers’ imagination (and in ours, because she makes him feel real to us).

No matter how much I would like to be like Peter Wimsey, I can’t. I don’t think I can learn from him how to simplify my life or how to order my day. He doesn’t have to cope with what I am coping with, or think about what I have to think about.

Can I learn anything from him?

We can learn a LOT from good fiction. Good writing gets us right into the thoughts and emotions of characters. We find it easy to empathise with them. Reading opens our hearts to ideas and situations that we don’t experience ourselves.

George R R Martin wrote, ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies’. Or at least, I think he wrote that. I haven’t read his books (or watched the TV shows). But I agree with the sentiment. Reading allows us a window into the lives of others.

When I read Peter Wimsey books I learn about mental illness. Sayers is brilliant in her portrayal of PTSD and of the depth of our need for others to care when our souls are deeply hurting.

When we read biographies, such as that of that Sir Allan, we can also learn principles to live by even when we can’t apply every part of their lifestyle to our own lives.

Take Jesus’ life, for example. I am not an unmarried 30-year-old man living a nomadic life in the first century. My life, in some ways, does not look anything like the life portrayed in the four biographies of Jesus.

When we look at how Jesus spent the three years we know the most about, we see that he was flat out, talking to large groups of people, sharing his daily life with his twelve closest disciples and the women who also followed him and provided for him. I feel that if I worked as hard as he did, I would burn out. (Though maybe he rested more than we think – he kept the Sabbath each week and also went away to be alone as much as possible.)

While he worked as a carpenter to begin with, we know almost nothing about how he ran his work life. I am also running my own business, but there’s nothing in Jesus’ biographies that will help me know how to bill people or use software to keep my tax records straight.

Having said all that, I still feel that I want my life to look as much like his as is possible. I want to learn the principles he lived by and apply them in my own situation. The same applies to the examples Carl Pullein used. Carl saw how the Sir Allan simplified his days, and applied that to his own life.

You know, sometimes I don’t know exactly what I’m thinking until I write about it. Today’s musing has definitely been one of those. This is what I have as a take home after all this writing and thinking:

We can learn from the lives of others if we look at the principles they live by and apply them to our own situations. We will fail at this if we look at the details of their lives and wish that our lives were the same.

Comparison is the thief of joy, but learning from others is essential to a full and mature life. We must strive for excellence, but striving to be ‘just like’ or even ‘better than’ others is unhelpful and sometimes even harmful.

Who are some people you admire? Do you try to put the principles of their lives into your own?

Declutter your time

On Monday mornings, after listening to a​ Bible podcast​, I usually listen to a podcast by Carl Pullein called ​Your Time Your Way​. In his podcast, he answers listener questions about time management and productivity. His work is thought provoking and often very helpful. This morning, he told us all that if we are struggling to fit everything we want to do into our lives, we need to do less, rather than organise our obligations better.

He used examples of world leaders from the early 20th century to explain what he meant and I struggled with that. Yes, the people he talked about achieved great things, and they seemed to be more rested – able to take long walks and afternoon naps, but they also had housekeepers and butlers (or at least, wives) doing the basics for them. I know that if I never had to cook, clean, and organise my house I would have more brain space and time to spend creatively. I’d like to know what the ordinary people of the early 20th century felt about being busy and getting everything done. Maybe they were so busy getting everything done that they didn’t have time to even think about it.

Despite all this, I think Carl has a point. We can’t add more time into our days. We can’t add another hour to our lives. So we need to fit everything we want to do into the time we have to do it. That means that we need to prioritise and figure out what is worthy of our time and what is not.

In ​Boots That Fit​ I suggest making a time budget. It’s a bit like a money budget. You look at the 168 hours that each week holds and put aside time to sleep and time to work at your job (that’s a bit like a mortgage payment in a money budget). Then, with the time that is left, you think about how much you will give away (volunteering or looking after grandchildren, for example) and what you will spend on the things you love to do. Maybe you’ll put aside a half hour each day for reading books, or an hour three times a week for exercise.

Even if you find that you don’t stick to your budget, just understanding what you’re trying to achieve in the time you’re given helps you to see whether you’re being wildly unrealistic in what you’re trying to do. It also helps you to see where you’re wasting time (doom scrolling, anyone?) and what you’d like to do otherwise. (Carl Pullein has a similar exercise that he calls a Perfect Week Plan.)

It’s so tempting to think that if we can just get organised, or just find the perfect method, we will be able to stuff more into our week and finally get caught up on all the things. I don’t think that’s true. I think that for most of us it would be impossible to organise ourselves enough to fit everything into the week. Instead of shifting all our obligations and tasks around, trying to find the perfect way for them to fit, maybe we need to get rid of some.

