It is important in this age of divisiveness and information overload to remember to take time to step back and re-centre.
That means tuning out social media once in a while and just being in your own skin with your own thoughts.
It means letting all the negativity drain out of you by focusing on what matters: Family, friends, nature, and your personal hobbies and passions.
We must learn to be alone with ourselves again in that sense without all the voices clamouring around us in the information sphere, and driving us into stress and anger.
Why let others manipulate our emotions and thoughts in that way, when with a click of a mouse they can all be shut off and shut away until we are ready to deal with them again?
The poet William Wordsworth once said, “The world is too much with us; late and soon. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
He wrote those lines over 200 years ago, and they seem to apply more than ever. With our private lives being invaded by social media and the “smart” technology on our phones, it is more difficult than ever to find true privacy.
So what options do we have outside of becoming a hermit in a forest somewhere? Well, the most important thing to remember is we have the power to turn it all off. We have the power to regulate how we spend our time and our energy. You control your phone and social media accounts, they do not control you. And secondly, it’s okay not to be engaged on every notification which comes onto your phone.
This is the starting point for a re-centring. Another might be taking a social media fasting. Disengage from it all for a while, whenever you feel it all too much.
It is alright to just be, and to just let it all be.
