This. All of This.

I'm off of Facebook right now because it is an unhealthy distraction in the way of so many things: my relationship with God, my connection to my family, difficult emotional work that's easy to procrastinate, and flowers, food, and sunshine-- to name but a few.

The following amazing OpEd piece from the NY Times is like an underline, italicized, highlighted, bold copy, neon sign, blinking arrow of support for the fact that I might be onto something.

From the article (emphasis mine):

"Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes."


Sculpture by Andrew Wielawski

And, later in the article:

"Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy.

There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion.

All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks 'getting it wrong' and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die."

Holy shit, right? Use your preferred electronic device and click this link to read why:

How Not to Be Alone