Me and my family recently took a trip to visit my sister and her family in Arizona.
It gets cold up in Utah where I live, and February can be really dreary.
Around this time of year, the magic and allure of snow and the winter season has faded and all that’s left is the seasonal depression that comes with not going outside ever. It’s cold and I don’t want to have to bundle up with 3 layers every time I walk out the door.
That’s usually how it goes in February, anyway. This year, it’s just cloudy, rainy, and cold. If I wanted cloudy, rainy weather all the time I would just move to the pacific northwest.
So, we took a trip down to sunny Arizona to see our pal, the sun, play with cousins and get away from it all for a bit.
We did some fun things while we were there.
We spent some time boating at the lake (in February?! Unheard of), went to a dance competition for my niece, went to church, basked in the sun, and talked about life while the kids played.
There was a lot of down time as well.
I’m self-employed, so I don’t have coworkers asking questions. I don’t really have a lot of interaction with people on social media, and I don’t spend a lot of my time scrolling through social because it tends to just suck hours away from my day with little benefit. I wasn’t trying to get a ton of work done while I was there, so not a lot of projects got done, and I didn’t watch any shows because I wanted to be connected with what was going on around me.
This led to plenty of time to think and reflect.
Boredom has that effect.
When you don’t have a constant barrage of social media assaulting your eyeballs, or you aren’t binge watching the latest of the endless assortment of shows available, you have time to ponder.
Unfortunately, pondering isn’t something that we do very much in our modern society.
We do a lot of watching and reacting, a lot of opinion sharing (we seem to only form opinions that we feel the need to share), but not a lot of sitting and thinking for the sake of thinking.
But I had most distractions removed (apart from the occasional argument amongst the kids), so a lot of thinking and feeling happened in those quiet moments.
And it was good.
That’s really the whole point of this post, I’m not going to share any of the things that I thought or felt.
I’m just pointing out what should be obvious, but something that we frequently forget:
We should feel okay, as a society, with thinking, coming to realizations about our lives, writing them down, and then not sharing them with the world. That should be normalized.
It’s okay to have our own thoughts that are just for us and never see the light of day.
So, let yourself have a day (or a weekend, week, month, whatever you can) where you don’t do anything but think, be present, and work through whatever you’ve got going on in your personal life.
When you get back on social media or whatever, don’t tell anyone about it.
Keep something special for yourself. It can be empowering.
Our whole lives don’t need to be on display, even if it looks like everyone else’s is.
Let’s give ourselves permission to wander and wonder through the vastness of our own thoughts for whatever amount of time is necessary for us to work through our own emotional and mental hurdles.
Sharing can be great, it can help sometimes, but I think we all know at this point that social media and the incessant sharing of our lives tends to lead us to live less fully. We become too focused on curating experiences that are shareable and capturing those moments, instead of just living and being present for those experiences.
And we need to stop doing that.
Can we do that?
I hope so.
We’d all be better off for it.