It’s like decluttering your house. If you have too much stuff, you can’t organise your way into a tidy and organised home. No matter how you organise your bits and pieces, you will never get your house under control. You need to get rid of some stuff.

In the same way, if you have too many tasks in your week, you will always feel rushed and crowded, and the things you love to do will get squashed out or lost in the rush. So you might need to declutter your time. You might need to trash some tasks (just decide not to do them) or you might donate them (see if someone else can do them). This may mean that things get done imperfectly. You might need to become okay with that.

But once you’ve decluttered your schedule, you might finally have time to do that thing, that life-giving thing that you’ve always wanted, but didn’t feel you had the time, to do.

And that will make all the hard work of decluttering worthwhile.

Slow changes

Last Sunday, our church had the privilege to hear from my friend Suraj about the way he and his team reach out to students from the subcontinent – Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His group, Subbies, provides food for anyone who comes along, reaches out in friendship, shares our faith with them, and also makes sure that they have great fun and celebrate their important festivals. It’s an awesome work.

Suraj told us all about it, and he also shared a quote that stuck with me:

You can’t make curry in a hurry.

Of course, he was talking about life change, not just the delicious foods that the Subbies share. (Though I should have taken him up on his offer of a recipe for a proper curry.)

Life change is slow. If you think of how slowly you would be prepared to change and then slow that down about ten times, that’s probably how slowly most of life change happens.

Sometimes a person will have a dramatic turn around. Occasionally internal healing happens immediately. But most of the time, good changes, lasting changes, take hold incrementally. Slowly.

Maybe it’s because if we’re changing something foundational, we need to make space, and rearrange our thinking about many things, not just the one thing we’re hoping to change. Maybe it’s because it takes time to grow new neural pathways. Maybe we’re just prone to falling back into old habits.

Whatever it is, you can’t make curry in a hurry. Not the really delicious curry, anyway.

Slow change can be frustrating. It can be discouraging. But it’s just the way it is.

Talking with other friends on Wednesday this week, I was reminded of a way to inch this slow change along. What we need to do is think of the tiniest most ridiculously small step we can take in the direction we want to go and put that step into action.

Want to go for a walk? Put your sneakers on.

Want a clean house? Set a timer for five minutes and put things away for that time.

Want to read a book? Just open the book up and glance at the page.

Sometimes you might do more than that. Sometimes you might stop at that one step. But even that is a win. Keep the bar low, and celebrate every time you jump over it.

Every tiny step you take is working towards that slow growth. That delicious curry. Eventually, after many of these tiny steps, you’ll be able to measure your growth. You’ll be able to look back and see how far you’ve come.

So don’t be discouraged if your growth or change seems to be happening slowly. Just repeat to yourself, ‘You can’t make curry in a hurry’ and keep going.

I’m here cheering you on every tiny step of the way.

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Ruthless resting

I have been reading a great book recently. It is called ​Celebration of Discipline​ by Richard Foster. It was originally written in 1978. I was born then, but I wasn’t very old. I was running around in blue terry towelling shorts and t-shirts with iron-on transfers. Riding my scooter up and down the driveway and hanging upside down off monkey bars.

Life was different then. No mobile phones. No internet. No seven-day shopping. No streaming services.

But somehow, people seemed to still be in a hurry.

Richard Foster talks about the distractions from newspapers and magazines. The interruptions from advertising billboards. The addiction to watching TV. He talks about how all these things consume our minds and stop us from being able to rest, contemplate, pray and think deeply about things. I wonder what he’d think of life now.

You may not want to live the life of a contemplative, sitting in a monastery and navel gazing, but I think that most of us want to feel less hurried and to feel more peace. Many of us wonder what is missing and why life feels so shallow and empty. We resonate with Bilbo’s feeling of ‘thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread’ (The Fellowship of the Ring).

I don’t think there’s a lot you can do about this feeling without being fairly ruthless and making time to rest and to think deeply. This requires making intentional changes to our lives.

It is difficult. Some of us are so busy that we don’t even have time to think about what we would change if we could.

The problem is, if we don’t make these changes intentionally, our bodies may well make them for us. We are not made to go at full speed all the time. It’s not good for us physically or mentally.

On Saturday, I used a new app to limit my access to my phone. It stopped me going onto any social media or email for the day. I didn’t think I was too bad at using social media, but the use of this app showed me differently. I reached for my phone over and over again, without even realising I was doing it.

But the phone wouldn’t open the well-worn apps, so I had to do something else with my time instead. I read books. I watched TV (but without scrolling at the same time). I slept. I talked to family on the phone. I knitted. I worked on a crossword.

It was a really good and restful day. If I continue blocking those apps, at least for one day a week, I think that my peace will grow and I’ll feel more restful, less empty and less stretched. I might even start thinking more deeply as I spend time reading. I might be able to more fully enjoy time with friends and family.

It’s worth an experiment, anyway.

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