The most monumental invention of the last five hundred years is the printing press.

Thanks to the innovations provided by Gutenberg (and yes, I know the Chinese and Koreans had a similar methodology centuries before), access to information became readily available to the masses. This resulted in an increase in literacy, a wave of critical thinking and the beginning of a period we refer to as the enlightenment.

The big shift was getting people to read. Doing so got them thinking for themselves, thereby being able to challenge, or support, what was being said on the pulpit.

And yet, here we are, five hundred years later rejecting the printed word in lieu of the pulpit of media sound bites and online videos.

How often do I hear, “I don’t like reading,” “I don’t read,” or “I hate reading?” and yet…

We are in an age where access to information is even easier and cheaper, yet we ignore it.

We’ve mistakenly made the assumption that the ability to access information is the same as knowing it,
knowing what to do with it,
being able to process it.

Our ability to think and learn is tied into our ability to focus for long periods of time. Reading long texts is still the single greatest activity we can do to cultivate that mindset.

And we can either hope for another Gutenberg breakthrough invention that will change the way our minds work, or kickstart another revolution in which people think critically for themselves.

Its amazing how one “quick look” at something online gets you easily suckered into a rabbit hole that melts away your time. This happened to me tonight and while I should’ve been actively writing something new, I lost the night.

Even with my stubbornness and full knowledge of what the algorithms are doing (including using extensions that prevent some of the more predatory features), multi-billion dollar companies designed to keep users hooked… will get you hooked.

So, in lieu of my usual, I offer something else instead.

In response to yesterday’s post, Terry Ann Carter (a foremost poet of the world… and I don’t say that lightly) sent me a prayer/mantra she put together in her thoughts about the concept of small.

With her permission, she has allowed me to post it here. Let it be a guide for you as well.

Sometimes the big world is too big. Big noise. Big problems. Big people, as though they are the only ones. For now, I want my world to be small, filled with the loving caring people I know. My beautiful families. My exquisite friends…who, over and over show me the world I want to live in. Oh yes. And one small act of kindness each day.

In some ways, I think many of us were hoping for a global reset with this pandemic.

An opportunity for everyone to reassess how the world works and to reconfigure it—especially those broken systems that aren’t serving (or have never) served our needs.

However, what we’re finding is some minor revisions, a few moments of insight and a lot of frustration about not being able to go back to the usual. Unfortunately, the usual has already changed and despite the desire, it’s the equivalent to wanting to revisit a golden era of our past… which may not have been as great as we remember it to be.

But, what we’ve become hyper aware of in the last year is our own community.

We’re recognizing the businesses in our community (especially those that are struggling), the events and the many ways the people in it are reaching out. In being forced into isolation, we’ve once again shrunk our world to those immediately around us.

Pardon the cadence, but the global cesspool is being replaced with the cozy village.

The tiresome flood of digital information, laden with sensational headlines and clickbait marketing tactics, is being absconded for something close.

Something real.
Something nearby.

We just may be learning how to connect with each other again.

Firing off an email.
Responding to a post.
Reminder notes.
Texts to friends.

All require some effort in terms of writing, but the level of thought to accomplish each is shallow. They’re the low hanging fruit.

The actual task of putting together a piece that requires serious thought is met with a lot of resistance.

It necessitates something more than reactive measures that feel like real work is being done. However, it’s the equivalent of saying walking to my car is exercise.

Yes… there is walking and the car might be at the other end of the parking lot… but there is no conscious effort to extend that into the healthy zone of exercise.

Digging deep into writing requires a person to mine the depths of their own mind. It’s a mining operation that is ongoing and periodically (although the timing is never certain) strikes something of high value.

Discovering the depths of the world requires a person to leave the shallow waters of comfort.

It’s hard.
It could be dangerous.
But it’s only there you really learn how to swim.

Our days this past year have been largely reactive.

Every week is a new announcement, news story or information piece that keeps us glued to the doom scrolling of news sites and social media feeds. From my end, all we’ve ever felt like we could do is hang on and anticipate what’s going to happen next.

Except… when you look at history… this particular situation isn’t anything new.

Ryan Holiday wrote a great piece on finding stillness during these times. One section (“Zoom Out”) spoke of how all this has happened before and will happen again. All you need to do is change the names and suddenly, you are at a different point in history. It’s reassuring to know we’ve dealt with all of this before and even at this magnitude.

So what can we do now?

Take control of our days again.

Be safe and decide what you’re going to focus on and what you’re going to ignore.

