I’ve recently started considering getting a flip phone. Well, a slide phone, because i do love a qwerty keyboard. It’s crossed my mind before, but burrowed in last week after watching a youtube video about a girl, a little younger than me, going ahead and doing it. While I think i have a healthier and more balanced relationship to social media than most, thanks in large part to past fasting of it, I do admit that it’s difficult to no get sucked into all of it. It’s addicting because it’s alluring, intriguing, entertaining, and numbing.
the numbing factor is a feature and a bug. Bored? Scroll and be distracted. procrastinating? find others who feel the same way. Anxious?
well, that one’s a hit or miss.
but numbing is so often what all of us seek because we don’t really remember how much we like feeling things. we were made to feel things. the fives senses, our myriad emotions, our swirling thoughts. We are experiencing hotbeds, and yet the overwhelming state of the world and everyday repetition makes us think we can’t experience. either that somehow our bodies have broken, our minds have dulled to the point where we physically cannot experience things, or that there are external factors that hinder us from “the one true experience”.
First off, “the one true experience” is a myth. There will be a sliding scale of awe in your life, and some things will just land with higher rankings than others, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be in awe of every day.
the external factors are sometimes difficult to change. In my own life, my hunger for adventure and my wanderlust is not the problem. i’m ready and raring to go. And yet, i’M HERE. RIGHT here. right now that’s on a small plush chair surrounded by two cute dogs. but it’s also right here, in my hometown after graduating college, working a retail job. And that can make awe feel impossible.
but it is there.
the easiest place to find awe sometimes is in a creation other than my own, that I can see, touch, smell, hear, and taste. Sitting in the sun. walking in the grass barefoot. seeing lightning bugs blink across cornfields.
fishing.
if you take this as your sign to go fishing, go for it and let me know what you catch (i’m up to one baby smallmouth bass and one bluegill). But there’s a whole world teeming with life, right outside your door, or right inside your door, or right next door. And everyone can experience their own fraction of it. Everyone.
teach a girl to fish…
…and she’ll breathe a little easier, write a little more, smile a little bigger.
and will she be there with a slide phone? she’s not quite sure yet. wherever the road takes her she’s willing to go, as long as it’s going somewhere.
Battered Books 