Exhausted, Anxious, and Checking Twitter

I listen to the Makers & Mystics podcast and a recent interview was with John Eldredge, a writer I used to stock on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, but I’ve never read any of them. On the podcast, he talks about pausing for beauty, pausing from social media and distraction, pausing for our own mental health. He talked about having a hard time reading anything longer than a blog post. He talked about having trouble focusing on his family members

I heard a diagnosis for my own condition. I, too, have had trouble reading books. I’m often at a table with friends and feel the pull of my phone and all the other people inside of it.

He said we can’t take the constant trauma of the world that constant connectivity brings us. I had just told the story, the evening before listening to the podcast, of my summer as a hospital chaplain and how I could not leave the people at the hospital, how they followed me home and weighed on me. I carry the trauma of the national politics in my joints. The world wars, military, economic, and political, have my anxiety up high all the time.

And I want to push back. Yes, even in my lifetime, we didn’t get constant news updates as we do today. We got news on TV twice, maybe 3 times a day, in an hour or shorter bites. We got the newspaper once a day. Outside of that, we lived our lives and maybe what we’d seen or read weighed on us, but so did our immediate company, our immediate work. And before my lifetime, there was a time without TV, a time without radio. News from beyond our communities might have come only once a day or once a week or a couple times a month. The powerful worked their machinations in relative silence, unseen day to day. Was that better or worse?

The deal is, the speed of the world allows the powerful to make their power moves with more speed, too. Two centuries ago, their power grabs also moved at a slower pace. Today, it feels like they have so many more opportunities to create poverty and despair as they create their own wealth. They have many more tools to hide, distract from, cover-up the nefarious intentions.

I could disconnect, live only in my immediate community and be crushed by the bull dozer I never saw coming. Or I can stay connected and see the bull dozer coming and still be crushed, the last hours lived in fear and anxiety as I was powerless to divert its course. Or maybe I could divert its course. Or get out of its way. Those last bits are what keeps me connected and anxious. It’s circular and exhausting. 

“Is it possible to learn how to care and yet not care?” Joni Mitchell asked that question in her Zen-influenced song, “Moon at the Window.” Can I care and not die of anxiety? Maybe that’s my question. Eldredge talked about detachment, a very Zen idea. To care, to pray, to turn over to God, to let go.

I wish I had some quick tips for stepping away from this. "Five Easy Prayers for Immediate Peace." And even as I type this, I'm thinking of people currently way more anxious about the the coronavirus outbreak than I am. Maybe we pick our anxieties.

I want to offer an answer. I want to end on a helpful note but I remind myself, this lenten blogging is more confession than instruction. I leave it here today. I'm an anxious, distractable mess. And I try to pause for beauty, too. It's a lot. I'm exhausted. And you?