Stay informed, sure, but do so in the smallest doses. Just enough to know what’s happening, but not enough to lose yourself in endless news cycles. Unless you’re a politician or viral lab researcher/technician/worker, much of what’s happening is out of your control anyway.

Keep in mind all things will cycle and we will look at this as another entry in our history books.

In any given day, there are thousands of observations to be made. Tens of thousands, really.

However, in an effort to be more efficient, our brain casually ignores those items that aren’t an immediate concern to our existence. Unless you’re a spy, we feel no reason to pay attention.

And this is why poetry is so important.

It’s the poet who picks up on the details that give life its richness. A single poem of theirs forces us to notice what often goes unnoticed… to pay attention…

to wake up.

Life is painful, hard and we’re often grinding our way through each day.

Let the beauty of language that shines through our poetic chorus help us see what often gets ignored.

You can always tell if a magician is a beginner, or if they’re just learning a new trick, based on how white their knuckles turn when they’re performing a move.

The lesson in magic is to use just enough force to grip whatever object you have and nothing more. It should be at the point where even the slightest loosening of the grip will drop whatever is in your hand.

This ensures the movements are natural and you won’t call attention to your hands.

However, the big secret to making this work is to not pay attention to the grip in your hands… but to the rest of your body.
How tense are your arms?
Shoulders?
Stomach?
Neck?
Are you even breathing?

Relax those parts and the hands will follow.

This advice is also useful for just about any other endeavour (minus plumbing—you want those pipes to be tighter than Satan’s grip on a drug cartel).

We can often approach what we do with such a heavy hand that it stifles our own movements within it. You want a grip on what you’re doing, but also the freedom to move in any direction.

Let the act of what you’re doing sing while you merely guide its movements with a gentle touch.

“The birds are singing,
The sky is bright,
The sun is shining,
I’m feeling ALRIGHT!”

Let us not waste an opportunity to appreciate the days we have in front of us and those we left behind.

The digital landscape is changing so frequently I often get a headache just thinking about what’s coming up next.

While the attraction of shiny and new has always been an alluring temptation, it’s now wearing me down. Considering over the past ten years, it’s now commonplace to see:

• Services you once relied on get bought out or shut down
• Compatibility issues with files you’ve been working on… even when it’s still in the same program/ecosystem
• Data breaches at companies that obtain personal information
• The birth of the “endless scrolling” on social media, which quickly turns into doom scrolling depending on the news cycle
• A thousand different services offering a thousand different conveniences, forcing you to remember a thousand different logins (or store them somewhere and hope where you stored them is safe)
• Programs you’re used to that suddenly change and lose the functionality you enjoyed about them
• Relying completely on cloud based services only to have your Internet service go down because a construction project near your service provider accidentally cut a main wire
• A lot of time wasted just mucking about within programs/services instead of actually doing something

All of this for the sake of making your digital life, and supposedly your real life, a little bit easier.

Yes, there are some conveniences that are hard to live without now—especially in a world that’s locked down. But for the rest of it? I’m done.

My goal now is to make my digital life a lot more inconvenient so that I’m more purposeful in what I do online. A few steps taken:

• I’ve set my browser to never remember any of my logins or passwords… or to keep me signed in anywhere—no more “quick checks”
• After Evernote lost its way, OneNote dumped its desktop version for a web based one (thereby losing all the features I liked about it), I now use plain text files for all my notes
• On that point, all my writing is now done in plain text (using markdown syntax if needed)
  • Plain text has been around forever and I never have to worry about compatibility issues with any system, nor wonder how to extract all my notes and port them elsewhere
• My phone hasn’t given me a notification in over a year (I turned them all off and it’s been quite satisfying)
• Abandoning almost all online services in lieu of just a few and replacing the rest with desktop equivalents

I’m still going, but what what’s really happening is I’m making digital life harder by making things simpler.

When you simplify your tools to the essentials, what you find is that it’s difficult to create something, but easy to tinker with it. The convenience tools are nothing more than a distraction from actually doing something worthwhile.

There’s also less to worry about because you don’t have to worry about updates, iterations, abandonments or corporate takeovers.

In fact, making a digital life harder could be key to making your personal life better.

It’s Remembrance Day, which is a time to honour all the veterans and people who served (and are serving) during times of war.

While we can speak endlessly on the tragedies, atrocities and horrors of war, there’s one particular moment that gets me every time:

A truce on Christmas.
A day to stop.
People meeting each other on the battlefield to discover… other people.

What can of world could we have if we looked towards the humanity in each other instead of the villains we’ve created in our minds?

On the frontlines of every battle are real people.

Lest we forget.