One.
When I had depression, my main coping strategy was to keep busy and always connected to an input – music, podcasts, reading, TV, socials. As long as I didn’t have a chance to notice my own thoughts, I could function. It worked well enough that no one except Christine knew I was depressed. Even she didn’t know for a long time.
Getting better involved the opposite. A therapist helped go into my thoughts and figure out what was going wrong.
I wonder about our society’s reliance on inputs. We’ve created an infrastructure designed to keep us receiving media at all times. As I write this, I have three devices within touching distance that are capable of playing media at me. They are silent right now because I can’t think my own thoughts while someone else is telling me theirs.
I love streaming music, TV and movies. I love having access to the world’s knowledge. I love all the creativity my connected devices show me.
I also love silent time to think. That’s how I stay mentally healthy. That’s when I mix up all the stuff that’s gone into my head and turn it into new things.
Do you have a healthy rhythm of input and silence?
Can you spend a little more time with silence today than you did yesterday? (Saturday is a good day to disconnect.)
Do you wonder how much sadness we are hiding in all the noise?
Two.
Tommy McScallion does not let his right foot know what his left foot is doing.
Three.
You know me well enough by now to know it’s not going to be Depeche Mode or Simon & Garfunkel. We’ve already heard those excellent songs a thousand times.
Perhaps you would like something more melancholy go along with today’s words? Christine recommends The National’s Fake Empire.
It’s all going off next week!
Alison Acheson is a writer and a teacher who escaped academia to teach people how to write in an unschool sort of way. She has written four TREE posts for Monday through Thursday next week. And they are not phoned in. She took the format seriously and created something completely unique in the short history of TREE. I’m so grateful to her and excited to share with you. Please check out her unschool. Please please read all her TREE posts next week at least twice.
Then it’s Friday 21 January 2022, the day all of us, but especially Skyler, have been waiting for. She’s publishing FEYNMANSPLAINING 1 straight to your inbox. I’ve read it. It’s all the curiosity-piquing, humanity-affirming goodness we said it would be. Cara Baute will be telling us why she chooses to spend her days with four year-olds.
Gather the family around the computer. Get your friends to subscribe. It’s going to be a grand week. But for now…
Happy weekend
Jeff
It is hard to learn to sit with your sadness, or your feelings in general. To listen within yourself to what is causing the heaviness that’s hanging on your soul and mind is a skill we no longer possess. We are surrounded with bandaids and temporary fixes.
I value silence so much more now since having a kid (well sometimes its suspicious). At the end of the day when everyone is asleep, even the house lets out a sigh that it’s been holding in through the chaos.
Growing up my family was L O U D so I escaped to my bedroom for silence as much as I could. I could stand to add more silence back into my life.